In around 2009, I was invited to join the Rolls Royce of bit torrent pirated music sites.  It was called what.cd.  Very under the radar, but they were sticklers for only top quality uploads.  Lots of rules, etc or they would reject your upload if it wasn't precisely by their rules.  You got 'tokens' to download by uploading something that wasn't already there.  I had lots of obscure stuff, so I did pretty well.

Around 2011, I wanted to gift my best friend at the time an invitation to this site.  I didn't want to spend my tokens on it; I wanted to just buy it for him.  They didn't allow that.

As it turned out, in order to do this, I had to purchase $40 worth of Bitcoin to gift him this.  I didn't really understand it all and it seemed shady AF, but I did it.  That would be worth approximately $37.5 million today if I had just bought it and kept it.

I am quintessential Gen X, BTW. Knew Billy Idol’s first band and had read Douglas Coupland’s book before Nielsen had ever heard the phrase.