Ethereum gave me the wonderful life I have today. I met my wife @lisacuesta at a book signing that wouldn’t have been written if Ethereum didn’t exist. My first full-time crypto job was at @Consensys as Joe bled out money to hire the best talent and support the Ethereum ecosystem. I joined Bison Trails because I was one of the lead organizers for @EthereumDenver that year and someone I met connected me to the CEO. There are so many stories, but today I’ll tell my favorite one: how I built my first and last Ethereum miner. My high school friend and now teammate at Coinbase @0xb17z was already into crypto and was instrumental in helping me learn. I wasn’t technical and really wanted to build an Ethereum miner from scratch to really understand how the pieces fit together. In 2017/18 EVERYONE and their mothers were trying to do the same so GPUs were almost impossible to come by. We ended up scrounging up 6 Nvidia GTX 1070’s together over months as we waited for restocking and needed friends to go buy in our stead because they only let people buy one per month. At one point we had everything hooked up, but the damn thing just wouldn’t connect to the wifi. We tried for weeks to get it to work; updated all the drivers, chased down every potential issue, and checked every last hardware installation guide. As we were about to give up, I checked the motherboard website to see its spec. THE DAMN THING DIDN’T HAVE WIFI. We connected an Ethernet cable and it worked immediately. As I quickly learned, these things are HOT and LOUD. I was living with my mom at the time while working at EY and as soon as I moved out she turned it off, shoved it in the closet, and there it sat for over a year until we sold it for parts. In total I spent $5k+ to mine like 1.2 ETH so as soon as ETH hits $5k I’ll finally break even. For the photos: 1. We didn’t know how much wattage my room could handle and if it could support the 6 GPUs. We also didn’t have the expensive tool to measure it. So another friend and I went to Costco, bought a bunch of irons, and turned them on one at a time to see when the fuse would blow. Thankfully Costco is generous with their return policy. 2. The motherboard in question. 3. Ben helped sell all the parts, but held on to one of the GPUs for me. He might have just been lazy, but I choose to believe he did it intentionally kek. It’s the first thing I’ve ever framed and it hangs in my office as a reminder of how I got my start and what I’m doing here. It says "Keeping Ethereum decentralized since 2017" - words I still live by today. When I joined crypto in 2017 I felt so very late. I imagine it’s how many people are feeling today. But now 8 years later I look back and realize I’ve been around for 80% of Ethereum’s life. I hope the newcomers to the industry realize that Ethereum is just getting started and as amazing as it is to celebrate its 10 year anniversary, I hope they look ahead and realize that there are many decades, and even centuries, to go. We’re all still very, very early and there’s a lot of work to be done to bring the world onchain.