Terry Dehko, a small grocery store owner for thirty years, woke up in 2013 to find his store's bank account empty. His identity had not been stolen. His banking information had not been compromised. How, then, could this happen?

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‎It turned out the federal government had emptied his account using what is called "civil asset forfeiture" — a law that legally allows the government to seize property without evidence of crime. A mere suspicion is enough. Unlike criminal cases, where you are innocent until proven guilty and proof beyond reasonable doubt is required, this law operates on the opposite principle: you are guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. Though no evidence of crime was found, the government offered to return only twenty percent of Terry's money. In civil asset forfeiture, this extortion passes for mercy — a generous deal, compared to more than ninety percent of federal cases where the government wins administratively, overwhelming property owners in a procedural maze.

The internet made the world a global village. Money leveraging the internet should have made freedom universal. Instead, it scaled oppression. We see it in stories like Terry Dehko's. We saw it during the Canadian Freedom Convoy, when banking was weaponized. This is the flaw of fiat money even in a digital age: it is centralized. Cryptocurrency is money built decentralized on the internet. At its heart, crypto is about sovereignty, autonomy, freedom, and trust. I found crypto when I needed something the modern financial system could not give me.

One of the acquaintances I met at the IDP camp (internally displaced camp) called me unexpectedly.

‎"Hello," I answered, quite surprised.

‎"Do you want to go to Italy?" was the response. I could feel the seriousness layered with excitement in his voice.

‎"Of course," was my immediate response. "What's going on?" I added.

Until that moment there had been no greetings, no small talk. Three months earlier, my family and I were in an IDP camp. I had just returned home after two years of surviving on temporary jobs, unable to find steady work. Farming was better than whatever I had been doing, I reasoned. Terrorism had been escalating distant at first, things we watched on national news, until we didn't. The next town, some ten minutes away, was attacked. You could hear gunshots ring in the distance. We were next. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, or never; it was best to assume its imminence. Things began to move. In that moment, we each seemed to know instinctively what our most valuable possessions were: certificates, some clothes, essentials. You could hear the frenzy outside. Mother burst in.

‎"Let's go.... please!" You could hear the terror in her voice.

Into the African night we began walking, the place that carried memories of our whole lives receding into the darkness. I remember wondering where we were going. That walk ended at an IDP camp. The call was from someone I had befriended during the roughly one month we spent there.

‎"What's going on?" I emphasized.

‎It was through illegal means. The only major risk, as I recall, was crossing the sea. A year ago, the mere word "illegal" would have terrified me. But desperation changes the way risk feels. I was at my lowest, or so I thought. In retrospect, I laugh at myself.

The call ended. An SMS came in about a minute later. It felt like an eternity. I dialed the number. The line rang. No answer. I tried again. A man answered — calm, elegant in speech.

‎"I understand your predicament," he said. "Come over, work a few years, set your family up with a little change. You know how the exchange rate is."

Even now, I can still feel what swelled in my chest. It was hope.

‎‎"Hello, I'm calling to inquire if you've received the payment?"

‎"No, it takes about three to five days," he replied. "Don't panic."

This was my first international transaction, sent through MoneyGram. I wondered why this was taking almost a week. Bank transfers generally took minutes; so I had always believed.

With more optimism than certainty — and, admittedly, withholding information — I had convinced my parents to fund the trip.

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‎A group of us crammed behind a truck, each given a scarf to wrap our heads and a stick. The scarf we understood. The stick we couldn't, so we cracked jokes and laughed hard. The smiles didn't last long. Falling off the truck was a death sentence. No one ever stopped to pick you back up. The stick was your only support as the Toyota Hilux trudged at full speed through a sea of sand beneath a sun blazing with the fury of a hen defending her young from a hawk.

The first stop was a desert city I hadn't expected to be busy or loud, full of other trucks carrying other people like me. The next stop was smaller, quieter. We switched cars and passeurs. We waited. We talked. We played soccer. We learned each other's names, stories, and reasons for the journey. It was in one of those long idle conversations that I first heard about cryptocurrency.

‎"I swear!!! these people are dishonest. His parents sent the money."

‎"How sure are you? Maybe it's the bank. Maybe it was delayed," thundered a second voice.

‎‎A member of our group had run out of money. His family swore they had sent payment. Somewhere along the chain it had vanished, or perhaps it had never been sent at all. No one could prove anything. Was it sent? Was it delayed? Or was there foul play? Nothing was verifiable except the consequence: he was left behind, somewhere in the endless sea of sand between smugglers, checkpoints, and rebels. This was tradition.

"Maybe his bank collect the money. You know this our work is very risky. That's why we use Biscoin, I immediately know who lying. I sell something to you, you send me Biscoin, I check. If I not see, you no send. No argument."

