The Black Swan Chronicles:
An Adventure in Cryptoland by Tracey Leonard
Let me start off by saying that I am the last person you would expect to find in the world of Bitcoin. I only started texting a little over a year and a half ago. I just purchased my first real smart phone. I’m going to sign up for a plan tomorrow. I have an online store, but it took me a good 8 months to actually figure out what I was doing with any sort of fluency. I joined Twitter just a couple of weeks ago on a whim. I somehow managed to get myself suspended before the first tweet. I still have no idea why, but I was graciously allowed to come back with no explanation.
That’s when the miracle happened. Suddenly I was able to find all of the Bitcoin people I was looking for. I bought my first bitcoin about a year ago. I had been trying to find out as much information as possible, but the mainstream coverage was terrible. By the time stories hit their publications, they were stale and full of misinformation. Facebook was ok, but I started to annoy friends and family members with incessant updates and news posts about….Bitcoin. On Twitter, I found kindred spirits. I like to think of these people as characters out of Stephen King’s book, The Stand, except that instead of a virus wiping out most of the population, it is Bitcoin that is released after the fiat system wipes out most of the global financial and economic sectors. Slowly but surely, we are all starting to find each other through social media. And what an incredible process that is.
I probably have one of the stranger stories in regard to my introduction to Bitcoin. When I joined Facebook in July of 2010, I did so in an attempt to find like-minded people. My ex-husband and I were one of many who lost a lot when the real estate bubble burst. Unfortunately, not only were we idiots once – we went on to buy again after the housing market dropped about 25%, thinking we had finally hit the bottom. We moved into that second house days after the stock market crashed 777 points. People all around us were losing their jobs, their homes, their life savings; while the media blasted ‘greedy homeowners’ who knowingly took on more than they could afford and who were ultimately responsible for the collapse. I remember thinking to myself that it just wasn’t true. Sure, some people did that. But most people were like us. We wanted a safe place to live and raise our kids. And we could afford the payments…until the crash decimated his sales business and it just never recovered.
After reading everything I could get my hands on about what really happened during the mortgage meltdown, it became clear to me what a dangerous and non-transparent place the derivatives market was. I also began to understand how political power was used to coerce a frightened and naïve public into handing over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pretend to fix a problem they never had anything to do with. The media couldn’t see this? That’s when the matrix started to break down for me. It was around this time I discovered Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan. The first image I used as my profile picture on Facebook, was just that:
The next time I encountered derivatives was in the gold and silver markets. I’ve been a precious metals bug for a long time. I just couldn’t understand it. How could the price of the metals be going down when the money supply was going up parabolically? Over time, that became obvious as well. If a single group of people can bring down the global financial system and get away with it, then how hard is it to manipulate the gold and silver markets? I think we know now – not hard at all. It happens in plain sight. LIBOR, the Federal Reserve, quantitative easing, fractional reserve banking, naked shorting, CPI – the list goes on and on. What do all of these things have in common? They manipulate reality in order to allow a dead (can also be called a death) system to continue at the expense of the majority who exist within that system. For a long time, I don’t think people really knew how to change it. Our political leaders have failed us. Regulators have failed us. The judicial system has failed us. Underlying all of this power is the root of the corruption and decay. Money. Plain and simple. Those with it steer the momentum and the direction of the ship, while we the passengers feel helpless to change its course - helpless until now, that is.
I first heard the word Bitcoin on Max Keiser’s show during a rant about Farmville virtual currencies. I ignored it. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. More importantly, he didn’t make me understand how it applied to me. I love his show and his humor – and no one explains financial corruption better, but it wasn’t enough to make me want to learn more.
