My Road to Bitcoin

Early Days

I first encountered Bitcoin in 2013. At the time, my partner Jorge and I were immersed in building a carsharing company in Madrid. We saw Bitcoin as the ideal payment option for our hourly rentals but never got around to integrating it. Even today, in 2025, mainstream businesses still struggle to accept Bitcoin—so you can imagine the challenges we faced in 2013.

Moral Hazard

The 2008 financial crisis hit Spain especially hard. It took us ages to recover compared to other countries. With my background in finance, business, and entrepreneurship—and an interest in Austrian economics—I was deeply frustrated by the root causes: rampant leveraged speculation, real estate bubbles, political corruption, extreme consumerism, and a general lack of intellectual and cultural development—yeah I have a polyhedric mix of Austrian and leftism—Worst of all, Wall Street got bailed out by printing more money. The moral hazard was undeniable. Many, including Satoshi Nakamoto, realized 2008 wasn’t just another economic downturn—it was proof the system was rigged.

Entrepreneurial Process

I believe society must protect and nurture the entrepreneurial process. Some criticize capitalism, but I love how it challenges the status quo. It’s about creation and flourishing, about changing social structures for the better. However, our fiat system incentivizes speculation over genuine production. I hate seeing how easily the current fiat system destroys the entrepreneurial process and, in general, the Human Condition. After 2008, I concluded that the current system is fundamentally broken—an opinion shared by many Bitcoiners.

Around 2013, Bitcoin’s price spiked, and another bear market followed. I didn’t fully grasp the dynamics at the time, and after a while, I got consumed by building Bluemove Carsharing—renting hundreds of cars by the hour to thousands of people is as demanding as it sounds. Bitcoin faded into the background for me then.

Elliptic Curve

In 2016, we sold Bluemove to Europcar, and I spent three year helping them expand into new mobility services—great people, great team, incredible experience. I also renewed my interest in Bitcoin, digging into Programming Bitcoin and Mastering Bitcoin. This time, I was a stronger programmer, so the concepts around PKI, hash functions, and elliptic curves clicked into place. Once you understand discrete math and how Bitcoin’s cryptography works, it’s impossible to dismiss Bitcoin’s significance—or imagine a future where we just forget about it.

Magic Crypto NYC

By 2019, I had left Europcar and wanted to learn more about how Bitcoin really functioned and meet real people more than CryptoTwitter. I booked flights to major Bitcoin events in Amsterdam, London, NYC, Austin, Berlin, Barcelona, and El Salvador, seeking conversations with real Bitcoiners.

I especially recall three events in 2019:

Magic Crypto (NYC): I met people like Matt Corallo and Alex Bosworth. They were brilliant—no hype, no-nonsense. I left convinced Bitcoin would make it.

NYC Consensus: A huge conference dominated by corporate blockchain players—Ethereum, Zcash, and Bitcoin Cash were all front and center. It felt more like a place where big companies sold “blockchain services,” and I noticed very few true Bitcoiners. After asking questions about their tech, I rarely got clear answers. It highlighted how many people attend these events without a solid grasp of the underlying technology. And basically, I become a Bitcoin Maximalist.

Lightning Conference in Berlin: This was a game-changer. Lightning was mostly a collective dream back then, but it was clear to me that internet-native, programmable money would reshape the web from the ground up.

From that point on, I decided to pursue Bitcoin wholeheartedly. It’s more than just technology; it’s a movement that challenges how we view money, finance, and trust. With Bitcoin and Lightning, we’re poised to shake the very foundations of the web—but this is another story.

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