The room fell silent. Our passeur was speaking. He rarely did. that may have been the longest string of words any of us had heard from him. When he spoke English it was broken, perhaps because he wasn't fluent, perhaps because he didn't want the emotional connection that communication invites.

Snickers followed. Someone tried to interject. "Wait. Let me finish," he said. He was a stern man. He drew from his cigarette before continuing.

‎"You cannot send me money, you cannot withdraw money, you open no bank, you have no bank this country. Biscoin like universal bank —" he waved his hand at the air — "it like the air. you no go to open bank. Just you and phone in hand. And business".

He was done speaking. He'll refuse to engage in any more dialogue from thence.

That is how cryptocurrency was first described to me: as universal money that was verifiable.

He probably did not understand it deeply himself. In his line of work he had seen it used and grasped only the first principles: it was borderless, trusted, transparent, and seemed to escape the eyes of the law. Though we were bound by common loss, our concerns differed. I was famished, perpetually thirsty, and most importantly I was not a criminal smuggling drugs or people. The only currency that felt global was the dollar, but even that wasn't truly universal. Without a bank account in these countries, you couldn't simply use it. you needed CFA, then dinar. A universal bank you could access with no documents sounded almost fictional.

You could move yourself without a middleman, but the risk was extreme. It'll mean moving with all required cash. Rebels could rob you. Terrorists relieved you of your money if they were merciful enough not to take your life alongside it. Security agents collected it as tax for letting you pass. And when your money was gone, you were finished. So the system worked like this: you paid a middleman upfront in USD through services like MoneyGram. He dealt directly with your passeur, handling transactions in whatever local currencies were necessary for rest houses along the way, food, bribes, protection. The logic was clean. Your only risk was the agreement not being upheld. Arbitrarily, additional money could be demanded at any stop. You paid, or you were left in the middle of nowhere.

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I stood at the port in Tripoli and stared at it. Somewhere beyond was Europe. Then the boat arrived. ‎I hadn't expected a ship, but what came was beyond even my lowly expectations. It was little more than an inflatable raft with an engine attached. At most, it looked capable of carrying twenty people safely. Nearly a hundred of would be forced ontop. People rushed forward clutching whatever they could hold. I did the math. Others were praying, some arguing. I was watching, paralysed, as more people boarded. Some had collapsed on the ground, their spirit already broken. I looked at the boat. This was suicide. If it wasn't explain the family phone numbers written on their clothes. Like the prodigal son in the parable, I turned back. I refused to die this way. But home was across the Sahara, and I had nothing.

"You'll have to wait. I'm drowning in debt. I don't have it, and I can no longer borrow." Those were my father's words through my passeur's satellite phone. The words sent shockwaves through me. I was back at the camp. It was overcrowded, new arrivals, people stranded for months, some gathering money to push forward, others to go back.

‎Work was hard. Construction, whatever you could find. The women drifted toward cleaning or worse. The biggest challenge wasn't the labor, it was the compounding futility. Whatever you earned, you held in cash. You were consistently robbed by men or some affliction. I was tired of running in circles. I might die here if I didn't stop. I remembered Biscoin. A bank.

‎"How do I open Biscoin?" I asked. I still thought of it as a bank.

"Have you also become a smuggler?" my passeur jested.

‎We had grown somewhat friendly. I paid for every benefit I received. He believed being helpful at a price was mercy. Perhaps he had a point. No good thing existed freely in Libya. He was a man of the jungle; the rules differed there.‎

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It was a ramshackle place. The air reeked of alcohol and was thick with smoke. A fairly tall man with murky eyes and a slim frame stared at me from across the room. He spoke Arabic more than English and seemed the only sober person there. everyone else appeared high on something. He was warm and disarmingly familiar; I cautioned myself to hold onto some of my distrust. His surroundings made his world clear enough.

Some salutations were exchanged between him and my passeur, the kind whose exuberance betrayed their familiarity. Then he turned to me

‎"Do you have a wallet?" he asked casually.

‎"No,only a bag," I replied.

‎The entire room must have found this reply amusing. I didn't understand why at the time. They were high, I reasoned. In retrospect I understand perfectly. He was referring to a crypto wallet. Not a physical purse. That embarrassing moment was my initiation into cryptocurrency. It was also when I discovered it wasn't "Biscoin" but Bitcoin. My passeur had a speech impediment — he could not pronounce the letter T.

The shop owner eventually wrote a series of words on paper and handed them to me carefully. He called them my "password." I did not fully understand what those words represented. I could also visit any moment.

