So I guess i should start from the beginning. Growing up, I never really knew what i wanted to be...i just new that i wanted to be rich. Looking from the outside in, rich people had it good. They drove fast cars and fucked pornstars on mattresses of money. What more do you need, right?
And for a long time, i thought i wanted that too. I used to judge people's worth on the car they drove, the neighborhood they lived in and how hot their wife/ husband was.
Fully believing the constraints of society, i set off to university to study finance with dreams of living like the models in magazines (you know the one)
This is where i met one of my lecturers who has possibly had the biggest impact on my life so far. He wasn't old, but he wasn't young. He had a beard that was beginning to grey and had a little extra weight on him. In 10 years, he could have an extremely lucrative career as Father Christmas.
He was an ex- city( Wall Street, for the Americans amongst you) veteran who had left swiftly following the proverbial shit hitting the proverbial fan in 2008.
Now you could tell this guy had seen some shit. When he spoke of the financial system, he spoke with an expression on his face that i can only best describe as a mixture of disdain and guilt. His teaching style, rather than encouragment to pursue a career in Finance, was more of an injunction - a warning. I always got the impression that he hated teaching, but felt compelled so as to atone for his sins as a banker and to ensure the next generation did not make the same mistakes his did.
In his first lecture, he described the ways in which banks literally create money out of thin air. Think that a bank needs to own money to lend it to you? WRONG. The money that you loaned from the bank did not exist until the moment it was put into your account. It is literally fabricated numbers on a screen (if you want to know more about this i highly suggest you read this article by the bank of England called "Money Creation in the Modern Economy" - it is a complete mindfuck https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf?la=en&hash=9A8788FD44A62D8BB927123544205CE476E01654 ).
We would talk for hours about the monumental fuck-ups of 2008, what could have been done, what was done and what can be done now.
It was when we asked what would be done in the future that his eyes widened.
"I'm glad you asked", he responded as he scurried to his laptop. It was as if he had been waiting for this moment for a while.
His demeanor had changed completely. He was uncharacteristically excited and animated. It was as if he had waiting an insurmountable time for this moment, and it had finally come.
He pointed to the screen and said ecstatically "This, boys and girls, is the Future of Money".
There were just 8 words on that board, but I knew that they would change the world forever - can you guess what they were?
"BITCOIN - A PEER-TO-PEER ELECTRONIC CASH SYSTEM"
What i didn't know, is that it would change my world forever as well
TO BE CONTINUED...