Both? The stress was unimaginable even if it wasn’t for the decade long fallout. There were some really good times but the bad outweighed them.

My dream was to break into the IT field as I really enjoyed infrastructure design and system administration. Bash is my thing and I got damn good at it.

I got hired on as the first employee of a cryptocurrency exchange startup (Technically the CFO was but only because I was working for free before she got hired haha).

Things spiraled quickly. Within months we were the first exchange to list dogecoin and it’s users crashed our website. Scratch that, they actually crashed part of the data center we’re were collocating our equipment at.

We were buying servers in back alleys on Craigslist to throw in the data center as quickly as possible.

Things progressed rapidly and by the end of my time with the company I had a C level title and was literally living my dream.

The stress was tremendous and Im not exaggerating when I say worked from when I woke up until I went to bed.

Then came the end. We were hacked and lost 11,000 Bitcoin ($10 million at the time)

The owner repaid a significant portion immediately and set out a plan to recover the rest.

Over the next two years he siphoned off anything left for himself and fled to China. Leaving me to pick up the prices with the lawyers and authorities.