Yep, we were there.

We were there way back, all those years ago, in 2014. It was like the social media, internet and PC booms before it….but more global, faster and with a special dash of idealistic magic.

Sure, we knew it was going to be big. It was a scary and wild ride. Every day some crazy piece of news came forward. But we knew it was special. It was getting tons of media attention, so much misunderstood. People went and easily afforded whole bitcoins they were so cheap. They used to lose them or have them hacked by the hundreds. It was an amazing pain to use….all these crazy long scary numbers, constant worries of theft. Even explaining the concept to people was hard. We had only a handful of ways to even buy or spend them. But we loved it.

None of the big companies were involved yet. The biggest players were new VC backed companies with just dozens of employees. It was such a big deal when Overstock and Tiger became the first major retailers to accept bitcoin. It was such a novelty.

You could go to conferences and it was a bunch of oddball characters with disorganized agenda – everyone in the space was there. You could walk right up to Andreas and talk to him and he’d be in the same room with Charlie Lee and Roger Ver and a dozen others. Vitalik was just a young guy with ambitious ideas. The forum and online sites had hundreds of the largest Bitcoin holders all in one place.

Everyone was measuring Bitcoin and it’s value compared to other currencies like the dollar. People were worried governments would shut it down.

Economists and the media laughed at us.

But we knew better.

Everything moved so fast the news couldn’t catch up. We’d instead congregate on places like Reddit — there were only 100,000 of us or so and and only a fraction of that really active.

There was an energy, an excitement that many of us had not seen for a very long time.

Some of us got it, we saw the potential and we gave up time and money and jobs and more to pursue this crazy thing with no real idea where it would go. We’d talk to each other for hours, we’d check the message board first thing in the morning and then feel a bit of sadness when we’d caught up on our daily reading….because we wanted to learn even more.

It was a bumpy road. There was sadness and tragedy companies that boomed and busted and some people who lost a great deal. But there was so much built and so much good being done.

We knew history was in the making. Today our world is a different place and like social media, mobile phones, PCs and the Internet before it, we can barely conceive of what the world would have been like without this technology.

Yep, we were there, and we wouldn’t trade that experience for the world.