This is the story of how a mechanical engineer got into Bitcoin & cryptocurrencies and became an editor at leading Crypto blog CoinSutra written by Sudhir Khatwani himself.
Hey folks, My name is Sudhir Khatwani and I have been into cryptosphere full time since May 2017. Just like you, I too have a crypto story, and today I want to share mine with you!
My motivation to write this story today is to drive home this message that anyone can get started in crypto. You needn’t be a developer or so-called technical person in traditional terms to begin in crypto.
If you have tried to search and understand ‘Bitcoin private keys’ or about ‘cryptocurrency master-nodes,’ there are good chances that you have read some of my articles. So far I have written 500+ articles on various cryptocurrencies, blockchain projects, and crypto basics read by millions of people starting in crypto.
Some of the pieces I have written are good, some are very good, and some are shit as they are just an amalgamation of a lot of information from here and there. (You need to do this in any job!)
Some of my work has also been accredited by Microsoft blog, IBM blog, and Gizmodo, etc
But why I am telling you all this?
Well because I belong to the herd of engineers that India produces every year. To make matters more confusing, I am from Mechanical engineering and if I can get into crypto then anyone else can as well.
Contents
The Start
After my B.Tech in Mechanical, I was placed in an IT MNC giant Cognizant for which I kept deferring my joining for almost eight months.
In between, I did two jobs (one in mechanical, another in CRM sales) and got severely ill to get finally operated.
Frustrated and in recovery mode, I joined Cognizant in early 2015 to support my expenses as I didn’t want to seek further support from my parents. They had already done their part by keeping me debt-free while most of my friends where carrying educational loans.
What a great blessing it was which I didn’t realise until recently.
This was my third job since graduating in May 2014. Into my job, I started working as a software tester for an investment bank and hated it to the core because of my initial bias towards investment banks.
This bias was developed because my father long back had lost a lot of money in the share market. I know that’s childish!
But this hate quickly evaporated as I started enjoying the domain of investment banking. Thanks to the new perspective towards my work which I had developed through my mentor’s guidance (Dr. Diasaku Ikeda, SGI President).
Hearing First About Bitcoin
It was here in this project that I heard about Bitcoin for the first time. This was the first quarter of 2016 when Bitcoin was priced around $400.
Every day at my office, I heard people talking about how they could make money from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. But at that time, I didn’t know what the heck Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies were!
Like most people, I got to know about Bitcoin from a friend (my Business Analyst colleague). At first, I ignored him and didn’t pay that much attention (mostly because I thought it was some sort of Ponzi scheme).
A few weeks later, I heard the Bitcoin noise again in my office. And the same friend approached me to invest in a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency (Swiscoin – don’t search about it, it was a scam).
Thankfully, I didn’t invest, but I researched it on a high level.
I concluded in some days that it was a scam. But from this research, I got introduced to the magical world of ‘blockchain.’ (I didn’t know, it was magical then!)
Honestly, it didn’t make any sense to me first. But I think that was because I didn’t pay much attention to understanding it also. As a result, I quickly faded in my research and involuntarily stopped.
But by this time, I had realised that it was something, I needed to revisit it to understand it more deeply and intuitively, also felt that it is something big.
But honestly, I didn’t have the time to do so.
Second Encounter With Bitcoin & Blockchain [Courtesy of my second project]
In the second or third quarter of 2016, I was tagged to another banking project but this time in the US Mortgages domain.
I knew already that the financial crisis of 2008-2009 had happened due to mortgages but going into the US mortgages project gave me the opportunity to explore the financial crisis of 2008-2009 more deeply.
And when you are pressurised by your managers and leads, more often you need to do that in IT MNCs (just for your general knowledge).
I started studying mortgages, and that’s where subprime mortgages case studies lead me to Fee.org. From here, again I was lead towards Bitcoin.
After this, I became all the more curious as to how Bitcoin was related to the financial crisis?
Later, I decided to continue pursuing my research after office hours late at nights. For the next 6-8 months, I tried hard to convince myself that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are fake.
But now as you are reading this obviously mean that I failed.
On the flip side, I was hooked and drowned by the concept of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin so much that it was hard to sleep.
And believe me, anyone who has really understood this, have found themselves in this situation because the plethora implications this will have on humanity are simply mind-boggling and sometimes inconceivable also.
Finally Into Bitcoin
Fast forward to 2017 I was putting down my papers in March after completing a little more than 2 years at Cognizant to join CoinSutra- a cryptocurrency blog which wasn’t so well known in early days of 2017 as a writer cum editor.
Funnily, I got to know about this opportunity through my younger brother who saw this job posting on some Facebook page or group.
Knowing that I wanted to do something in cryptocurrencies and blockchain but wasn’t so sure, what. So this was the best thing to get involved at that time.
By now, I had amassed an ample amount of knowledge to talk about Bitcoin, Bitcoin wallets, Bitcoin exchanges, and other related stuff as I had already purchased my first Bitcoin through Unocoin in late 2016.
Bitcoin was around $700 mark when I bought it!
Now What?
Since then I have glued to cryptosphere.
I also attended a few local, national and international cryptocurrency conferences last one been- Token 2049 Hong Kong conference in 2018 but nothing has amused me as much as my own self-exploration.
Have also read quite a few books on crypto and monetary history. Some of those books are Mastering Bitcoin, Blockchain Revolution, and Guide to Gold & Silver by Mike Maloney who is the best monetary scientist I have come across so far.
Coming across the monetary history’s perspective on Bitcoin like cryptocurrencies further excited me to find answers to questions such as:
- What is money?
- The Difference between money & currencies?
- And how Bitcoin, though a cryptocurrency doesn’t fit into this category because it exhibits the properties of money? (But that’s just a nomenclature !!)
And till this day these things excite me.
Fast forwarding a bit more:
Though I left my last writing job on crypto in October 2018, I continue to remain actively involved in the cryptosphere in my capacity because according to me, lack of education is the biggest hurdle in this space for mass adoption.
Will tell you about my perspective towards governments and regulators sometime in the future!
But for now, until and unless as a worldwide community we figure out a way to get this tech to the next 100 million people in a way that’s not intimidating to them, the space won’t go anywhere.
Having said that I want to share, I am doing my bit through TheMoneyMongers where I have determined to bring atleast 1000 people in crypto this year! The site is under work as of now, but still, if you want to read something that is worth sharing, you will definitely find it here !!
So that’s all about me and my crypto story.
Tell me what’s yours? I will be waiting 🙂
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