Enter Clif High. If you don’t know who Clif is, you may know the Web Bots. He specializes in predictive linguistics based on expression of language collected from targeted sites by spiders. His site is Half Past Human. He’s one of the few individuals I could listen to for days. I’m pretty sure I’ve caught about every interview and podcast he’s done for the last 4-5 years. Much of what he covers is way too out there for most people, but honestly, it can never get too weird for me. I have a Hunter S. Thompson mentality in that area. “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” It is Clif High who convinced me to buy my first bitcoin. He has talked about it for a couple of years, but at the beginning of last year he really urged everyone to set up a wallet and get started, because according to his data, Bitcoin had reached a critical mass, so to speak, and was now beyond the point where the genie could be put back in the bottle. He had also been talking for a long time about a ‘calorie economy’, where work put in would equal monetary compensation out. If that doesn’t describe the mining process perfectly, I don’t know what does. It is not the expectation of financial gain that pushed me from thought to action. It was the possibility of real change. Monumental change. The kind that people 100 years from now will be talking about. The kind that can alter the lives of billions for the better. It is the kind of change we were promised but never received.
I know so many people who feel exactly the way I do. We have been waiting for something to come along with the potential to redefine how we live. As a divorced mother of 3, I have desperately been looking for a way to do what is most important to me, ie parent, in the way that I feel benefits my children the most, and still keep a roof over my head, the lights on, and food on the table. That shouldn’t be impossible to do. Yet as I have tried, unsuccessfully for months now, to find work (after a 9 year absence from the workforce in any meaningful way) that allows me to do both without having to fork over half of my income to child care costs, I realize that the world I knew is gone. Hundreds are competing for a single entry level job. Having children is looked at as a liability. It means sick days and half days and snow days and all sorts of other unforeseen obstacles. It means staying late and working overtime may not be feasible. When you have 50 candidates for a job who don’t have any sort of obligations tying them down, there is a good chance you’ll be passed over. That is something that many women face every day.
That is why I chose Bitcoin. The way we’ve been doing business doesn’t work. The way we are forced to live as slaves to jobs we hate that prevent us from spending the time with our families is causing us to make choices we just shouldn’t have to make. Our creativity and innovation has been stifled. Imagine if we lived in a world where everyone was able to contribute with their true potential. Doing what you love should be your job, because if you love what you do, the word ‘job’ loses all of the negative connotations. You would do this work even if you didn’t get paid. It’s time to stop being herded like cattle into a corporate structure that does not consider the individual, but rather only considers the maximum profit structure, often in spite of the people, animals and environment it exploits and destroys.
Bitcoin offers an evolution. Through this system, we are able to communicate and deal directly with one another on our own terms. We don’t need permission from governments to do what we feel is right. It’s freedom. For me personally, the small bitcoin purchase I made a year ago has enabled me to pay for expenses like heating oil, electricity and groceries. I would not have been able to pay for those items over the last winter without it. It has enabled me to be at home with my children and has prevented us from becoming another statistic. Most importantly, it has given me the freedom to devote my time and energy to the thing I love to do the most – sewing. I’ve been working nonstop over the last couple of months in an effort to get my handbag business off the ground. That is what I love to do. That is how I want to support myself. I have no idea if I will succeed or not, but Bitcoin is offering me the chance to try. You can’t put a price on that. When something comes along that allows you to be exactly the person you want to be and the best version of you that there is, you don’t let go. You follow it through to conclusion. If you don’t, those are the regrets you’ll always think about and wonder ‘what if?’.
In conclusion, my hope is that more women will begin to understand how Bitcoin can offer them a different way of life. I have met the most supportive and caring ladies along the way on this adventure, and I believe that if others are able to feel that support and motivation, they too will understand the transformative nature of Bitcoin. That is how broader adoption will happen. When we all band together and help each other up no matter where we live or what we believe, we change the world. I mentioned the black swan briefly before. I’ve been waiting for years for a sign that change is coming – for that black swan. I don’t believe in coincidence. So when I saw this image not long after I bought my first bitcoin, I knew. This is it. Change is coming. So hang on tight, it’s going to be an amazing ride.
TRACEY LEONARD: I am a mother of 3 living in New Jersey. I love to write and sew. Oh – and I want to change the world. If you’d like to learn more about me or are interested in my handbags or the Bitcoin Swag project I’ve started you may do so at the following links.