Original title: I spent a year changing my career for Bitcoin.

    This story begins two years ago.

     After graduation, I interned in the New York City Mayor's Office for a while, and then worked at the World Bank for a while. How should I put it? All governments are the same, and efficiency depends entirely on personal character. The World Bank is a place where people are promoted based on seniority and just eat and wait to die.

     Before that, I learned about Bitcoin and thought it was a good thing. I made a few transactions, with some gains and some losses. It was my first time to trade in my life, and I knew nothing. Winning or losing depended entirely on luck. But at that time, this was the only way for me to participate in Bitcoin. The reason why I wanted to stir up this muddy water was that a long time ago in Wuhan, when I was still a college student, I came into contact with some literary youths who believed in anarchism. We hung out together every day, talked nonsense, smoked, drank, and debated. Although I didn’t remember any of the theories and pretentious terms of various isms, I felt that the government was xx and had a good impression of citizen autonomy.

     So when I first learned about Bitcoin, I was so excited that I felt like the evil banks were going to go bankrupt. It was too simple, sometimes naive. At that time, I couldn’t even write “hello world”, but I just believed in Bitcoin completely and wishfully.

     After the World Bank was fired, I thought that since I liked Bitcoin so much and liked the new possibilities it brought to the world, I might as well find out more about it. At least from a technical point of view, I wanted to determine whether it was reliable or not. So I happily decided to switch to studying CS and jumped into the pit of being a programmer.

     Those days were miserable, but full of hope. I took classes online every day and stayed at friends' houses. I got started with CS, learned Python, learned statistics, and started looking for a job in data analysis.

     In February, I went to a startup in New York with only a few employees. The salary was extremely inversely proportional to the workload. There was no other way. I was a newcomer who changed my career. I had to learn everything by doing. Because my boss was greedy for money and dared to attract any client, I had to accept all the clients. I made several statistical models, did machine learning, did SEO, analyzed Google Analytics, and then went to website development, front-end and back-end, and then to data mining. Basically, I went home and slept every day, and worked in the morning. I wrote code on the subway on the way to and from work. I remember that I made a bug in the config file of the client's website. The website could not be logged in. I stayed up all night to debug it. The next day, I made a report to the client... After half a year, I couldn't do it anymore. The boss didn't understand technology, made products every day, and saved as much as possible. I did all the technical work, and I didn't have the equity share as promised. Fortunately, although the salary was low, I did learn a lot. At that time, I became more and more interested in data analysis, so after resigning, I stayed at home and soaked in Udacity every day, preparing to get a data analyst certificate.

     I had been studying for about two months when I suddenly received an invitation to participate in the Google Foobar Challenge. I didn't know what it meant at the time, so I worked on it intermittently for a month. After I finished the third level, Google gave me an invitation to participate in the onsite competition, and I was naturally ecstatic.

     Following the instructions in the HR email, I spent two weeks taking the MIT Introduction to Algorithms, and the remaining two weeks doing exercises while reading UC Berkeley's OS Design. During that time, I got up early and went to bed late, and I felt that this interview was my life-saving straw after changing my career. On the other hand, I found that there were so many things to learn about CS, so I was tired and happy every day.

     Then I went to the onsite interview, had five rounds of interviews, and did whiteboard coding. I was so exhausted that I regretted that I should have prepared for two more weeks. Sure enough, I received a rejection letter the day before Thanksgiving, saying that I was welcome to come back next year... I had no choice but to eat turkey in a depressed mood. After resting for two days, I started applying to many companies and interviewed with several companies one after another. I came across a very interesting company. Although it was not engaged in Bitcoin, they seemed very interested. So I chose this company, signed the contract, and started working next week.

     Well… this time I took a big step and went a long way, but I didn’t forget my original intention. I watched a few open classes on Bitcoin taught by Princeton around Christmas, and I felt that there was no problem. After laying the foundation for a year, I can finally learn blockchain technology from scratch.

     I still want to say that whether I am working or studying, I will encounter many ideas, technologies, and products that are changing the world. But it is rare to see something like Bitcoin that has the potential to turn the page of human civilization.

     Recently I have read some discussions about deflation and inflation. At one time I thought that this was a wishful thinking debate between schools of thought. At another time I thought that there is no end to learning and I should enjoy it.

     It’s been a year since I posted much. I’m just dropping in now. From now on, I’ll just be a technical person.