Every Chapter Leads Somewhere
02/18/2026
I remember sitting at my kitchen table in the summer of 2016, watching sixty million dollars drain out of a smart contract in real time, and thinking that honestly this whole thing might just be over.
The DAO was supposed to be the future of everything. The first decentralized autonomous organization, a community-run investment fund built entirely on Ethereum, the kind of project that made you feel like you were part of something genuinely new (and I don’t use that word lightly). People had been giddy about it for months, myself included. And then a bug in the code let someone siphon off a third of the funds while the rest of us just sat there refreshing Etherscan and hoping the next block would somehow fix it.
It didn’t. But here’s the thing nobody talks about enough: almost everyone I know who stuck around after that summer went on to do something pretty incredible.
I should back up. My first Bitcoin purchase was in 2013 for about ninety bucks. It required a trip to Bank of America for a money order that I then mailed off to an exchange called Bitfloor (the kind of thing that sounds like a fever dream now but felt perfectly reasonable at the time). Something about it just clicked, and from that point forward I was all in. When Ethereum showed up a couple years later I got in, and that’s what pulled me straight into The DAO, because when you’re watching an entirely new financial system get assembled in real time you don’t exactly sit on the sidelines.
Nearly ten years later, that story still isn’t over.
The unclaimed ETH from The DAO hack is now being used to create a massive security fund for Ethereum. The wreckage became infrastructure. I think about that a lot, honestly, because it mirrors something I’ve watched play out in this space over and over again: nothing is wasted if you’re paying attention.
After The DAO I kept showing up. I watched DeFi summer happen from the sidelines, then jumped in headfirst. I bought a Moonbird around 16 ETH. And somewhere in there I started writing about all of it. What began as daily updates for the PROOF community turned into one of those things I couldn’t put down, and before I knew it I was publishing every single day for over five months straight, covering everything from ecosystem recaps to on-chain analysis to whatever random thought crossed my mind about nesting mechanics or the future of digital ownership.
The pretty wild thing about writing that much is you stop documenting the space and start documenting yourself. Bear markets made me terse and careful. Bull runs made me sentimental and grateful (as you can probably tell). And every single time the markets dipped, the same pattern played out in the broader community.
Every cycle, people panic. Every cycle, someone declares it dead. And every cycle, the people who were here before just keep building. To be honest, that pattern is pretty much the entire thesis of my thirteen years doing this.
I burned out eventually (honestly I’m surprised it took as long as it did), stepped away for a stretch, and when I came back the whole world had shifted underneath me. AI wasn’t a buzzword anymore, it was a tool I was using every day to build apps with my son and plan lessons for my students and, yeah, keep writing. Crypto and AI stopped being separate conversations entirely.
AI agents with their own crypto wallets, transacting autonomously on the blockchain. This is pretty much the kind of thing The DAO was reaching for back in 2016, except now it actually works (or at least it’s a whole lot closer to working).
So now I write a newsletter called Ghost Notes, and I write about pretty much everything. Crypto, AI, being a dad, gaming, whatever feels honest that week. If you had told me back when I was mailing off that money order that all of this would eventually lead to a newsletter where I’m writing about Coinbase AI wallets and my son’s basketball games in the same breath, I would not have believed you. But at the end of the day, I think that’s kind of the whole point. You don’t get to skip the chapters. Every bear market you survive, every project that blows up in your face, every stretch where you write until you can’t anymore, it all adds up to something you never could have planned. I’m pretty grateful I stuck around long enough to figure that out.
That’s it for today - I hope you have a great day!
BFG