My story with the bitcoin begins in 2010. I was coming back to the market after selling my company in 2008, and I was invited to make a Dropbox clone for a consultancy firm in São Paulo, around 2009/2010.
Since the beginning we identified that it was a very interesting computing problem, and the first tool and approach that we used was the librsync. The issue without a doubt involved the failure tolerance and consequently we could say we were dealing with a problem of distributed computing. In addition to porting librsync for the mobiles devices of the time, we created a layer that served as a “node” to coordinate the syncs on multiple points.
The Dropbox did and does that spectacularly, saving a lot of band when sending only the differential data and keeping everything in the same state through an arbitrary consensus. This technology consists in checking a file that I have in one place as well as the same file stored in another location and, if it is necessary to forward it, just sending the difference between them.
In order to achieve this, the library that we were based on generated hash parts of the file producing a comparative index. With this, it was possible to generate a “delta” with only the parties with different hashes. Any resemblance to the blockchain is not mere coincidence. I believe the hash issue ended up leading me again to the encryption and the sea of information found in the internet. Within the process, for some reason I can’t explain, I hit the bitcoin white paper.
This was the trigger that led me to fall in love with it. And I started to work on that. Thereafter I was hired by a consulting company to act as data architect at a large bank in São Paulo. Back to the financial market, and looking at this scenario, I saw that it was quite clear what was going on: waste of resources, pointless redundancies and the real money has no longer an owner.
Back to the financial market, and looking at this scenario, I saw that it was quite clear what was going on: waste of resources, pointless redundancies and the real money has no longer an owner.
Job in New York and the first cold wallet
In the meantime, as I was learning more and more about the bitcoin and playing the consultant role in the financial market, I ended up working at the stock exchange in another project involving distributed computing. In the first semester of 2014, I went to New York indicated by some old acquaintances. The deal with these people didn’t come out quite as expected, however I had known Nick Spanos and the staff of the Bitcoin Center NY.
So I took my bag in Brooklyn at 9:00 pm and left. I got out of there believing in the same way in the bitcoin. It was a much greater movement than the initial expectations that I followed since 2011. I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, arrived in Manhattan around 10:00 pm. But it happened to be the Veterans Day or something similar and I couldn’t get a hotel to sleep. There may have been one of the decisive moments. I couldn’t give up. Without hotel, I slept on the street, in a square in front of the building of the Nasdaq. I like to tell this story and give enough laughter, because a lot of people did a lot for the bitcoin and vice versa…
At 8:00 in the next morning I walked into Starbucks for a cup of coffee. And I had an insight: I’m going to call Nick, and tell him I’m leaving. When we spoke early in the morning at the Bitcoin Center, he offered me to stay and work for the bitcoin. It was a very cool moment, especially for the relationship in these first years of Bitcoin and also for the challenges of everyday life, including the personal, technical and legal aspects.
One of the interesting stories about cold wallet was when Nick at one point, offered me his apartment to spend a couple of weeks. Arriving at night he made a visit in the apartment and he began to remove from the freezer some meats. In the middle of them, he picked up little pieces of paper with QR Codes, with the date, and each with an absurd quantity of BTC even for the time. This was the first major example of cold wallet.
This apartment was also home for other people at the Bitcoin Center besides me. We fought together against the State of New York, against the bit license – state license to operate in this market. But we lost the battle. NY closed the market for us. And I walked out of there with the following mission: to go back to Brazil and talk about bitcoin in the financial market.
Back to Brazil and the mission to speak about the bitcoin with businessmen
In Brazil, the environment was still unborn. The Foxbit was already working, but I went back to the traditional financial market. Because I needed to talk about the bitcoin to that market businessmen. It wasn’t about earning money, about investment, but something bigger, that would cut bureaucracy, give transparency. And again, Satoshi Nakamoto watched over me and he opened the doors once more, letting me get in touch and socialize with executives of the financial market.
In 2017, the blockchain movement arrived. The banks began to open blockchain labs. And I don’t believe in blockchain purely as technology. I believe in the bitcoin, period. And I began to have difficulties in explaining the blockchain to my friends in the R3, a consortium of companies that wanted to make a blockchain to the financial market. Along the way they decided to call it DLT technology (acronym for Distributed Ledger Technology or technology of Distributed Registry).
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In the meantime, I was at an event with several executives of technology companies to explain what was the bitcoin. And everyone loved it. So, with all this trouble to explain the blockchain, I asked everyone to install a wallet crypto. And I gave satoshis to some of them. And at the moment that all transactions were completed I told them: Gentlemen, now you are participating in the blockchain.
I continued on this journey, with many short stories along the way. In 2018, I left BRQ because an old school “bitcoiner” called me to open an exchange in Brazil. I took a company that I had, fitting it to become an exchange and went to New York. But things were no longer as before: all bitcoin trade sites were blocked in New York.
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Still working and believing that the national financial market needed serious and competent players to take away the current system status quo from the 20th century, I continued to develop relationships. However, all involved in bitcoin end up suffering with speculation. Unfortunately, the investor pulled out the check and I ended up getting no support to continue the project, which at the beginning would be a mobile wallet with asset exchange without custody integrated to the Brazilian payment system. The idea would develop as far as buying and selling gift cards. I still have parts of the release version. Nevertheless, I´d lost breath to proceed with the endeavor and I started looking for a new opportunity.
I already knew about Transfero since the Bit.One, and I greatly admired their operation in Brazil. At the end of 2018 I started to perform some consulting works with the company.
