(picture on myself edited with Canva Pro)
Between 2018-2019 I had what I call the worst working experience. I am Spanish and somehow I ended up working at the Asset Management of the biggest pension plan in Europe, based in the Netherlands. The work actually was not that bad, but the working atmosphere was.
They placed me in the derivatives department. I had previous experience in the financial sector in capital markets, but derivatives was something completely new for me. There was this product that it took me some effort to understand: CDS (Credit Default Swap).
I think that to completely understand something the best thing to do is going to its origin. And in my research I found a documentary that I think everyone should watch: Inside Job. It explains how the financial crisis of 2008 happened and how, as always, the financial institutions found their way to make profits while the rest of the world was hardly paying the consequences of the greediness of a few.
I started my Bachelors Degree in 2008 and I still remember in one of my first classes the teacher saying: “don’t be in a rush to finish your degree because you are going to have time to do more than one until the economy recovers”.
In Spain, where I am from, I don’t even think that the economy has recovered. I was lucky that when I finished my degree, I found a job in a bank where I was getting paid 1.000 € a month. Many of my friends the only option that they had was an internship where they could just aspire to 300 € a month.
Which led us to emigrate to other countries for finding better work opportunities. That’s how I ended up in that awful Dutch company back in 2018. After a year of being the most depressed and anxious that I have ever been in my life I decided to quit. I was not willing to put my time, skills and energy in such an unfair industry.
After quitting I came to Bali to find some peace of mind and think about what to do next. Here I started listening more and more about Bitcoin. I heard before about it, but I didn’t pay attention because I thought it was another shitty financial product that the same greedy people that I hated so much had created.
But this time was different. I kept hearing that Bitcoin and crypto could change the world and make it more fair for everybody. So I started my research and it was when I understood the concept of decentralization and how that was possible thanks to the blockchain technology that I completely fell in love with that idea. So I decided to buy some Bitcoin and just hold it.
At that time I also started my career as a freelancer. I used to write about different topics and also do translations from English to Spanish. I noticed that of all the money that I was making I didn’t get so much at the end between the taxes and the fees that the platform where I advertised my services was taking.
So I thought, okay, maybe there is a pair to pair platform where I can exchange my service for money without nobody taking most of the profit from it. And I found that Ethereum had developed a freelancer marketplace for that. But I needed some ETH to pay for the gas fees.
So I bought some. This was in 2020 just before the bull run. But suddenly the price of it was increasing so much that the value in dollars that was needed to buy to run the smart contract on this platform was ridiculous. So I thought I better keep this as an investment.
I honestly was shocked at how much the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum was increasing in such a little time. And I was getting more and more curious about crypto, so I decided to focus my freelancer career in just writing articles about it.
That was the best decision of my life. Not just because I learned a lot, but the amount of clients and work that I was receiving was beyond any expectation.
Since then, I went all in crypto. Nowadays I don’t sell my articles to other websites anymore, but I have started a new brand where I educate other people about it because I truly believe that we would live in such a better world if instead of using centralized money like euros or dollars, we will use decentralized money.