‎‎I worked as a housekeeper, carried supplies, anything that paid in dinar, returning whenever my earnings felt worth handing over to the shopkeeper, who said he was buying Bitcoin on my behalf. Two months later, I asked for a phone in exchange for my Bitcoin.

‎"Where's your password?" he asked. ‎I had forgotten there was a password.

‎‎"Without your password, I don't have your Bitcoin."

‎"Can't we reset it?" I protested gently.

‎‎"No. I'm sorry".

‎‎I held my peace. He showed some sympathy, or what looked like it. Perhaps that was just an excuse I gave myself because I was scared. I had seen people killed in this country for far less than an argument. I desperately needed to leave.

I typed into Google: how to reset the password of a Bitcoin wallet? A question that'll pull me deeper into crypto than I had ever gone. ‎I read with rapt attention.

There were two classes of wallets: custodial wallets, where someone else holds your keys, and non-custodial wallets, where you hold them yourself. But before I could understand the difference, I had to understand something more fundamental . Up until this moment I thought crypto wallet functions like a physical wallet. I kept learning;

A crypto wallet does not hold your cryptocurrency. It never did. ‎Unlike a physical wallet that holds your cash, a crypto wallet holds nothing. Your money lives on the blockchain: a public ledger shared across thousands of computers simultaneously, recording every transaction ever made. No single person owns it. No government controls it. It's maintained by the network itself. The blockchain is, in a sense, what my passeur had tried to describe when he called Bitcoin a "universal bank" except no one owns this bank, no government can empty it the way they emptied Terry Dehko's.

Your wallet is simply software that connects you to what the blockchain records as yours. Think of it like a banking app. Your money isn't inside your phone. The app shows you what belongs to you and gives you the tools to move it. Remove the app and your money doesn't disappear; it's still at the bank. The same logic applies to crypto, except instead of a bank, it's the blockchain. And unlike a bank, whose records can be manipulated and whose accounts can be seized without your consent, the blockchain is transparent and controlled by no one. It's the safest "bank" in the world.

Access is governed by two things: your private key and your seed phrase. Your private key is a long string of mathematically unique characters that proves ownership of your funds. It is the only signature the blockchain recognizes. Your seed phrase, typically twelve words, is the human-readable master key that generates everything else. Lose it, and no one, including the wallet provider, can recover your funds. There is no customer service line. There is no "forgot password." The blockchain does not know your name. It knows only your key.

This was what the shopkeeper meant when he said, "Without your password, I don't have your Bitcoin." Not only did he not have my Bitcoin. Nobody did. It was on the blockchain, locked behind a seed phrase I had carelessly forgotten, waiting for an owner who could no longer prove they existed. My months of savings were gone. The very thing that made Bitcoin powerful the —fact that no one could arbitrarily seize or control it — was also what made mistakes permanent. The lesson was learnt: Great ‎Sovereignty demands greater responsibility. I'll had preferred a less painful lesson.

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Owning a phone came by compromise. I was housed, given a phone, and earned in one week what I had earned in two months pushing drugs at night. The loss of my Bitcoin never left me, but I had access now, and I used it.

‎My first real crypto transaction wasn't surreal. I downloaded a wallet. Twelve words appeared — my seed phrase. I wrote them down. I memorized them. I was now being paid in Bitcoin. I copied a long string of characters . It was my wallet address, which I had learned to think of like a bank account number. I sent it to the shopkeeper. A moment later he said, "Sent." I kept refreshing my wallet. Then: 0.00673 BTC appeared. Those digits are so embedded in my memory I use them in every four-digit PIN I create. This was 2018.

‎What was surreal came later, it was my first international transfer. I checked my phone and saw a message from my brother: he had received it. The message was four hours old. I sat with that for a moment. ‎In the past, international transfers had taken days; I had lived through the anxiety of that wait firsthand.

But I had also discovered that even the transfers I thought were instant were not. A bank does not move money in minutes. It advances you money in minutes, crediting your account while actual settlement grinds through intermediaries, currency conversions, regulatory checkpoints, and business-hours constraints that have nothing to do with you. International transfers expose this illusion.

Bitcoin had no illusion to maintain. The blockchain settled the transaction directly, without intermediaries, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Until then, every transfer during my journey had depended on someone else. Suddenly there was no five-day waiting period. No need for forms. No agent collecting his percentage for the privilege of moving my own money. For the first time since the journey began, I owned my money and moved it at will. Bitcoin was indifferent to the fact that I was a young man with no bank account in a country that was not mine. No documents. No verification.

That freedom did something to me. I stayed longer in the underworld than I had planned. I had forgotten why I was there: to go home. Business was good. I was supporting my family. I began smuggling drugs properly. My turning point came after a close brush with death on the Tunisian border. It reminded me of who I was not.

