I begin my journey back to the UK RIGHT HERE!

Hello,

My name is Josh Igoe. Who are you?

A while ago, I bought a domain: www.joshigoe.com and I didn't know what to do with it. So I figured why not just point it to this page? It is easy to blog on here and simultaneously earn STEEM, which is a nice new kind of cryptocurrency which I have recently been introduced to. So far so good.

My story begins in the UK, where I was born and raised. I was born in Bristol but shortly moved back to my parents' hometown of York at about 18 months old (I think, not from memory, but from memory of what I've been told by others). I lived in York from then on until around age 18 when I went to uni. I attended Loughborough for exactly one academic year before transferring to Reading. After a bit of a rough time with a lack of direction and without any clear objectives in my life, I finished with a gentleman's degree in Politics and left wondering what I was going to do with myself. I drifted between playing poker as a hobby and dreaming of travelling the world. I managed to make a success of the travelling the world part. I did alright at poker for a couple of years too. Then disaster struck. The US govt shut down online poker in the USA. This meant that overnight all the worst players with the highest disposable income were no longer able to play. This meant that poker became suddenly very hard. I had a stake and winning became tougher and tougher. I lost the stake and left poker entirely with my tail between my legs. It was a humbling moment. But I was still young, and on the bright side, I learned about luck and variance as well as being in the right place at the right time. More on that later.

Next step was moving to Korea. I taught English at a cram school there for 1 year. It was pretty OK looking back on it. At that time, however, I thought it was hellish. I was ready to leave Korea dejected, again with my tail between my legs, when I met the girl that changed my life. We got married 2 years later and we've now been married for 3 years. All in all, I've been in Korea for the past 6 years and have loved it and keep on loving it more and more as I understand the culture and the language and resilience of the peninsula. More on the benefits of resilience later.

I studied for a Master's degree and earned a distinction in my dissertation. It felt like a sort of reconciliation, in a sense, or some kind of atonement for my previous gentlemen's result as an undergraduate. I moved on to better things work-wise. I began thinking more about the future. I am now 30 years old. At 20, I didn't care about the future. But now I do.

I found cryptocurrencies while playing poker. Some other poker players (online poker players include some of the most interesting and intelligent people on earth) were talking about it and seemed like it was a good thing. It had all the properties of real money, without the downsides of government inflation or centralization (I'd mentioned my distrust of government earlier with their ability to ban, and overnight stop my ability to earn a living from, online poker). There was a problem with crypto for me though. I was broke. I had no money to invest. I started saving my paycheck and investing a little bit here and there in Bitcoin. Later on, a friend introduced me to altcoins. Altcoins? isn't that just copying? yeah, pretty much. Most altcoins are just clones with no innovation. Hence the nickname: shitcoins. However, some have truly interesting applications in the real world (STEEM being one of them). Some coins, like Ethereum, have added smart contracts, changed the way they work, and added new innovative ways of doing things which make them unique and appealing with more applications in the real world.

I've been buying crypto for about 1 year now. I started small, and my meager beginnings have been blessed so far with a good start and good timing; something which you can't beat: luck! Also, the facts are as of right now, the world economy is up shit creek. The central bankers (another good thing about crypto is that it is DE-centralized) have printed so much money Keynes would be proud, but apparently, the world owes trillions upon trillions of dollars, pounds, yen and euros to itself with no mathematically sound way of paying itself back. Sounds awesome. That's probably, therefore, the greatest thing about crypto: it can't be manipulated. It's not debt based. It is hyper-inflation proof by virtue of the fact it isn't controlled by some people in a little back room. There is the resilience it has built into it. It can't be tampered with by central bankers. It can't be printed. It is the future.

Anyway, that's my first little blog on here.

Thanks for reading.