Hello Steem!

My name is Ryan and I've been involved with cryptocurrencies since 2011. My first exposure to Bitcoin was through Wikipedia. I was living in an artist community at the time, having just left my first job out of college in order to pursue music on a more full-time basis. While I was supposed to be focusing on music, I mostly found myself doing freelance software development, strumming aimlessly on my guitar from time to time, and researching alternative economic systems over the Internet.

I read the whitepaper and was blown away. It contained, as far as I could tell, a wholly original idea that satisfied my predilection for decentralized, anarchic systems. The mining aspect did concern me, as I knew it'd be subject to the same economies of scale found in traditional industries, but it was also the most interesting project I'd found in years. I spent a few weeks trying to improve on the idea or punch holes in it, finally coming to the conclusion that it was as perfect as I could imagine a system being.

Of course, one's imagination is finite. I kept an eye out for systems that might represent genuine improvements on Bitcoin and discovered Ethereum in 2014. It offered a direct path to some of the innovations Bitcoin had promised back in 2011, most notably useful smart contracts. I've been working full time on Ethereum projects since early 2015 now, most notably on the Maker stablecoin ecosystem.

I feel very lucky to be where I am today. The last five years of my life have been full of interesting characters and adventures I wouldn't have discovered if I hadn't come across that link on Wikipedia back in January 2011. Every day there are new ideas and new projects coming out, and I get to be a part of that. Steem itself looks very interesting, being built by a solid team on top of the Graphene platform. While I admit I'm not very familiar with Graphene as of yet, becoming more familiar with it is a high priority for me. In the meantime, I expect to be posting on Steem with some regularity, and I look forward to seeing what new adventures await!