My genesis is a long story (I'm over 50), but I can share the highlights of how I got into cryptocurrency...

For many years (starting in 1991) I've run a self-funded company that specializes in creating and selling software for the electrical engineers that design digital circuitry (think smartphones, computers, digital radios, gps systems, and most of the other modern marvels of electronics). The company began with just me and my partner, Donna, then we began hiring part-time students, then later full-time professionals, to help develop our products.

Around 2012, we decided to venture into custom software development contracts. Over the years, we had built up a team of extremely talented software programmers and we saw an opportunity to market those skills to companies with programming teams that were struggling with difficult software problems.

One of our earlier contracts was with another software company in Blacksburg, Va (the town where I live). The company was attempting to design software to solve complex engineering problems with the work being distributed across a network of computers. Multiple internal teams had already failed at the project, the current team they had assigned to solve the problem was behind schedule and struggling badly, and no one else at the company wanted to be associated with an apparently doomed project. We were contracted to help get the team back on schedule, which we did.

The tech lead for that project was a relatively new hire there named Dan Larimer. While working together, Dan and I began talking about our outside interests including politics and economics, and Dan shared his interest in developing a cryptocurrency that supported stable coins (a cryptocurrency that tracks the price of a fiat currency) and also allowed for shorting of a cryptocurrency (betting against the value of a coin).

During the middle of the project, Dan was able to obtain funding for his cryptocurrency ideas from a wealthy Bitcoin entrepreneur (he received his initial funding in Bitcoin), so he quit and began coding. He hired me directly on a part-time basis and later contracted for some of my company's other programmers as well, to develop his project. The peer-to-peer network for BitShares was one of the tasks assigned to our team.

Eventually his funding for BitShares began to run out, and he could no longer afford to pay us, but I wanted to stay in cryptocurrency, so I started a second company called BlockTrades to focus on cryptocurrency projects, with our first product being the web site you're probably aware of.

So it's fair to say that Dan is directly responsible for me getting into cryptocurrency.