I had just completed my first year of law school. The year is 2011, and I’ve been mining bitcoin (BTC) for a few months now. Bitcoin (which probably won’t exist by the time you read this) was a nascent social experiment conceived by an anonymous and reclusive genius who had discovered that by combining advanced forms of cryptography with a new blockchain technology inspired by torrents, he could create a new, completely decentralized currency. The price of bitcoin in those first few months was mere pennies. At the time, it was more of an intriguing project that appealed to engineers, anarchists, and monetary policy wonks. Being all three, I of course participated with some gusto.

At the time, you didn’t need a particularly powerful rig to mine blocks of bitcoins. “Mining” meaning the process of using a computer to calculate the next hash in a procedurally generated chain of hashes corresponding to a classical encryption algorithm. Think solving primes, but with added steps. My first block of bitcoins I mined on the CPU of my old college laptop. From there, I moved on to GPU mining on my desktop. The pace of hash generation slowed — the algorithm was designed to become more and more difficult as more and more hashes were solved. Each block would contain fifty BTC to start, and be cut in half at regular intervals. The idea was to limit inflation and create price stability. By the time I got to that first summer, I had around 80BTC sitting in my digital wallet. That was worth around 40 cents at the time. At the time of writing, it’s worth $5,497,504.00. You can probably see where this is going.

I had met a girl near the end of the semester who went to college at Rowan University in New Jersey. Growing up out West, you probably are wondering why I was dating a girl in another state. The East Coast is much more compact than it is out here. Even though we lived in adjacent states, it was a quick train ride to go visit her, or for her to come visit me. Probably about an hour. I wonder if you still have trains by the time you read this, but I digress. This girl was a fascinating individual whom I bonded with over a shared love of the philosophy of Ayn Rand (which another chapter will be dedicated to). She had a penchant for fedoras, and we shared many of the same kinks and sexual proclivities. I think she was bipolar, because she would have these manic periods where she was absolutely wildly, irresponsibly fun, followed by depressive periods where she would do nothing but sob for days. Once, we ran to the liquor store for a fifth of whiskey during a tornado. She was short, agile, and good at dodging flying branches. Me? Not so much. She was eccentric, and so was I, and at the time, it seemed a good match.

She had resolved to visit me over the summer, which was quite the trek, as I had moved to central Pennsylvania to work at The Commonwealth Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Harrisburg. I lived across the river in nearby Lemoyne, renting a room from a soft-spoken, middle-aged man. I didn’t have any air conditioning in my room, which was on the second floor, and the weather in Pennsylvania made for hot, steamy summers. It was, admittedly, miserable to be in my room that summer. I was running my bitcoin mining rig day and night, convinced that one day the effort would make me fabulously wealthy. The amount of heat being put off by that computer was akin to a furnace. It was not unusual for the ambient temperature in my room to reach ninety degrees Fahrenheit. As you may expect, this did not place my partner, whom took to turning the damned thing off whenever I wasn’t looking —mostly when I was at work.

And work, I did. I had managed to score an internship with the Commonwealth Foundation as a result of my deep involvement in Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) seminars. The IHS was the premier Koch-funded educational arm of their sprawling libertarian-leaning political machine. They prided themselves on producing libertarian and anarchist scholars of each generation. There are other chapters of this memoir mentioning them, as they were tremendously influential on my academic development. Suffice it to say that without their help, I would not have landed this gig. The job itself involved a combination of legislative affairs, policy analysis, and using the company credit card to rent a car so that myself and another intern could go liquor and wine shopping all around the state. That last one was a particularly fun project, and was part of our push to privatize the liquor and wine system in Pennsylvania. It used to be the case that Pennsylvania had a strict regime where liquor and wine could only be sold through state stores. Washington used to be like that too, until Costco decided they wanted in on the business and spent a ton of money campaigning for a privatization initiative here. We went around Pennsylvania border towns through most of the summer, checking prices on both sides of the border. Turns out that state store prices were usually significantly higher than the prices at private stores on the other side of the border. Go figure. It was a fun and outrageously subversive endeavor which I took to with aplomb. My policy work was excellent, as well. I did a lot of work on school choice promotion, in order to end the state monopoly on public education. That project was deeply important to me, for reasons which will become obvious in another chapter.

While I was working, my girlfriend would lounge at home, reading, writing, or trolling about on social media (which I pray is defunct by the time you read this). Of course, I would return home each day and immediately turn the computer back on and return to mining my precious bitcoin. My girlfriend didn’t understand the point, which is understandable, as one had to be interested in several desperate fields in order to decipher what exactly was so cool about this hot new currency. I’d estimate I’d have been able to mine another fifty bitcoins over the course of the summer alone had she not turned that PC off during the day. Granted, she’d have likely died of heat stroke, but what’s a human life worth in this society when money is on the line? I jest, of course. But still, fifty BTC is worth $3,436,692.50 USD today. Given inflation, that probably is pennies by the time this memoir reaches you, but still.

We wound up using some of my bitcoin stash to purchase drugs over the summer —mostly high-end strains of cannabis — but occasionally other party drugs as well. It was a fun summer. I remember sitting on the front porch with my partner watching the sunset, the cool breeze of twilight a welcome reprieve from the summer’s scorching heat. It was the first and only time in my life that I saw fireflies. Fireflies are one of the most magical creatures I have ever set eyes on, dimly flickering and flitting about the lawn, providing welcome ambiance to the serene suburban environ. If you ever have a chance, please do make your way to see them, because they are really something to behold. We’d sit on that porch and sit for hours, high as two kites flying on an ocean breeze, watching those fireflies and wistfully wondering what the future may hold. Life back then was good, though I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time.

As the summer ended, we broke up, a summer fling at its inevitable end. I moved back to Philadelphia and began my second year of law school. My ex had headed back to New Jersey, where she was studying music. We remained friends for several years, and she even came to work for me for a few short months when I started up my law firm. She flew back home after getting so angry with me at dinner that she broke a wine goblet by slamming it on the table. I wound up selling half of my bitcoin when it hit dollar parity, and another half when it hit $5. Two months before law school ended, my laptop broke and I had to buy a new one for finals, costing my remaining bitcoin stash to do so, leaving me with nothing. At one point I had 250BTC in my digital wallet, worth $17,157,667.50 as of this writing. Right now, I’m homeless, crashing at your Oma’s place until I find work.