Stories - Loss

It didn’t mean much at the time - Bitcoin was only $50, and I only had 0.5 BTC to my name. My interest in BTC was, sadly, due to anything but “the tech.” At age 25, as I was preparing to exchange my remaining BTC for something that would allow me to disconnect from reality, I got the phone call: my older brother had died unexpectedly.

My brother Max, among the most kind and caring people I have even known, suffered a psychotic break in his late 20s, and our mental healthcare system - or lack there of - completely failed him.

He has left separate notes for each of us, which my mother read to me. Mine was two sentences: “I love you, nomjs. Live purposefully and with abandon; do not succumb to the temptation of a thin life; you are capable of great things.”

I did chuckle through the anguish that someone who just committed suicide (and abuses semicolons) had provided the ultimate example of “do as I say, not as I do.”

But nonetheless, these final words - for some reason I honestly can’t explain - led me to bitcointalk.org. Maybe it was the first place my brain thought of to find meaning because I was in the middle of a transaction? I had perused it once before, but found the more passionate posts about the ills of central banking and the promise of digital hard money to be more fanciful than anything.

And then I went way back to read Satoshi, Finney, and co. These men were not leading a thin life - they embarked on what must have felt like a quixotic quest to change our money because it was the right thing to do. Period. And knowing that these conversations were at the root of a revolution… I had found my muse(s).

I had also found my cause. And after I rooted myself in Austrian economics, software development, and cryptography, the real journey began… /1

To Max.