My first deep dive into Bitcoin was back in 2013. The price had been climbing steeply since 2012, and I started to realise this was more than just a weird experiment by computer geeks.
Back then, it was a real wild west, and the media was filled with stories of fortunes made and lost.
The era of CPU mining was just about over, and GPUs were starting to sell like hot cakes.
I managed to buy four GPUs, and built myself a milk-crate mining rig. It chugged away in the garage all summer, and kept the house warm in the depth of winter as a noisy space heater.
Aside from a little deafness, I had the Bitcoin bug, and wanted to share it.
There weren’t really any easy to read books on the subject back then, so I decided to write my own Bitcoin Survival Guide.
It was as much a way to organise my understanding as it was to help spread adoption, but I sold it online until about 2016,
(It’s a little out of date now, but you can download it here if you are interested)
The Wilderness Years
I kind of lost the plot a little in late 2016, when the block size wars were raging, convinced a “better bitcoin” was going to take the crown.
I pretty much spent all the bitcoin I’d saved when the price reached the previous ATH around $1,000 and started looking at other projects.
A decision I would, with hindsight, deeply regret.
Anyhoo… fast forward to the pandemic era, and I started to take an interest again.
Governments around the world were printing currency with abandon, and paying people to stay at home. I knew this was a recipe for a tsunami of inflation, once the economy opened up again and all that currency started circulating (ie monetary velocity increased).
Bitcoin’s fixed supply of 21,000,000 bitcoin was starting to look like a safe haven, but at the eye watering prices of 2020, I thought I’d already missed the boat (another hindsight moment).
So I gravitated towards Kinesis Money instead, which is gold and silver backed crypto.
The Prodigal Son Returns
It wasn’t until earlier this year, when the regulatory mist started to clear, I started seriously focussing on Bitcoin again.
I literally spent well over two months deep diving into it, studying everything I could, including Austrian Economics, Game Theory, the history of money, inflation, capitalism and socialism.
And it changed me. I took the “Orange Pill”, and woke up from the Matrix.
So much so, I decided the time was right to make Bitcoin a part of my business again.
Problem was, my original BitPay account had been deactivated for lack of use, and they wanted me to jump through all sorts of hoops to reactivate it.
So I decided to look at alternatives, and discovered BTCPay Server.
BTCPay Server… FTW!
BTCPay Server is a free and open-source cryptocurrency payment processor which allows you to receive payments in Bitcoin (on-chain and via the Lightning Network) and altcoins directly, with no fees, transaction cost or a middleman.
In other words, you can effectively become your own BitPay!
You can use it as an invoicing system, crowdfunding platform, Physical Point of Sale (PoS) or eCommerce payment processor, and more.
You can even use it to securely accept tips/donations… like this Buy Me A Coffee page.
So I decided to write a BTCPay server plugin for aMember.
As with all my payment plugins, it’s open-source and totally free.
With it, you can securely accept payments in Bitcoin (or altcoins), and have aMember manage the access/membership renewals for you.
In other words, it combines the best membership software with the best Bitcoin payment solution.
If you want to see it in action, why not purchase one of my other aMember plugins here. 🙂
