A Harvard professor (and laziness) cost me $500M worth of Bitcoin
...and why I’m taking a yearlong sabbatical to study the blockchain
There are a bunch of evolutionary reasons why your gut just told you this guy should turn right below. Some have to do with fear-avoidance. Others a desire for safety and predictability. Some stem from nephophobia (fear of clouds), and nyctophobia (fear of the dark).
If your gut leaned left, you’re probably an explorer! Or you might have gamophobia (fear of marriage/commitment). Or a fear of 1950s TV show housewives (LucilleBallphobia?).
When it came to understanding the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2010 -- and most of my college education -- I went right, probably due to mild ergophobia (fear of hard work). More realistically it was laziness.
I like the uncharted parts of the map, so this is me on a monthly basis. The first blockchain fork (puns will get much better, I promise) was March 2010 in the basement of a Harvard science building.
A friend handed me the Bitcoin whitepaper as an option we should consider for our Applied Math 50 final project. I understood almost none of it after reading it twice, was way more interested in sports, and was a much bigger fan of the alternative option of calculating how often underdogs won in the NCAA Men’s March Madness tournament. After all, the expansion from 65 to 68 teams was slated for 2011.
Our final presentation was 5 minutes/12 slides1 that will make you laugh + cry.
Easy Fork
We got an A on the project and the class -- I only got 4 in 32 attempts, so hold your applause -- in ~80 hours of work on the project. We celebrated and never thought about it again. Honestly, it took me 10 minutes to work through Gmail cobwebs just to track down that presentation.
Hard Fork2
When we decided on the project in March 2010, Bitcoin was under a penny per coin. Just 9 days after our final presentation was when Laszlo spent 10,000 BTC for 2 pizzas -- so transactions were rolling at $0.0041/BTC in May. Mt. Gox was still 4 months away. Coinbase wasn’t founded for another 2 years!
I still refuse to look at my May 2010 credit card statements. We spent way more than Laslzo’s $41 on the beer we used for beer pong shenanigans.
I can’t remember the classmate that shared the Bitcoin whitepaper with me. If you find a Harvard grad Class of 2010-13 that bought a private island, you might have found them.
I do, however, remember the conversations with the professor & TAs saying “people have been talking about cryptocurrencies like bit gold for years, it’s very unlikely to work.” Given I:
knew very little math (thanks Applied Math 50)
knew less computer science
thought the US Dollar was the safest thing on Earth, and
preferred to spend my free time chasing my professional golf career
I stuck to the easy fork.
Had I gone the other way, spending that 80 hours trying to make sense of the Bitcoin whitepaper, my guess is that I would’ve earned a B+ and written a short, lazy summary of “proof of work.” (lol, ok that’s enough for today)
So many tiny things could have changed it all. If that classmate was more persuasive. If my project partner wasn't an (All-American) athlete. If the professor encouraged us to explore further. $41 of beer money invested. A couple hours figuring out how to mine on my laptop. I might have been a crypto kingpin today.
If Laszlo had ordered his pizzas 2 months earlier and we’d read about it, we might have invested $41 = 10,000 BTC = $500M as of May 2021. I could’ve renamed the building where I first heard about Bitcoin!
I did end up buying 4 BTC ~4 years later at about $520/coin. In addition to being lazy, I’m also a wimp. I felt like a genius selling two of them at $2,700 and $4,200.
“Take your profits!”
“It’s the tulip bubble all over again!”
...I rebought at 15x my cost. In hindsight, I would’ve absolutely crumbled and sold most of my (editor’s reminder: nonexistent) 10,000 BTC during the bull runs.
Today
Given my net worth stands a couple significant digits short of 9, I have harder (albeit, still very privileged) decisions now. My college degree opened the door to Google. I learned a lot about technology, growth, and choosing the difficulty level of your adventure. People joke that certain parts of Google are a great place to retire. Sort of like Bighead on the roof at Hooli.
But I was restless and wanted to see what else was out(/in?) there, so I pitched Area 120 and got funding to start a company within Google. That failed pretty quickly for fun reasons like cookie-licking (what an under-used phrase).
I started a company outside of Google and grew it to over $1M in revenue in 6 months. I lost interest after getting yelled at for the 14th time by clients. So I tried to start my own product companies. Those failed, too!
tl;dr
“Cool story bro, what’s the point? Why should I still be reading?”
I decided to stop working and take a year off. At first it was a couple month paternity leave to help take care of my newborn. In that time, I stood at the fork and admitted to myself I don’t have the right skillset to build the world I want (for my son & I) to live in.
I’m probably not going to learn the sea level pressure inside of rocket engines, or figure out the best use for CRISPR, or sort out quantum computing (aside: I tried to help the team at Google Research. Help, I did not.) but I am going to learn how blockchains work.
And I’m going to document what I learn, how I learned it, and -- maybe most importantly -- ideas on how blockchains can be applied. Sort of the opposite of my Applied Math 50 experience.
Maybe the fork on the left isn’t as dark or scary as it seems. Given my math & writing prowess, it’s probably way darker.
The aim is a mix of Stratechery for Blockchain and Wait But Why. If Ben Thompson or Tim Urban ever read that sentence, I’ll probably faint. Then retire.
I doubt many people will read this -- and that’s perfectly ok. It’s my commitment mechanism to stay on the path. Who knows, maybe a few others will take it as a nudge toward making a similar decision when they’re standing at their fork.
p.s. if your path may lead to $500 million, please encourage me to invest
2Lou Productions didn’t pan out, so add that to the list of failures
told you they’d get better