about this website

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I'm a retired management consultant born in Glasgow in 1951 who professionally specialized in IT for 40 years. I am not a financial advisor. My background is computer programming and I like the quotation, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself." - Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987). 

In 1971 I was studying engineering at university and dropped out to get a job training as a computer programmer because I could see future potential in information technology and I seemed to have some natural talent for coding. It was difficult to explain this decision to people who knew almost nothing about computers. In the mid ‘80s I wrote a computer terminal emulator on a Grid Compass laptop so that our senior executives could carry these around and connect to our company’s mainframes from anywhere and I bought an early 80286 based PC and a dial-up modem to play with at home. I found it tricky to explain to people why the AOL service that I connected to could actually be quite useful. By the 1990s we were using email every day at work and by 1995 I had developed my first website as a global project communications aid on my employer’s internal intranet. I found it difficult to explain to people outside of work the huge potential I could see in this HTML thing I was working with, but by 1998 Amazon was already selling books, computer games and music online and their revenues reached $600 million that year.

Jump forward another 10 years and the Bitcoin whitepaper was published in October 2008. I confess I took no interest in blockchain technology until Ethereum was released in July 2015. Then I started to read about it and became excited about the potential of smart contracts and the EVM. Although I had by this time retired and had plenty of time to read and research this technology, my first purchase of cryptocurrency wasn’t until early 2018. By that time the 2017 market “bubble” had burst and quite a lot of my friends and family had at least heard of Bitcoin. But most only perceived it as an alternative form of money and a new way of doing financial transactions. I found it difficult to explain to them how the underlying technology could become as world changing as the Internet. A majority tended to believe the rhetoric of fear propagated through mainstream media by the threatened establishments of government and financial institutions that could be most disrupted by this technology. Of course, I recognised that, as with most technical innovations, there will be many bad as well as many good outcomes. So that fear is not wholly unfounded. But I also foresaw massive, mostly positive, opportunities for our society and the way industries operate. I was convinced that if one were able to identify and invest in some of the most substantial projects in the space, then one could accrue significant financial rewards. I decided, therefore, to find some way to educate my children and grandchildren in how to safely become early adopters while developing the capability to mitigate the worst of the risks. Then the Covid-19 pandemic came along and, finding myself stuck at home during lockdown, I created this website as a hobby. Finally, in early 2021 as an incentive to getting them started, I coached my daughters through the process of setting up their own cryptocurrency wallets and gifted each of them some of the cryptocurrency that I had accumulated.

I'll be happy if this website helps anybody else, because helping others is one of the best things in this world. The content is intended to provide introductory guidance to newcomers to the cryptocurrency space while providing entertainment by using characters and themes created by Douglas Noel Adams (1952 - 2001) for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC radio and television series. Douglas Adams once said, "The fact that we live at the bottom of a gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."