It was one week before Ethereum DevCon 2, in the summer of 2016, and I needed a visa to China, fast. I made an appointment at the consulate in San Francisco, paying a premium for rush delivery.

I was able to book an AirBnB in the Shanghai Bund neighborhood, walking distance to the Conference venue for only 75 bucks a night, less than a week before I would arrive. Not bad.

The flight was another story. Two days beforehand, I booked my first ever flight to Asia: 2 1/2 hours from SF to Vancouver, 13 hour layover overnight in Vancouver, and then a 12 hour flight from Vancouver to Shanghai. Ouch.

After the long flight, and the short train ride on the fastest commercial train in the world from the airport in Shanghai, that went a max speed over 260MPH, I finally arrived at my AirBnB. I had brought a trolley car shaped tin can of Ghiradelli chocolates from San Francisco for my AirBnB host. He received them amicably and traded me for a pair of slippers that I was supposed to wear while I was in the house during my stay. I was not in Kansas anymore.

During my three days in Shanghai China, I saw presentations up close from Juan Benet on IPFS and the plans for a future token launch (FileCoin), Jarrad Hope on Status.im and their future plans for a WeChat inspired interface that would incorporate the Whisper decentralized messaging protocol, Viktor Tron’s talk about plans for Swarm Decentralized Storage, and Nick Johnson making a proposal for the Ethereum Domain Name System. Three of the most influential talks for me would be Vlad Zamfir on Casper Proof of Stake, Peter Szilagyi on Geth and a demo of running a light client on Android, and of course Vitalik’s overview of Ethereum. Seven years later and I still consider all of these presenters heroes of mine.

So what convinced me, a mid level Android App Engineer at startups in San Francisco, that it was worth calling out of work sick, traveling over 24 hours to spend three days at a technology conference in Shanghai China?

At the time I would have struggled to have put it into words. In fact I did struggle when interviewed for an article in Coindesk.

"The ethereum community is good at envisioning these future applications," developer Cameron Voell said, explaining his own interest. "Maybe in other groups they focus too much on trading and stuff like that."

Reflecting on it now, with 20/20 hindsight, I see that a large part of my motivation was definitely me being on the hunt for profit opportunities. Even at that early stage, Bitcoin was worth 10x more than Ethereum. I figured if ETH achieved the equivalent market cap of bitcoin at some time in the near term future, that would be a 10x gain on an investment. I wanted to be close to evaluate whether I should invest for my own personal gain.

Ethereum’s token would go on to appreciate over 20,000% from its $13 price during that conference (I bought a t-shirt for 2 ETH during the conference, which is worth $3600 at the time of this writing!). It is a safe bet that participating in that historical appreciation still unconsciously influences many in the community to this day.

But this returns us to the question, why did the value go up so much in the first place? Skeptics would say because the ponzi aspect of crypto convinced enough people it would go up in price, so it did. But then, why were all of these brilliant people so dedicated to this vision of a decentralized software stack, so early on?

The answer is that just like how the World Wide Web made it possible to do things that were unimaginable before hand, the possibilities of Ethereum consensus convinced many of the brightest minds of a generation of technologists that there was a better way to design existing internet infrastructure. Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, LinkedIn, and Amazon all operate opaque systems where they are incentivized by their shareholders to maximize their profit, and they have ultimate control over the connective nervous system of humanity, through the internet software we all use. The step from an opaque centralized service like Facebook, to an open source tool, with core logic enforced by the Ethereum Blockchain and Smart Contracts feels like moving from Monarchy to Democracy, not for our nations, but for the connective nerve tissue that combines the mental capacities of everyone on earth into a global consciousness.

These were the thoughts spiraling through my brain as I walked out of the conference hall in Shanghai, eager to get some relief from the mental strain of the fast talking technology presentations. I sat down at the beautiful cafe in the lobby of the Hyatt on the Bund, ordered some green tea, put in my headphones, listening to a relaxing piano version of Where is My Mind by the Pixies, opened up my notebook and started to write. Right at that moment, Vitalik Buterin, exited out of the conference hall, walked over slowly in my direction, and sat down at a table next to me with a Chinese business man. I could just barely hear them talking in Mandarin over the soft piano keys playing in my headphones. Watching this brilliant young mind who brought so many people together at this conference in Shanghai, looking to form connections with the locals made me feel a deep sense of hope for the future. That feeling, though it is often hard to put into words, still motivates me, and I believe many others in the Ethereum community today.