In 2007-2008 I had started dabbling with a technology called Second Life. One can think of SL as a "video game" where people can shoot and kill each other but actually it belonged to a genre of products called Massively Multiuser Role Playing Games (MMORPG) where humans could log in, assume the look of avatars and interact with each other in many ways. I was never really a game enthusiast but I joined Second Life because it offered one amazing feature that no other MMORPG offered, namely the ability to construct your own world, using in-game world building tools.
IBM, where I was working at that time, was also quite interested in the possibilities offered by Second Life and had built a James Bond / Dr No themed presence on this platform. I was perhaps the only IBM employee outside the US / UK who was in any way involved with this technology and in a moment of madness, I too, in my personal capacity -- in my Calcutta Cyclone avatar -- purchased a piece of virtual land, Mayapur -- the world of illusions, and built, of all things a Kali Temple, that still exists today. As in any real world temple, I had put out a donation box and I was pleasantly surprised when some 'visitor's actually dropped in some pranami into the box giving me a small stash of Linden Dollars. In addition, as a land owner, I was also getting a monthly stipend of Linden Dollars which kept accumulating in my online wallet.
The Second Life craze peaked around 2009 and then quietly faded away as IBM and other companies lost interest but deep in my heart, I had fallen in love with this platform and the Kali Temple that I had built and I decided to keep my account alive even though it cost me US$ 60 per year. As I would realise later on this was perhaps the best economic decision that I had ever taken.
I left IBM in 2008 and moved to IIT Kharagpur in the background something else was brewing. Sometime in 2009, an anonymous genius who identified himself as Satoshi Nakamoto created an amazing mechanism that resulted in the creation of an internet based entity called the Blockchain. This allowed the creation and storage of a token called Bitcoin.. Thousands of people have written millions of words to explain what is a Bitcoin so I will not repeat the same here. All that I will say is that :
(a) just as the world wide web was an application of internet technology that allowed the storage and transfer information in secure and efficient manner, the blockchain was an application of internet technology that allowed the storage and transfer of value in an efficient manner.
(b) the sweat equity of running the blockchain to ensure the legitimacy of the transfer of value, was folded back into the value that was being stored and transferred. It was as if the employees of a bank were being paid in shares of the bank itself. Establishing the equivalence of the asset under management with the payment or reward being made to manage the the asset was such a breakthrough concept that it should have won Satoshi Nakamoto the Nobel Prize in Economics!
This blinding revelation -- or should I say, epiphany -- occurred to me sometime in 2013 and I decided to explore Bitcoins further, not from the point of view of investment but from the sheer and palpable excitement of being onto to something very big and unique. I tried setting up a Bitcoin mining node and soon realised that I would need a fairly big computer that I would have to keep running for a long time.
So let me tell you what I did ..
Mining Bitcoins is a complicated process and I decided to stay away from it. Instead my focus was on acquiring some Bitcoins, but even if you want to acquire you need a place to store it. You need a wallet.
A wallet is a piece of software that is identified with a long string of numbers. This software can be located on your desktop or laptop machine ( like having a safe built into the wall of your house to store gold, cash ) or you can get an online wallet hosted by vendor ( like having an demat account with a depository or a cash account with a bank )
I opened an account with Blockchain.info and created my wallet with this identifier 1AoD4Ax1xHtwPCa99GbiQo86Bya77Hu8Bo The next challenge is to fill the wallet with some Bitcoins. But where do you get Bitcoins ? You can join a Bitcoin mining consortium, offer your internet connected machine for running the "mining" program and get a tiny share of a Bitcoin if and when your consortium gets a Bitcoin.
Or you can search Google for websites where you can get free Bitcoins. I visited Bitvisitor and entered my wallet identifier (given above ) and pressed submit. This leads through a series of websites, each requiring me to spend five minutes, at the end of which a tiny fraction of a Bitcoin was credited to my wallet. This was good but far too slow. After spending hours, I just had less than a thousandth of a Bitcoin !
Clearly something faster was required !
Then I remembered Second Life and the stash of Linden Dollars that I had accumulated as my avatar called Calcutta Cyclone. Now I would have to retrieve my Linden Dollars and convert them to Bitcoin. This is possible through an account in the Virtual World Exchange.
So I entered Second Life with my Calcutta Cyclone avatar, located a Virtual World Exchange terminal and transfered my Linden Dollars to my Virtual World Exchange account. Next I logged into Virtual World Exchange -- which is nothing but a normal commodity or currency exchange -- converted my Linden Dollars to Bitcoins at the current rate of exchange ( around SLL 36,000 = 1 BTC). The last step was to transfer the Bitcoins from my Virtual World Exchange to my Bitcoin wallet at BlockChain.
This takes time because this transaction must be verified by a large number of Bitcoin servers to confirm that there was no double spend. This process can be accelerated by paying higher fees but I was patient and after a couple of hours, the transfer was formally recognized by the Blockchain server.
So now I had a clean pile of Bitcoins in my wallet. I could either withdraw this money as US Dollars through my Paypal account, which would show up in my Standard Chartered Bank account, or -- and this what I intended to do, I could it to pay for website domain payments.
This was in 2013 when a Bitcoin was still selling for about US$15 and, in hindsight, I should have bought more, but since my focus was less on investments and more on the technology, I really did not push it any further.
Moreover, sitting in India and dealing with Bitcoin was not easy. Governments were realising the immense power and potential of this new concept and were putting in mechanism to block it. Converting game currency to Bitcoins was delegalised as money laundering and the Virtual World Exchange stopped functioning. There were a few big scams and thefts including the famous Mt.Gox robbery. Incidentally, I had opened an account on the Mt. Gox exchange and had undergone the rigorous KYC process and was about to transfer my pile from Blochain.info to Mt. Gox when Mt. Gox went bust. Had I transferred, I would have lost all my coins but perhaps Ma Kali intervened and slowed me down.
Subsequently, and instead, I moved my Bitcoins to an offline paper-wallet that is kept at a very secure location. I can still sell it but as per current laws I will have to pay a very hefty capital gains and other nearly punitive taxes. I have neither the need nor the intention to sell any of these precious coins but if push comes to shove, someday, somewhere I may have to sell it. Till then, they lie safely in storage -- untouched but not forgotten.
But what about my Kali Temple in Second Life? Well it is still there and I still collect my monthly stipend of Linden Dollars. However I can no more convert them to Bitcoin so I am using them to pay my annual Second Life subscriptions which means Ma Kali is living at her temple and it is rent-free.
