I am an old school cypherpunk, a dedicated antiauthoritarian, and in general, a huge geek. Professionally, I have, at one time or another, held almost every imaginable technical position within the IT/IS sphere. In 2002, I left my last corporate position to work on what is, to date, the single best thing I have ever done.
To make a (very) long story short, I coded and populated the world’s first dark web marketplace: The Farmers’ Market. Unlike the many markets which followed, the Farmers’ Market was carefully curated. There were no hard drugs, guns or sketchy services offered. Only medicinal substances, including Cannabis and various psychedellics.
In the roughly 10 years of the Farmers’ Market’s existence, my cohorts and I helped thousands of people around the world obtain the medicines they needed and the recreational substances they wanted. Then, in 2012, the DEA finally caught up with us.
After a long and drawn out plea bargaining process, I was sentenced to 63 months in Federal prison, most of which I served in Fort Dix, New Jersey. While incarcerated, I spent my time teaching other inmates to read, helping them communicate with their families, working out, and giving myself the humanities education I never got in college. I went through an average of 2 books per week on subjects ranging from epistemology to linguistics.
Upon my release, in August 2018, I found myself overwhelmed by the changes that had taken place in the technology landscape. Having always been a generalist, I realized I now needed to specialize, and having discovered Bitcoin shortly before my arrest, I chose blockchain for my specialization.
I now serve as co-host of the Los Angeles chapter of CryptoMondays, and as a consultant on all things crypto-, blockchain-, and startup related.
I live in Santa Monica with My beautiful wife, Sharyn, and my unbelievably awesome dog, Albert Einstein Evron (Albie for short).
Personally, it’s not religion I object to per se. Rather, it’s dogma, which is a much larger phenomenon and includes such things as political affiliation, uncritical beliefs in the current state of science, etc. Thing is, there is a huge overlap to the point where religion sometimes appears to be subset of dogma. It isn’t really, but it takes a surprising amount of work to find religion outside this Venn diagram.