I first heard about Bitcoin in 2015, when a friend told me he was mining it. Out of curiosity, I spent some time reading about it, but that was as far as it went. I didn’t buy any, I didn’t follow the market, and I certainly didn’t imagine it would ever become relevant to my life.

The first time Bitcoin really caught my attention was in 2021, when it climbed to around $70,000 for the first time. Suddenly, crypto seemed to be everywhere. News outlets were covering it, social media was talking about it, and everyone appeared to have an opinion.

Even then, if someone had told me that Bitcoin, stablecoins, and blockchain technology would eventually become part of my daily learning process, I probably would have laughed.

My world revolved around products, customers, websites, content, and orders — not trading charts or market strategies.

For a long time, my view of crypto was probably similar to that of many other people. It felt complicated, risky, and difficult to understand. I was curious, but not curious enough to jump in.

What eventually pulled me closer wasn’t investing.

It was business.

As I started building an international e-commerce brand, I found myself dealing with things I had never paid much attention to before: payment systems, exchange rates, transfer fees, settlement times, and the countless small frictions involved in moving money across borders.

I still remember noticing a Bitcoin payment option while setting up my LaceMoods website. At the time, I thought it was interesting, but I didn’t think much about it. Who was actually paying for products with Bitcoin? Why would a platform even bother offering that option?

The question stayed in the back of my mind.

Then came the moment that changed things.

When I was registering an Etsy store, I needed to complete a verification process that cost a little over twenty dollars. The fee itself wasn’t a problem. What surprised me was the transfer cost.

By the time everything was processed, I had paid more than $35 in fees just to send that payment.

I remember staring at the numbers and laughing.

Paying more in fees than the verification itself felt absurd.

It wasn’t a life-changing sum, but it forced me to ask a question I had never seriously considered before: in a world where information travels across the globe instantly, why is moving money still so expensive?

That moment didn’t turn me into a crypto believer overnight.

But it made me pay attention.

It was around that time that I started learning about stablecoins.

Why were so many entrepreneurs talking about USDT and USDC? Why were stablecoins becoming part of conversations about payments and international business?

I didn’t have the answers.

So I started reading.

I signed up for exchanges, downloaded wallets, and spent a lot of time confused. The first time I saw a seed phrase, I had no idea what I was looking at. I couldn’t tell the difference between BTC, ETH, and SOL. Most crypto terms sounded like a foreign language, and I often found myself searching the same concept multiple times before it finally started to make sense.

But as I kept going, I realized the most interesting part of crypto wasn’t the price charts or the overnight success stories.

It was the problems crypto was trying to solve.

How money moves.

How global payments could become more efficient.

How value could travel across the internet as easily as information does today.

Those questions felt surprisingly relevant to someone running an online business.

Over time, I began following crypto news more closely — regulations, stablecoin adoption, exchange competition, and eventually the growing overlap between AI and Web3.

What I’ve come to understand is that crypto is about much more than speculation.

At its core, it feels like a new kind of infrastructure — an ongoing experiment in how value might move through the internet in the future.

Many things that feel ordinary today once seemed strange and unnecessary.

Perhaps some of the ideas we dismiss today will eventually become part of everyday life as well.

What fascinates me most right now is how often AI and crypto appear in the same conversation.

Maybe a few years from now, we’ll look back and realize these technologies had already quietly blended into daily life — and we stopped calling them “AI” or “crypto” altogether.

They’ll simply become part of how the world works.