The pillar project

The Pillar Project.
7.15.17
Forward
Time sure does fly by. I began my crypto quest about six weeks ago
and I have learned a great deal on the subject, however, I feel like I
have just begun to scratch the surface. The crypto sea is vast and
treacherous, even to the seasoned investor. On the other hand, much
like the real ocean, a great bounty of beautiful treasures awaits. An
entire global community is forming around this decentralized
macro-ledger called the Blockchain. Applications abound for this new
way of performing transactions, expressing value and retaining wealth.
I believe soon this technology will begin to enter it's public
acceptance phase where the layman, struggling to apply decades old
business tactics to remittance, shipping, marketing, trade, banking,
etc. will realize the massive potential of the Blockchain and
crypto-currencies. A world awaits humanity where markets can break
free their shackles and trade free. Peer to Peer will become
exponentially more attractive to the common person and eventually make
third party overhead and oversight a thing of the past.
Six Weeks In
Mike had a packed house that night and help was short. Among several
other businesses he runs a small, seasonal restaurant with his wife.
Being a successful business woman in a traditional brick and mortar
situation it comes as no surprise when a tone of skepticism is heard
when we try to explain to her why we love silver and block chain based
investments. The silver will be a door stop and the cryptos
meaningless pieces of paper in your safe and worthless little hardware
devices with numbers in them. Perhaps, this goes through her and many
other sensible, reasonable, intelligent and hard working people's
minds. After all the silver will never see the light of day trapped
under the pressure of that mouse button deep in the catacombs of the
Treasury Department. And the cryptos are just an electronic illusion
of wealth, meant to entice new, ill-informed investors into spending
their entire 401k on a single crypto asset, at the peak of it's pike
tooth, only to bow out at the bottom at a loss.
It had been an hour or so since the last group went out, bellies
stuffed with jalapeno burgers, smoked ribs, catfish sandwiches and
glasses of heady pale ale. I sat in my car going over my check list
feeling a bit overwhelmed. I am a newbie to the cryptos and we were
about to sink a tiny fortune into an ICO with a very promising future.
However, a promising future does not guarantee a net gain or that you
won't loose the whole kit and caboodle. We had planned on using the
restaurant to make the buy but we decided his place had better
internet connection and more computers to work with just in case our
phones didn't cut the mustard.
I grabbed a lite beer and once again went over my checklist. We setup
his laptop with the Tor browser and double checked the time of sale
and the address to send our precious ETH. Time went by quickly at
first. Many prognostications about the future potential of the project
and the resulting increase in value of the token were made. His guests
had not been introduced to Bitcoin and had no idea what we were
talking about until we explained the ways Pillar would change the way
we pay for things. Most other applications and concepts, when
presented, resulted in a deer-in-headlights response. We told them
their information would be completely inaccessible to anyone without a
private key. That everything would be protected by the Blockchain.
That's where we lost 'em. There were college graduates, a chef, and
business owners who hadn't the slightest. I think that's one heck of
an anecdotal answer to the question, "Is Bitcoin in a bubble?"
It's almost one in the morning. Getting close to the sale now. The
crowd had cleared out with fuzzy heads (minus the DD's) freshly
planted with a germinating seed that is Bitcoin. I sat down at the
kitchen table we had converted into an office and cracked open a
Perrier. We were just over an hour out and it was time to bring up my
Eth wallet but there was a problem. My phone was dying and I couldn't
seem to find the charger and the chargers available were all for
android. Without that phone I had no access to my Eth. I had failed to
make a copy of the private key. I had to drive back to my house to
grab the charger. I live close by but we didn't have much time till
the clock read as a string of zero's. If the Doc would have been
sitting shotgun and Marty in the back seat, I would be writing this on
an Apple II in the eighties.
I get back. I plug the charger in and nothing happens. A minute
later, nothing. Now it's getting real. I drag my buddy into cryptos
and a few weeks later I have him giving a big chunk of his investment
away to a new more risky investment and since earlier in the day he
had deposited a healthy chunk of his Eth in my wallet to perform the
transaction, he's up the creek with me. My neck began to tell me all
about the past three days of intensive computer and phone time spent
getting a handle on the ICO process and the project in which we were
investing. I began to panic. The sale is a couple minutes away and I
can't buy anything. Default reaction; YouTube. Within ten minutes the
phone was up and running and after one more obstacle of being forced
to change my gmail password because of "suspicious activity" (using a
different phone to access my account), we confirmed the address with
the newsletter. With shaking hands we sent a few Eth to its new
owners, pedal to the metal, and waited with bated breath the arrival
of our newly minted coins. Half a minute later the transaction was
confirmed and we were proud first owners of these tokens that fuel a
revolutionary idea.
Mike and I made a handful of buys that morning. Because of the
potential of the project and the sheer high you get from ICO
investing, we justified six more grabs that wiped my wallet clean and
his to a fraction of its former self. I look forward to the changes
humanity will experience regarding this and other related platforms
and technologies. A bright future awaits if we can climb out of the
darkness of central banking, of central control.