Tornado hit without warning

First business ran inside a video game

It started on IRC, in a small group of programmers. I was nowhere near the best programmer in it. But when we played Quake, I was always the best player.

That led to EverQuest. As a teenager I became one of the top players in the world and ran my first business selling in-game items. I had customers around the world and tracked sales in a plain text file.

A player named Malden, on the Lanys T'Vyl server, became my mentor. His advice: buy stocks and start companies. I did both. I bought what I knew, which around 1999 was Nvidia. Then I sold it to travel. I try not to think about that.

At 20, a move to Taiwan and two TV commercials

After Alabama I spent a year in Michigan and learned sales. I took a job selling computers and got promoted quickly. I also watched 8 Mile on 8 Mile when it came out.

Then came Florida. I hung out with Kevin Shelton, a real estate investor the local news called the Money Man. He shot two-dollar bills into crowds from a cash cannon, and he showed me the news clips all the time. I spent my days on a lake in Odessa and at parties. Kevin and I rode a jet ski to meetings, some of them at the homes of Tampa Bay Buccaneers players whose houses we were trying to buy. I learned a ton from Kevin, and even helped him strategize on some of his projects.

Then I read Jim Rogers, who grew up in Alabama like me. He started the Quantum Fund with George Soros, then traveled the world and wrote books about it, China most of all. I decided I wasn't going to stay in real estate. I was going to keep learning.

So at 20 I moved to Taiwan to live. My childhood neighbor, who ran that IRC group, was already there. I studied Mandarin, taught English part-time, saw most of Asia, and somehow ended up in two national TV commercials.

I've never been able to find a copy of either commercial.

Early into Bitcoin

J.R., my Gamify co-founder, got me into crypto early. He later bought into Ethereum at its 2014 crowdsale. After talking with Erik Voorhees I bought my first bitcoin. Then I co-created QuickCoin, the first social Bitcoin wallet, which landed me in the book The Age of Cryptocurrency.

In February 2014, Marshall Hayner and I put on the first Bitcoin Fair in San Francisco, at Ramen Underground in Japantown: a hand-painted sign in the window, bitcoin accepted for dinner, and a room too full to move in.

It was one of the first events in the city where you could buy food and drinks with bitcoin. Prominent founders and investors came out, among them Jeremy Liew and my good friends Ali Moiz and Murtaza Hussain, who created Streamlabs.

Copyright for more than 10,000 artists

QuickCoin became Binded, copyright protection for artists. You uploaded your work, we recorded it on the blockchain, then we scanned the web to show you where it was being used. More than 10,000 artists used it to protect their work.

That took me to the Library of Congress to talk about the future of copyright. Pixsy bought the company in 2019.