‎I returned home in 2019, three years after I had left, with just under 0.5 Bitcoin. I had been sending money home and the journey back was more expensive and more discreet. There had been a crackdown on the illegal migration routes.

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It's 2021, Bitcoin was everywhere. On every headline. I read posts about how it had changed lives and felt a distant recognition, then pushed it aside. I had not forgotten Bitcoin, I had rejected it, out of bitterness at what I had done to earn it. Then came a crackdown on cryptocurrency transactions in my country, and I was reminded of just how limitless it was. The government could not stop it. I used peer-to-peer trading to sell gradually over three months, careful not to draw attention from the banks. Every trade still fascinated me. Two strangers who would never meet, engaging in commerce. We could have lied to each other. But the blockchain could not lie. We mutually trusted it.

I sold for $24,000. I could not believe it.

‎I paid every debt my family had accumulated. I moved my siblings to private schools. I relocated the family to a safer neighborhood. I placed what remained into treasury bills and living on it's profits. A few years later, that holding would have been worth $50,000. On the nights when thoughts of what I would have had, if I held just a little longer, come to poach my peace — I find sanctuary in the certainty that we will never be in an IDP camp again.

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The money was intoxicating. I started buying random tokens, telling myself one would make me truly rich. It was gambling, I had forgotten what had brought me into crypto in the first place: utility. Bitcoin had carried me across a continent with no documents and no bank account. Now I was buying memecoins: Dogecoin, Apecoin, RACA, Iron Finance, hoping one would make me rich. I managed to consistently buy at the highs. I lost roughly with impressive ease.

That loss changed how I evaluate crypto permanently. A real project, I learned, should not be judged by hype or price alone, but by utility, transparency, and what is actually being built. The difficult part is how rare those qualities become once you enter the endless sea of cryptocurrencies, each trying to seduce you out of your money with promises making you rich.

‎I returned to buying Bitcoin steadily, the way I had in the desert. Now less from a desire to get rich, and more from a deep, quiet desire for freedom. If I lose everything, I will only need a phone and a mobile connection. And that is freedom.

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‎I discovered eCash this month. Someone posted a link in a group I'm in. It was an article, but it was behind a paywall except this time the payment was in crypto, and no registration was required. I replied that it was behind a paywall. No response came. Out of curiosity, I decided to check the unlock fee. I searched: how much is 100 XEC? The answer: $0.0007. I smiled. The cost is definitely hidden; it was the fee. I searched again: what is the XEC transaction fee? The reply: fractions of a cent, ecash is designed for high-speed, low-cost payments. My interest was piqued.

‎I searched my exchange, bybit. The coin wasn't listed. I googled it ecash: a Bitcoin fork. I went to Twitter, read posts, watched a video titled "Money" it's part of an educational series on cryptocurrency. The core claim: money should move as freely as information on the internet, combining decentralized security with instant transactions and extremely low fees.

Hmm, "Instant. Low fees. Global scale". These are strong claims, I thought to myself.

An hour in, I'm now reading about "instant finality," my mind drifted back to Libya. Certain memories resurfaced: a MoneyGram transfer taking almost a week. Bitcoin taking minutes. XEC finalizing a transaction in three seconds.

Why is the supply in the trillions, are they printing endlessly? A short read clarified it. The total is still fixed, like Bitcoin's 21 million coins, simply redenominated. Think of it this way: if Bitcoin is one dollar, eCash is one cent. Ten Bitcoin and 1,000 XEC represent the same total value expressed differently. More cents does not mean more money, the same way 1,000 cents is not more than ten dollars.

‎"How crypto savvy are you?" came a reply from the stranger who had posted the link.

‎I said six out of ten, nervously, who loves appraising himself? . Twelve words arrived in a screenshot, a seed phrase, alongside a wallet on the Play Store, and the words: "Good luck. Explore. You can always message."

‎I was skeptical. No one had ever sent me a seed phrase before. I downloaded the wallet; Cashtab. I imported the seed phrase. I tried to unlock the article. It loaded for about a second. A sound rang. The article opened.

The fluidity. The fees, barely there. I could stack crypto in the wallet, receive payments, convert to a stablecoin and earn interest, all within the same interface. The core idea is straightforward: be cash on the internet. Be better money.

‎I have been in a state of quiet nostalgia, since confrontated by the fact that something serious was being built within all the noise, that someone cared about utility, that the technology was trying to solve money as a problem. I had discovered cryptocurrency again.

I messaged the stranger once more: "Where can I safely buy this coin?"

My Crypto Origin Story: it was not "Biscoin" all along