Etherean to Crypto Moderate, Part 1: Excitement
2026 Apr 28
See all posts
Etherean to Crypto Moderate, Part 1: Excitement
I spent around 8 years in crypto as an engineer and I'm now exploring
other areas of technology. Over the years, my views on the industry
evolved into what I'd call a "crypto moderate." This series of posts
documents how I came to that position and what it comprises.
I had some relatively early exposure to crypto in university via the
Silk Road. I filed it away in the same category as Tor/VPNs/Limewire.
Controversial, but in cases defensible, libertarian technology. I was a
boglehead at the time, so the financial speculation spooked me. I didn't
engage with it much and instead dug into software engineering and math
more generally.
After graduating, I got a job at Cisco Systems and spent time
learning about routing protocols like IS-IS. I started to get more
interested in distributed systems. A few coworkers had started
discussing the Bitcoin and Ethereum white papers at work as the price
started to run up into the 2017 bubble. Routing protocols were old;
crypto was new and exciting. People my age like Vitalik Buterin, Ethan
Buchman and others had framed the technology as a greenfield for
"economic and coordination experiments." It was clearly a frontier worth
exploring. I'd played around with AI models as well, but much preferred
the act of hand coding distributed systems and deterministic algorithms.
AI models felt fiddly and black box to me. Assembling components into a
larger complex system was just more satisfying. So I committed to a
rebrand as a "crypto software engineer." I bought some ETH from Quadriga and
withdrew it to a self-custodial wallet in accordance with the ethos.
That ethos turned out to be grounded in a valid rationale when later
Quadriga went bankrupt because the operator absconded with the
funds.
I quit Cisco in 2018 to study crypto at RC. I implemented parts of the
bitcoin client and the EVM, discussed whitepapers like filecoin and
tendermint with friends and sharpened my algorithmic thinking. I was
just following technical curiosity and positioning myself to be able to
further dig into the space with paid work. As a climate conscious
millennial, I was always sympathetic to the Bitcoin energy-use
critique.
Ethereum, however, was plotting a transition to PoS which would reduce
the energy consumption by 99.99%. I'd begun to think of myself as an
"Etherean" and looked up to Vitalik who wrote long screeds on his blog
about how
to achieve this transition. Around this time, the Ethereum meme of
"World Computer" was spreading and that stuck with me as a good vision.
The goal was to build a distributed computer to be shared by all as a
sort of public computing commons, where finance was but one major
application.
Next in the series: Etherean to Crypto
Moderate, Part 2: Building
Questions or comments? Email feedback@cstein.xyz
Etherean to Crypto Moderate, Part 1: Excitement
2026 Apr 28 See all postsI spent around 8 years in crypto as an engineer and I'm now exploring other areas of technology. Over the years, my views on the industry evolved into what I'd call a "crypto moderate." This series of posts documents how I came to that position and what it comprises.
I had some relatively early exposure to crypto in university via the Silk Road. I filed it away in the same category as Tor/VPNs/Limewire. Controversial, but in cases defensible, libertarian technology. I was a boglehead at the time, so the financial speculation spooked me. I didn't engage with it much and instead dug into software engineering and math more generally.
After graduating, I got a job at Cisco Systems and spent time learning about routing protocols like IS-IS. I started to get more interested in distributed systems. A few coworkers had started discussing the Bitcoin and Ethereum white papers at work as the price started to run up into the 2017 bubble. Routing protocols were old; crypto was new and exciting. People my age like Vitalik Buterin, Ethan Buchman and others had framed the technology as a greenfield for "economic and coordination experiments." It was clearly a frontier worth exploring. I'd played around with AI models as well, but much preferred the act of hand coding distributed systems and deterministic algorithms. AI models felt fiddly and black box to me. Assembling components into a larger complex system was just more satisfying. So I committed to a rebrand as a "crypto software engineer." I bought some ETH from Quadriga and withdrew it to a self-custodial wallet in accordance with the ethos. That ethos turned out to be grounded in a valid rationale when later Quadriga went bankrupt because the operator absconded with the funds.
I quit Cisco in 2018 to study crypto at RC. I implemented parts of the bitcoin client and the EVM, discussed whitepapers like filecoin and tendermint with friends and sharpened my algorithmic thinking. I was just following technical curiosity and positioning myself to be able to further dig into the space with paid work. As a climate conscious millennial, I was always sympathetic to the Bitcoin energy-use critique. Ethereum, however, was plotting a transition to PoS which would reduce the energy consumption by 99.99%. I'd begun to think of myself as an "Etherean" and looked up to Vitalik who wrote long screeds on his blog about how to achieve this transition. Around this time, the Ethereum meme of "World Computer" was spreading and that stuck with me as a good vision. The goal was to build a distributed computer to be shared by all as a sort of public computing commons, where finance was but one major application.
Next in the series: Etherean to Crypto Moderate, Part 2: Building
Questions or comments? Email feedback@cstein.xyz