March 30, 2026 ·
Now accepting credit cards via Square.
Let's talk crypto. I believe I made my first transaction on the blockchain in 2017. It's hard to recall the precise moment, but I believe it to be in 2017. I recall it to be in the kitchen of my Houston apartment one evening after work. In my vague-about-it memory, what I am semi-certain about is that my crypto tinkers started as an ode to Ed Thorp while reading his book A Man for All Markets which had come out earlier that year. I was amazed that such a person existed, and that his book was easy enough to understand for an outsider and beginner like me. The book is very appropriately titled because Ed isn't just about one kind of market, or more broadly, one kind of dynamic. What he describes in the book is relentless pursuit of understanding how information, money, computation, and numbers work in the real world. It's further mind blowing that Ed worked with the great Claude Shannon to create the first wearable computer. True titan of industry, Ed.
Ed's life story and explanations had me hooked. His book inspired me to buy a cheap 2014 Mac mini and start learning about blockchains more seriously. A bit more vagueness here because I don't fully remember if I already had the Mac mini or I bought it for these experiments. But either way, soon after reading A Man for All Markets, I started tinkering and picked up more books closer to crypto which was starting to heat up by late 2017: The Internet of Money, Mastering Bitcoin, and Mastering Ethereum by Andreas Antonopoulos were my favorites. In parallel I ran Bitcoin nodes, created coins on Ethereum, and generally experimented onchain. Last vague memory of this piece but I sometimes wonder if I had ETH on the Mac mini I mention that I lost forever; or maybe it was never there? It was unclear back then if these assets had any serious value. In any case, because of this trial-and-error-based, path-of-least-resistance approach I found myself taking, I've long told people that my path to markets was crypto-first, fiat-second. The meaning and significance of that order flies under the radar and remains undetected to most, I think. What I mean when I say I learnt markets crypto-first is that I learnt information and money to be innately computational and programmable. In my own silly way, I was simply applying the kind of experiments Ed Thorp wrote about in his books. I only later learnt that traditional markets and people involved in them had drastically different approaches and schools of thought about economics.
Crypto is a dirty word in the 2020s just like oil was a dirty word in the 2010s. To be pro-crypto is to be some kind of an ignorant person that denies climate change or something like that. This used to mystify me in the 2010s but no longer does. I now know that innovation has always and perpetually been treated with ridicule. So now I expect that. Be free, be cringe type beat. This isn't to say that criticisms are to always be ignored, but that innovation in its time is hard to make sense of versus in retrospect.
I'm reflecting on all this because I recently added products to this website, and up until now payment rails for them have been crypto-only. While designing the store, I started thinking about wallets, credit cards and dashboards. Like back in 2017, today too, my experiments just happened to be crypto-first because it was just so much easier to set up and program without asking anyone's permission. I wrote on here the day before yesterday that Stripe annoyed me with their onboarding process precisely because it all felt so permission-seeking-and-giving. Square in comparison has been phenomenal. So starting today, I am accepting credit cards on this website. Coincidentally, Square is allowing Bitcoin payments received in either BTC or USD starting today, too. And they allow converting credit card sales to BTC, which I chose to do at the highest possible number allowed: 50%. Very cool.
I also mentioned developing a dashboard yesterday. I’ve created a sparkline under my profile picture on the home page. It tracks aggregated view counts and contributions on GitHub. It starts off as a single, tidy blinking dot; and each day here on out it will add metrics for the previous day; showing a rolling 14 days worth of trends for me and my visitors to view.
And that's it. I'm now accepting credit cards via Square.
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