I'm surprised to find myself having mixed feelings about the Bitcoin ETF. I should be really happy, but, for some reason, a part of me is really sad. I wonder if anyone else feels this way.

When I first got into Bitcoin in 2012, it was like I and everyone I talked to about it were in a secret club. We knew something that few others did. Something controversial, something "naughty" even. The fact that few others understood bound us together. And the fact that they would eventually, one day, understand that we were right all along was, admittedly, exhilirating.

Today, a purely digital, decentralized, and permissionless store of value is not only understood by loyalists of the old system, it is embraced and *profitable* to them as well. Something that you sounded *crazy* for believing in just a few years ago is now a "mainstream" asset your dad can hold in his retirement account. On every dimension, today we can say we won, and we won unambiguously.

I should be really happy, but, for some reason, a part of me is really sad. Yes, we completed our mission, but our mission was the thing that bound so many of us together. The email lists and meetups are now officially replaced by conferences and webinars. And the sweatpants and flipflops have been replaced by suits and ties.

In 2012, I was able to mine 24 Bitcoin on free campus electricity using two strong GPUs. And for the one trip I took in college, I went to Japan to visit Mark Karpeles, the founder and CEO of crypto exchange Mt. Gox. The same exchange where I bought my first Bitcoin by taking a wad of cash to a CVS to send a Moneygram... Back then, so few people were interested in crypto that Mark was happy to meet with us off of a cold Twitter DM, and he was super generous with his time. I remember we chatted for over an hour. We discussed how he wrote the matching engine in PHP, and I still keep the picture we took on my desk.

Today, I'm told electricity on campus is metered specifically to prevent kids from mining, and you'll need much more than 2 GPUs to get anywhere. Meanwhile, crypto companies are publicly-traded places that Harvard MBA's want to work at (no offense, it's just a different vibe!).

Yes, there is always more to do. Our work is never done. But, as we get closer and closer to Bitcoin replacing traditional stores of value, I'm left with a longing for the good old days. The days when our world was small, and when we were still "weird." Today, with the ETF announcement, those days are officially behind us. It makes me sad, but I'll always be thankful for the good times we had.