The Sneaker Savant

I’m going to switch gears here for a bit...I’m still totally into sneakers and I’m still watching releases and I’m still looking up prices and scouring for random, long-forgotten pairs that no one gives a shit about, but I’m gonna talk a bit about bitcoin and crypto and digital collectibles and hopefully I’ll be able to help y’all who have been hitting me up in the DMs learn a few things about what is going on...

2011 is the first time I ever had an extended conversation about Bitcoin and understood the macro concepts behind the idea. An old friend of mine, @jeragon775 and I had reconnected after a 10+ year hiatus and suddenly found ourselves in the highlands of Nevada trying to hack our way onto the dark web. What I saw on the dark web blew my mind and all of it was for purchase with Bitcoin. We initially found the price of bitcoin a bit daunting…$11/coin was just too much for either of us at the time. I remember saying… ‘I’ll buy a hundred when it drops back to $1’. I missed that boat.

In 2013, I watched the price of bitcoin reach $1,000 and felt a sense of panic. I remember I was in one of those coding bootcamps tryna learn HTML watching the news just thinking ‘man, how do I get my hands on this stuff?’ At the time - there were no exchanges for it. It was a free-for-all.

Shortly after the first ‘crash’, maybe June or July 2013, I found a guy on Craigslist who was selling Bitcoin for USD via Paypal. I hit him up, agreed to send him $200, sent it over and...nothing. I was freaking out and I started cussing this guy out...he was defensive, telling me he sent it but didn’t know what happened and when I called him a scammer he said he’d just send me money back. He couldn’t figure out how to refund me, so I said ‘If you didn’t scam me - email paypal and tell them to refund me.’

I called paypal and pleaded with the rep to refund me my money. She was relentless. I finally said ‘he told me he emailed you, can you just check to see if he sent it?’ After 20 minutes, the rep came back on the line - ‘you’re not going to believe this, but he emailed [email protected] and you’re right - he said we could refund you.’ $200 refunded. But still no BTC.