Pizza Money

My life is pretty great. My husband and I both teach in a very challenged school district and enjoy making a difference in the lives of our students. We drive nice vehicles; our home in San Francisco is paid for; we have a vacation home in Cocoa Beach; and we don’t have to worry about the size of our paychecks. When I’m asked how we can afford all this on a teacher’s salary, my standard answer is “I made a lucky investment in college.”

While this is technically true, the whole truth is so much more than most people would ever believe. Back when I was trying to figure out the purpose of “if-than” statements on a computer that booted up with DOS, my roommate was inventing Bitcoin. Yes, I was there at the beginning.

Sasha and I were assigned to room together our freshman year, and ended up remaining roommates throughout college. I majored in Elementary Education and Sasha majored in the newly created Computer Science program. Senior year was when we took everything we had learned, and somehow proved we were good enough to graduate. For me, that meant working as a student teacher in a nearby elementary school. Sasha, on the other hand, had to participate in a group project to determine a problem, then write a computer program to fix that problem.

In the late 90’s, female students were generally expected to live on campus. Due to a record number of students the year before, upper classmen could apply for an exemption for this rule, which we did, then rented an apartment in a quiet neighborhood. Because of the extra space, Sasha’s group usually met at our place when they needed to discuss their project. The problem they decided to solve was to create a new type of money that was not regulated by a government. I’ll be honest. I really didn’t understand most of what they were talking about. Something about chains of code in a block of wiring .... or something close to that. Group members Eddie and Laura were tasked with creating the currency, while Sasha and Liam had to find a way to keep it secure.

During the testing process, the group convinced several of us to each give them $10 that they could trade for the new digital money they called bitmoneroj. This would later be revised to Bitcoin. They decided to keep the terms simple for those of us who still believed floppy disks were going to remain the best way to save information. The Bitcoin was to be secured in a digital wallet.

The project took nearly the full term to complete, but in the end, Professor Satoshi Nakamoto was impressed with their ideas. Those of us who gave them our pizza money initially regretted not having anything tangible to show for it. A few years later, Bitcoin became something that people around the world would talk about. Eddie, Laura, Sasha, & Liam did not want to take public credit for their new creation. They felt it was more important to be well known for their accomplishments in the professional world, than for an accidental creation during a school project.

Today, I still visit Sasha when we vacation in Florida. She got her dream job in a high security section of NASA programming. She tells me her former teammates also enjoy the respect of the computer world in their various sectors of employment. Even now, they don’t talk about their part in the creation of the world’s first successful cryptocurrency. That ten dollars I gave them turned into more than thirteen million dollars, and it is still growing.

The idea behind Bitcoin is so complex that I get a headache every time I try to figure it out, yet I have made a fortune by simply supporting my friend and roommate. The creation of Bitcoin really was a class project, yet I know you won’t believe it. This is why I will continue to tell people that I just made a lucky investment. But now you know that is only part of the story.