***
David Smooke founded HackerNoon on the back of Art Map Inc., which he started in February 2015.
2015 … 7 full years since Satoshi Nakamoto had published Bitcoin's White paper.
Bitcoin was alive and well, and 1 bitcoin was an entire $216.87.
I was a high school senior at that time. With no smartphone, though I had a Facebook account.
My world was Physics by Roger Muncaster and Pure Mathematics by J.K. Backhouse.
Boys boarding school, so I didn't care about my looks or my wallet. Except during Picnic (Like Prom but more of a date outside school).
It was a simple life. It is gone now.
I wonder if Mr. Smooke was thinking about Bitcoin then? Being smack in the tech publishing world as he was?
To dig out this information, I have to get the first Bitcoin articles ever published on HackerNoon.
Alas, I have to dig through all 5431 Bitcoin stories !
If you're reading this, that makes it 5432.
I dare you to scroll through them all by hand. I tried back in July. It was a great experience!
However, I was soon cooking up better ways to navigate these Bitcoin stories. Bitcoin stories are too important to leave to random internet search.
They need better infrastructure. An AI dedicated to them even.
Story number 1 should have the added tag #bitcoinstory1.
And so on.
Or a way to search by date.
MM/DD/YY (I'm catering to Americans. HackerNoon's native audience. Otherwise DD/MM/YY).
Imagine if I had to scroll through Bitcoin's 800,000+ blocks by hand.
It would be, … well, difficult.
Oh well, “let's scroll”, I said.
***
Scrolling…
Hold that thought.
I think I found a hack.
Google prompt : Bitcoin Artmap inc.
And what do you know, I was thrown back to this HackerNoon article of 2018.
It certainly has to be one of the earliest articles.
Because it is on Medium!
Brief side story >>
HackerNoon started out on Medium then David moved it to its own piece of land. Medium was getting prickly about its rent.
I'm glad too. Because Medium, it turns out, wanted to own HackerNoon Writers’ work. Not the other way round.
(Monetization on here would be nice though. It's dry you guys).
While Medium have a big platform and a big voice and so on, I'd prefer to know that my IP was mine and I could move it as I see fit.
(Though I'm not moving it much as yet. HackerNoon pretty good.
You got some ideas where I could move it? Tell Me!).
End of side story.
If you read the article shared, you'll see the touch of a master.
Someone who understands the dance needed between Bitcoin purism and traditional online media business. Enough to serve as many palates as there are human reader-ships. Sailing the seas of the written word all over the globe.
Where there's Smooke, there really is fire.
Hang on a second…
Hello?
Yes?
Did you just say there's a Bitcoin Page on HackerNoon that tracks HackerNoon articles like Bitcoin's Price?
I'll be damned.
https://hackernoon.com/coins/BTC?range=month&embedable=true
It only goes back 1 year 😭.
I'm still looking for the Genesis HackerNoon article.
I need that article.
End of scrolling
***
It was a time travelling experience like no other that July day.
I scrolled for well over 42 minutes, and caught glimpses of Bitcoin articles across 8 years.
I saw articles move from having colorful cover images to having the HackerNoon's iconic green web.
Just as I had made it to 2017, alas, my time was running short and I had to go to work.
I stopped at this article
https://hackernoon.com/demons-in-digital-gold-87354fb9300
by Bruce Kleinman.
What are the demons in digital gold?
Well, the article has 1455 reads, so it must be good.
Bummer. No demons were found in the story. Though his idea of these demons is interesting.
In other news,
Renown Bitcoin Author and Writer Knut Svanholm used to write on HackerNoon.
Saw his name on many great 2018 posts. Like this one.
Wow.
And Nopara73 too, who created a Bitcoin-only wallet called Wasabi Wallet (which was too good it was forced to shut down.
Oops.
That was before the Trump administration though).
***
James Altucher also wrote about Bitcoin on HackerNoon back in 2018.
https://hackernoon.com/james-altuchers-bitcoin-faq-38edc8f58037?embedable=true
Who is he?
I used to see him around the web. He is an early-type finance guru who would do newsletters as cool PDFs packed with nice looking data and stats.
I read one of his PDFs in my school days.
These days, YouTube is the game.
YouTube shorts.
Alex Hormozi.
Wonder if I can really grind for 10 years on one thing.
***
UPDATE : I hired a dev to build a website that searches HackerNoon Bitcoin Articles by DD/MM/YY. No more scrolling until your phone freezes.
Hurray!
Here it is:
https://hackernoonindex.netlify.app/?dCursor=20
If you find that Genesis Bitcoin article, you can comment it below because I still can't seem to find it. Older articles are returning 404 and did HackerNoon have people writing about Bitcoin in 1970?
Just before the Nixon shock?? No way!
If you would like to volunteer developer hours, especially if you're a Hackernoon contributing writer of one of these Bitcoin articles, do consider reaching out.
Adios Muchachos.