Too Long; Didn't Read
<strong>When did you first hear about cryptocurrencies and what were your thoughts about it at that time?</strong><br>My life before Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies was as an experimental musician and <a href="https://thecentrifuge.bandcamp.com" target="_blank">decentralised arts organisation</a> founder, manager of <a href="https://twitter.com/thecentrifuge/status/616670096434573312" target="_blank">interesting creative technology projects</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbergfestival" target="_blank">festival curator</a>. Whilst on a music tour around the US West Coast in 2012 we went to a friend-of-a-friend’s place in Silicon Valley, he opened his closet and said “check this out, I’m doing this thing called mining Bitcoin”. It took a while to be convinced, the idea sounded great but everything I could find online looked quite dubious — Mt. Gox, Bitcoinica, BitInstant and so on — and as I wasn’t a computer scientist or cryptographer the detailed discussions were beyond me. It wasn’t until 2014/5 during what may have been Bitcoin’s darkest days that I started to get really interested. The idea of natively digital money that isn’t controlled by anyone has obvious appeal, but surviving the Gox incident showed me that the technology had some serious resilience and could be a long-lived proposition.