About the Author
In early 2015 I was introduced to bitcoin. I was definitely not the first to learn about digital currencies but in retrospect, it was still early days. People were still focused on the decline of Mt. Gox and the closure of the Silk Road.
I have always been an early adopter of new technology and the concept of digital money and the internet of value immediately made sense to me, but what really excited me was the underlying blockchain technology. I spent the first half of my career in manufacturing, eventually studying the Toyota Production System (TPS) and I saw blockchain as an administrative improvement on these theories and a process which, unlike TPS which was looking to eliminate waste in a process with blockchain you are looking to eliminate friction and the need for a trusted third-party intermediary.
I became enamored with the technology and began reading everything I could find — which back in 2015 was not a lot — but the crypto community was incredibly welcoming and I was fortunate to find a few guides to help educate me or rather pull me down the proverbial rabbit hole.
I started telling everyone I could about this new digital money and I promise the first few years were very frustrating. I repeatedly was told that bitcoin has no intrinsic value and would never find a real use outside of a handful of cypherpunks, nerds, and hackers. To combat these arguments I started writing a daily update and sharing all of the news I could find on the subject with our investment team. I really wanted to show that there was more to this story than Mt. Gox and Silk Road and as I started speaking with new companies and government officials it was apparent that I had really fallen upon the next great technological breakthrough — the internet of money.
In 2017, one of our banking partners asked if I could share some information and articles on bitcoin and I decided to send my daily email. I realized very quickly that if I did not send it first thing in the morning before I started my regular day, I would never get around to writing it. I found some publishing software to make the letter appear more professional and started sending out BitDigest.
Since then, I have worked every morning and scoured the internet for articles and reports that I wanted to share with friends and industry colleagues. There are a lot of writers covering this space and many who have a much greater grasp of cryptography and new developing protocols than I do, so I chose to focus on government and corporate stories that are driving global adoption.
During the day, I am an investor at a family office. Over the past seven years, I have had the opportunity to invest in a lot of early – and now later-stage companies in the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem. I speak with many investors, founders, managers, and developers and I try to share my thoughts and learnings with the community through BitDigest.
I hope you will join me on this journey and if permitted allow me to pull you down the rabbit hole. I promise it is very exciting and it is the future of money, shared economies, and monetary systems.
~ Greg