Hello everybody, I'm very excited as my steemit account got approved last night. This is my first post where I'll introduce myself and what I'm doing with my life.
Let me start of by explaining my name, Yoshi Livo. When I started my adventure in the unknown, about 6 years ago, I was working as an external assistant auditor for corporations like Mc Donalds. After the financial crises of 2008 I was investigating about the history of money. Money had always intregued me and I never quite understood it, so I was watching youtube movies of Max Keiser, BrotherJohnF and Mike Maloney (and others) to learn more about our financial system. These people, Max mostly, where pointing me toward Bitcoin and to cut it short I bought my first bitcoins under 10 euro each late 2012, early 2013. After the bitcoinboom of 2013 I've sended out an email to my Dutch bank, Rabobank, asking them if they would allow me to deposit Bitcoins in their account, because I had scruples with using Euro and I felt like a terrorist by profiting from monetairy apartheid. In return for my golden tip, they descided to close all my accounts, this made me into a kind of radical activist. I was determined to prove their moneysystem sucks goatballs and that human beings deserve better.
Living in the Netherlands without a bank account is kind of undoable. I started receiving threats about that I had to pay my bills, but when I tried to explain that I was unable to pay by bank it didn't take long for me to understand that this David vs. Goliath story would end different then the one from the history books. By that time, 2015, the Bitcoin infrastructure was not as advance as today and making payments with crypto without the other party knowing where the money came from was not as simple as today. Today, you can tell businesses like http://www.bitbill.nl/betalen.html?coin=EFL to fullfill any kind of payment for you without the need of any co-operation from the other party, but back then the court judge wasn't really impressed with my printed version of the blockchain that proved I had sufficient bitcoins to pay.
I started to live in communities, activist communities, from left wing to right wing, it didn't really matter to me, because I don't believe in those boxes anyway. I like to have an open mind on every subject without any prejudice.
This brought me to a student protest in Amsterdam early 2015, where I lived with people that where protesting against speculation. Can you imagine I'd managed to win their trust enough for me to present Bitcoin to them one day?
https://bitcoinembassy.nl/bitcoin-embassy-supports-the-occupation-of-the-maagdenhuis-in-amsterdam/
This is where I first came in contact with media, rather negative contact I would say, because after I explained why I didn't see the need to finish my financial study, because of the massive change that Bitcoin was going to bring to our world, they only selectively quoted me by mentioning only uneducated professional activists where protesting there, and that the original group of students was long gone. They didn't mention a word about me starting the New University Of Values and how I believed that not all values can be quantified. They needed a name from me, and that's when I started thinking about how I should be called.
I'm not sure if #YOLO rings a bell to anybode here, but when I first heard about You Only Live Once I felt as if that motto had a lot of shortcomings. That's why I made up #YCLO which stand for Your Children Live On. During my first media interview I told them my name was Captain #YCLO, many students had names like that, so it fit well in the group.
After the police beat down the student protest I was searching the internet for places with direct democracy. I lived in a direct democracy in this last protest and was intrigued by how it works. That's how I found out about http://www.liberland.org
I descided to go and take a look there, so I packed the few belongings I had and moved to Serbia. Right upon my arrival people where planning some sort of action and needed volunteers. What better way to prove to a new group you mean business to let yourself go to prison for the cause? Within 48 hours of my arrival I was standing on Liberland and a few moments later I was dragged of the island by Croatian authorities. I had to spend 10 day's in Osijec prison for illegal border crossing.
Because Captain YCLO wouldn't work for Liberland I had to find another name that would fit me. In Liberland I though of the name Yoshi Livo, that comes from #YCLO, Your Children Live On. When you take the first letters of those words you spell my name. Ofcourse Children is written with a C, but I've alway's liked to play Super Mario games in my youth and Yoshi is the one that Mario and Luigi can get a lift from. He dies before Mario does, giving him some kind of extra life and makes many eggs that I see as my creative ideas. Also, in Europe, we have this Super Mario Draghi, so this Yoshi is going to prove he is a lot better then him. To end my Yoshi explanation, in Japanese Yoshi means happy or best, well so far that is not really true, but I'm working hard on getting there.
So anyway, after I found out that Liberland is not really a place where I could live I thought of my next step. When I came back to the Netherlands to give a speech about my adventures in Liberland (on the very same school that I squatted only half a year back) I started Googling again and found this other new country, called Wonderland. It was kind of a set-up I believe, never ment to be a succes, but inbetween Netherlands and Germany I stayed for many months, explaining people that visited me about Bitcoin. I even made it to national television and into many newspapers, some Dutch, some French, some German.
On top of all these projects and protests I've also connected myself with e-Gulden EFL, but about this cryptoproject I will talk about on another occasion, I just want to let you know I believe it is one of most undervalued cryptoassets out there today and it will only start to sparkle when we break 1 euro per coin and the Dutch population will get it on it's radar. We are traded on a couple of exchanges, bittrex is the largest one https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-EFL but besides all my endeavours I didn't get the message across well enough for a breakthrough. This has caused me to make some decisions on how to keep on going that will for sure once come to light when EFL will be more popular. It's not as if I'm hiding anything from you, but this story is getting quite long already and there needs to be an end to it at some point.
So to cut it short, last year I received my Liberland citizenship. There are about 200 of us Liberlandians at this point in time, but there are over 100.000 others that want to achieve the same status. After Bitcoin broke 5.000 euro each I stopped persuading people to invest in Bitcoin. Although I make a lot of money with it, it makes me quite sad to see that I havn't managed to get more people involved in that early stage. Mostly because I was so angry with everything and everybody and my message wasn't very positive for most people to hear.
For somebody that makes a living from bitcoin, I've only got limited computer knowledge. I see myself as an economist and manage to make profits because I just trade before the rest does and got a little more courage, or less fear to lose. with e-Gulden I try to make crypto political, I like to see myself as a good talker. Last year I made a killing on Ripple, twice, but I really hope that we will not allow banks to persuade us in their system. I hope we build a web of small communities and use different cryptomoney systems for different geographical locations. My end goal is to abolish all money and have a payment systems that relies on trust and reputation. Not just 1 system with a monopoly like today though, but many that do not by any means have to work together with eachother. To end this story, I want to share with you that I might star in a new to be made Dutch documentary about cryptomoney and forward you to a short clip that aired on Dutch channel 1, 5th of may 2017, the day when the Netherlands celebrates it's freedom after the second world war.
https://eenvandaag.avrotros.nl/item/micronaties-de-ultieme-vrijheid/
I hope you enjoyed this text, please do give me feedback. I know in the end it has become quite a long story afterall, I try to make it shorter in the future so it will be easier to digest. This Saturday I'll talk about Liberland and Blockchain in Bratislava, and there are many more places that I hope to be visiting in the future. You can also follow me on youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVuyQ0FAwbqujdwrJXYffPA, find me on facebook https://www.facebook.com/yoshilivo and I keep my own blog on www.sGulden.nl
The main reason why I became a member here is because I want to get in touch with @satoshischool and create a Liberland Satoshi school one day, we'll see how thing develop from here! Also, I want to let you know it took al little more then 2 weeks to get approved and during that time 3 random friends of me have pointed me to STEEMIT, in my opinion this platform is on fire!
Have a good day, and thanks for letting me part of this awesome group of people!