# My internet money fixation: Psychoanalysis 12/15/2025 I’m confused by my own interest in crypto. I’ve never been into finance, I hold too much in my savings account, I don’t keep up with credit cards, and most crypto trends repulse me or at least elicit skepticism. I never for a moment believed people wanted to “own” their eg. data or presence on the internet, I’ve continuously felt that most of DeFi in practice is circular and zero-sum, I’ve been skeptical that anything but hierarchical, corporate governance could actually deliver useful outcomes, etc. In writing this post, I’ve tried to figure out — mostly for myself — why I still can’t help but want crypto to succeed. My interest in it started when I was in high school, led to a stint at Coinbase, and has returned to the forefront at my "regular" payments job, as stablecoins have taken off both in the world and in my work. It’s never gotten off my mind. --- I loved making videos as a high school freshman. They never got views, but I still wanted to do something with my interest. Eventually, I decided to market my video editing services through a Wordpress website -- and I realized I could build websites for other people too. There wasn’t much of a market for some kid to edit your videos; “web design” soon became my core focus. I tried to find contracts on a website called Elance. It was easy to see all the demand, and to sign up as a freelancer at all, as a minor with barely any economic agency. It felt like I could earn my first income by doing things *entirely* on my computer. I mostly failed to convince people to buy my services, but there were a few exceptions. My first client – a farmer in the Midwest – wanted me to resolve an `Error establishing database connection` issue that his Wordpress site was running into. I didn’t know how to solve it, but my price was low enough that I won the gig anyway. I didn't actually know what I was doing, though, and I failed to deliver. He still paid me a $50 stipend for my time - I didn't know what the word meant at the time and asked him what he meant by it - and the feeling of my first internet paycheck hit like heroin. I could just find people on the internet, (try to) do things on my laptop for them, and get *paid* — with no one in my way. ![[IMG_3885.jpeg|300]] Another web designer wanted to subcontract someone to work specifically on *fonts*. I’d used Google Fonts before, was familiar with some CSS gimmicks (eg. making text look engraved with clever drop shadow), and somehow pitched him well enough (maybe just on cost) to win that gig. I actually did deliver what he wanted, got paid for it - $85 - and we kept in touch to work on a few more! Incredibly powerful moment for me: I could deliver value, and be compensated - effectively, as a dog (minor) on the internet. ![[IMG_3886.jpeg|300]] I even tried to sell services in Dogecoin at one point, just so that someone would pay me — even in internet money that I didn’t have an offramp for — in exchange for my services. ![[IMG_3884.jpeg|300]] This was a time when iPads were vaguely accepted as educational devices - a real arbitrage in hindsight - so, with my iPad in all of my classes, I faked note-taking to write emails, to post on freelance websites, and to try to win business all day in school. I mostly failed, but I was *obsessed* regardless. At that age - 14 - I couldn’t drive yet, my parents wouldn’t let me get a job yet (for fear of losing focus on school), I didn’t have an allowance and I couldn’t just go to (eg.) Walmart and independently buy things, I didn’t have video games, and I also lived in a different (further out) neighborhood than the rest of my class. It was fine (I don’t say these things to complain), but I basically had no agency anywhere other than at school and on the internet. --- There was something incredibly powerful about “money”, in this awkward childhood regime I lived in. It was among the only material levers in the real-world that I could even *theoretically* get my hands on, through the few venues of agency I had access to. Everything else I had reach into was immaterial and made up: academic achievement was a game designed by my babysitters, and no one wanted to give me attention on the internet. Money was both “real”, and obtainable *entirely* through the more “virtual” internet that I had unfettered access to. That I was able to transact at all on the internet, at that age, is a testament to payments online "working" - even back then. I don’t think crypto would have moved the needle on my ability to be an economic actor solely via the internet. I do think being that age, on the internet, obsessed with getting my hands on even a cent of money - because money was the "realest" thing on the internet - imprinted on me in ways that made crypto even more appealing. Around the same time (in ~2013), I took a Coursera class called Startup Engineering, taught by Balaji Srinivasan. Back then, he was just a biotech founder & Stanford professor. His course taught me basic software engineering, and the use of tools like Git, Heroku, AWS, and so on. It also involved setting up a Coinbase account - somewhat esoteric at the time - to help with its capstone project: a Bitcoin-powered Kickstarter for us to fundraise for our final projects. This was the easiest way for Balaji to let hundreds of thousands of students, internationally, build their own internet payments acceptance - and it was my real introduction to Bitcoin. It wasn't really all that edgy or exciting to me at the time, but it wasn't boring either. It was just generically cool and interesting. It made sense - a money that was designed in the wake of the internet rather than prior to it. --- I really liked free things on the internet at the time, too. Specifically, free things that would otherwise cost money: * Free domains (there used to be sketchy websites for this purpose) * Free hosting (both GitHub Pages and subsequently Heroku were really exciting to me - I could put anything up on the internet, running any sort of logic, and they wouldn't charge me) I had a ton of \*.github.io and \*.herokuapp.com apps all over the place, and I felt genuinely powerful for it. It's cliche now as it was back then, but it felt like a form of real estate that I had before I was "supposed" to, as a kid. Also, I didn't have money, and I didn't want to ask for it and justify myself for every incremental thing that I did. --- I think the internet was real to me before the rest of the world was - I was relatively insulated from "the rest of the world" as a kid in the suburbs, "against my will" to an extent, and the internet was a place where I could expand and stretch my legs entirely with my mind. In the Ethereum era, to hear of eg. smart contracts and the ability to permissionlessly deploy financial software felt like an obviously good thing. Like, in contrast to a permissioned system, on which I couldn't build on a random weekend? Of course it makes sense! Why wouldn't we want that? It's not so simple as an adult - there's more reason than ever to reconsider "gatekeepers" and social norms - but I don't think I could ever believe in the "opposite" of Ethereum either. I think what it all is, ultimately, is that I'm very invested in the ***materialization*** of the internet from my time on it as a kid. I get unreasonably excited when, for example, esoteric internet politics translate to and precede real life. I was late to learning how to drive, but I was simultaneously a really early Uber user by the time I had my first internship money, junior year of high school. And that was cool too - I could get around the physical world by clicking things on my phone, again with the internet. I never figured out how to buy myself clothes until I could do so through online stores like JackThreads (at the time). For a very long time, my "real" friends were my internet friends: many of those friendships materialized through hackathons, which I could only attend because they did online travel reimbursements. It's almost a mundane detail of this arc, that I'm also excited by money being "of" the internet, rather than of the world outside it. The place in which I'd felt freest and most agile, like [[Why Wise and Airwallex aren’t worried about stablecoins#^16d5ee|zero gravity]], was becoming realer and realer. Money was and is a thing that makes the abstract “realer”, and less frivolous. Crypto is a thing pulls money from the old world, into the new. The real-real world matters too, and the internet is not an unadulterated good; there's a lot to be concerned about, and I think the fear of people ending up trapped in this virtual world is entirely warranted by the facts. But I do, *still*, think it will net out to be good. It’s given me a lot of the solutions to the problems it introduced, and I touch orders of magnitude more grass now; it's at least been good to me. And I still think it’s not remotely as material, yet, as it’s destined to be.