2018: It was a crazy adventure

Year 2018 is now over. It was a wild ride, to say the least. Here's a quick summary of my most memorable events.

?? I had a privilege to discuss with people from very diverse backgrounds while growing our global community to 65k people. Learnt about everyday life in various countries where I haven't been yet.

?? I talked an Indian-born man out of committing a suicide over gambling debts. That was an intense conversation.

?? I learned about government-sponsored drug smuggling operations from a person who had witnessed that from the front lines.

?? We won the global blockchain competition in Singapore in March.

?? We learned about global money-laundering practices when a person representing owner of multiple shipping companies in Panama wanted to invest cash (bank notes) into our token. We naturally refused.

????? I was invited to keynote at many conferences about AI and Blockchains. I enjoy speaking, especially about topics that shake people's worldviews.

????♂? Hackers hit us seven times this year: We paid a ransom to one black hat hacker, and rewards to 2 white hats. Luckily nothing was lost beyond those payments.

? Because of this, I learned to secure my digital life much better - encryption, 2FA, hardware security and insanely long passwords are a daily habit now.

?? I got to travel around the world once, plus many shorter trips around Europe. I visited Philippines and Malta for the first time in my life. Visited Finland more often than before because my oldest son lives there now.

???♂? I learned that 30% of Russian men do their KYC selfie shirtless (I counted twice, because it felt too crazy). I wonder if the shirtless pictures of Putin riding a horse have had an effect.

?? I asked a number of specific questions and future predictions from aliens living in other dimensions of the multiverse via a human channeler. Why? Because being open-minded includes testing if such claimed powers do exist. I am not convinced yet, but will report back if the future predictions turn out to be right.

?? Lobbied for a better cryptocurrency taxation for Finland. I was invited to write an expert opinion to the Parlament's Committee for the Future. Met with the tax administration on this topic too.

?? A random sample of my expert-level learnings: I learned that the total market value of a limited-supply cryptocurrency increases on average 4x the money that comes in to the ecosystem, but can increase up to 100x during periods of hyper growth. The market value also decreases as fast when the money escapes, creating a lot of volatility in the process. That's why algorithmic stablecoins are extremely hard to make, but will be super useful when successful.

?? The most important learning: I learned in theory and practice that already relatively simple AIs leveraging blockchains can create algorithmic incentives to induce a large scale change in human behavior.

This probably means that the era of liberal democracy will soon be over. Why? Because manipulating people's behavior digitally has become way too easy, and is already exploited by all the major corporations with large communities, as well as politically motivated oligarchs, dictators and other powerful actors.

But the same powers can be used for good too. My main life goal going forward is to leverage my skills in this space to enable a social change for a better future. I hope to be able to make at least a small contribution in this field.

Thank you for being a friend and sharing these adventures with me. I am not sure if I want as much craziness to the year 2019, but the adventures will surely continue.

Happy new year!