Etherean to Crypto Moderate, Part 1: Excitement
2026 Apr 28<br>See all posts
Etherean to Crypto Moderate, Part 1: Excitement
I spent around 8 years in crypto as an engineer and I'm now exploring<br>other areas of technology. Over the years, my views on the industry<br>evolved into what I'd call a "crypto moderate." This series of posts<br>documents how I came to that position and what it comprises.
I had some relatively early exposure to crypto in university via the<br>Silk Road. I filed it away in the same category as Tor/VPNs/Limewire.<br>Controversial, but in cases defensible, libertarian technology. I was a<br>boglehead at the time, so the financial speculation spooked me. I didn't<br>engage with it much and instead dug into software engineering and math<br>more generally.
After graduating, I got a job at Cisco Systems and spent time<br>learning about routing protocols like IS-IS. I started to get more<br>interested in distributed systems. A few coworkers had started<br>discussing the Bitcoin and Ethereum white papers at work as the price<br>started to run up into the 2017 bubble. Routing protocols were old;<br>crypto was new and exciting. People my age like Vitalik Buterin, Ethan<br>Buchman and others had framed the technology as a greenfield for<br>"economic and coordination experiments." It was clearly a frontier worth<br>exploring. I'd played around with AI models as well, but much preferred<br>the act of hand coding distributed systems and deterministic algorithms.<br>AI models felt fiddly and black box to me. Assembling components into a<br>larger complex system was just more satisfying. So I committed to a<br>rebrand as a "crypto software engineer." I bought some ETH from Quadriga and<br>withdrew it to a self-custodial wallet in accordance with the ethos.<br>That ethos turned out to be grounded in a valid rationale when later<br>Quadriga went bankrupt because the operator absconded with the<br>funds.
I quit Cisco in 2018 to study crypto at RC. I implemented parts of the<br>bitcoin client and the EVM, discussed whitepapers like filecoin and<br>tendermint with friends and sharpened my algorithmic thinking. I was<br>just following technical curiosity and positioning myself to be able to<br>further dig into the space with paid work. As a climate conscious<br>millennial, I was always sympathetic to the Bitcoin energy-use<br>critique.<br>Ethereum, however, was plotting a transition to PoS which would reduce<br>the energy consumption by 99.99%. I'd begun to think of myself as an<br>"Etherean" and looked up to Vitalik who wrote long screeds on his blog<br>about how<br>to achieve this transition. Around this time, the Ethereum meme of<br>"World Computer" was spreading and that stuck with me as a good vision.<br>The goal was to build a distributed computer to be shared by all as a<br>sort of public computing commons, where finance was but one major<br>application.
Next in the series: Etherean to Crypto<br>Moderate, Part 2: Building
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