I feel like a life update is in order. I finally managed to break the 8 figure mark on my own. I got released from the slavery contract which is the Iranian passport. I helped my entire family immigrate out of Iran and I created a dozen of income streams for myself. It is almost unbelievable how far I've come. Only 5 years ago, I nearly became homeless while studying abroad in the UK. I had to pay for a degree that cost thirty thousand pounds a year on my own, without the option of taking out loans. I couldn't rely on my family because the Iranian rial had collapsed completely, One British Pound went from 39,000 rials to well over 500,000 rials in my final year and besides this, the US sanctions had made it nearly impossible for my parents to send me money from Iran. I entered an apocalyptic post-Brexit job market and couldn't find a job in the 4 months that my visa allowed me to stay in the UK. My inventions all died in bureaucratic death traps despite having investors and I had to leave the UK, defeated. At the time, I was just a university student with a dream, but I had no idea I was in the middle of the fourth turning of the western civilisation, witnessing collapse from within, feeling powerless in the face of something way bigger than me.

In this article, I want to talk about how I overcame challenges that seemed impossible to overcome and made +10 million dollars by 25. I have divided this article into 4 sections, the first part is a small introduction and background about me, in the second part, I explain how everything I worked so hard for became meaningless, in the 3rd part I explain the path I took that netted me the fortune I made and go into detail about the maths and technicals. and finally, the 4th section is a summary and a philosophical overview of everything.

1. Getting a bachelor's degree as an international student ( Read this if you're applying from a country that feels like a prison, skip if you just care about the crypto part)

2. Inventing something, as an international student.

3. Making your first 10 million dollars and why it might not be enough.

4. My Perspective on crypto, money and the future of finance.

When I first came to the UK, I had nothing but big dreams, I had sacrificed so much and it felt like all my hard work was paying off. In general, going abroad as a male Iranian at the age of 18 is nearly impossible. There are a few hard to achieve prerequisites, These include:

• Academic Merit ( Something other than good grades )

• Exemption from Military Service

• Linguistic skills

• Being able to pay for the degree or overcoming the wealth gap.

In terms of academic merit, I studied. HARD. I wanted to earn the highest possible achievement for a high school student in Iran which was to become an Olympian. To become an Olympian, I even tried to remove sleeping from my schedule by using Uberman cycling ( only napping in 15-minute intervals instead of sleeping ) this allowed me to read and comprehend PhD level books such as Weinberg's Cosmology and Binney's Galactic Dynamics by the age of 17. I had mastered orbital mechanics, quantum mechanics and laser physics all while I was a teenager attending a high school in Tehran. Sounds insane right?

In Iran, the "best and brightest minds" compete in these hyper-competitive competitions known as the Olympiads. About 40 students are given medals each year in various subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemistry,... 40 out of hundreds of thousands of students who compete. I was one of those 40 that won an Olympiad medal. A notable outcome of this system is Maryam Mirzakhani who was the first woman in history to win the Fields medal in mathematics. You'd think that getting a medal would've been enough to secure a spot in any university on the planet right? wrong.

Every male Iranian that turns 18 is required to do 2 years of mandatory military service. Avoiding this is almost impossible so students are forced to finish their degree in Iran and do a project for the army or the terrorist organisation known as IRGC, if this is not possible then they will be forced to do the military service, and trust me, for the sake of your mental sanity, you wouldn't want that. The last thing you want is to end up in some dodgy border post for months while trying to make sure you don't die due to cold weather or rebels attacking your camp. Through some black magic and sleight of hand, I managed to get myself exempted from military service. [I will go into detail about this in my book]

The next step is learning a language. Most students that study for the Olympiads don't comfortably speak a second language because they sink so much of their time into the topic they are competing for that any extracurricular activity becomes impossible. I used to play a lot of video games when I was in elementary school and would write down every word or phrase I didn't know on my hands. That's how I learned English, without ever attending any English class in my entire life. This is how I later learned French and Mandarin. Later in life, I read about the works of George Zipf and created my own framework for learning new languages, hopefully, one day I'll publish my method so others can benefit.

Finally, the biggest challenge. How was I supposed to pay for my degree? My father was a simple physics teacher in a public high school in Tehran, my mother was a retired psychologist. together they made about a 300,000,000 rial a year or about $10,000 a year. Also, this was only in 2014/15. My family's income decreased year after year due to the collapse of the rial. By the time I finished my degree in 2018, my parents were making $3000 a year because each US dollar went from 30,000 rials to about 300,000 rials. a 90% decrease in 3 years.

At First, I tried to apply to Canada because my aunt lived in Vancouver and she could help me settle. I paid a Canadian lawyer to take care of my student visa but she had no idea how Iranian banks worked and this caused my visa to be rejected after a year of waiting. After this, I applied again, this time to the UK universities. I got accepted at all of the universities I applied to. The main ones were the University of Oxford, Edinburgh University, the University of Manchester, Cardiff and Imperial College. I decided to attend the University of Manchester and study Electrical engineering on the mechatronics track. There was however one giant problem. British universities cost significantly more than Canadian universities, besides this, I also had to pay for my accommodation. this meant that I had to prove that I could pay for my university's 19,000 GBP tuition and around 10,000 GBP for accommodation and living expenses. this was so much more than my expenses, had I attended UBC in Vancouver.

Initially, I remember that I even thought of selling a kidney to pay for my degree. I felt like no other option was available, loans were only available to children of government officials or through bribes and connections, and my parents didn't make enough to support me abroad. I remember that one day I went around Tehran, looking for organ for sale ads, and discovered that one kidney was going for 1-2 billion rials. (there are plenty of these in Tehran, look at the image attached ), I also had a small apartment that my grandfather had left for me that would cover half the cost of my degree if I sold it but my parents were against it. In the end, I convinced my parents to allow me to sell the apartment to invest it in a real estate development project that was nearing its completion stage. luckily it paid off just in time to make me about 50 grand so I could apply to the University of Manchester in time. Finally, the grand escape felt near!

I packed my belongings, did my IELTS exam, had my interviews, saw all the people I had to see, went to turkey to get my visa ( no British embassies in Iran) and after a few months of stressful waiting, I finally got my visa. the wait was almost over. I had climbed the only stairs to success in Iran and by that I mean the departure escalator in Tehran's international airport. I flew and arrived in Manchester.

Yet..., It wasn't long after I arrived in Manchester that all my illusions shattered. I went from integrating the age of the universe and calculating the orbit of satellites in MatLab to basic arithmetic equations and elementary logic design. There was nothing new to learn in the first 2 years of my degree. Because of this, I spent that time learning other skills and travelling inside the UK. I also worked on the social skills that I so severely lacked.

By the 2nd year of my university, I had invented a few contraptions. I invented an Exo suit that helped me lose 40 kg of body fat and build a significant amount of muscle mass using a type of electronic muscle stimulation that I had developed. I also invented a glove that acted as a strength tracking device that would guide athletes through their resistance training and dumbbell exercises.

So I had 2 functional MVPs, what were the next steps? All I knew was that I needed either an entrepreneurial visa or a work visa to be able to stay in the UK and bring my startup to life. So I got to work. I contacted a few lawyers about this but all of them were clueless. I tried applying to startup accelerators but most of them required me to either be European/British or have an entrepreneurial visa. To get the visa I needed a fund or to have been verified by a select number of home office approved VCs. and even though I had a functioning MVP, most of these VCs rejected me without EVER even asking what I had invented. Some believed that a single founder can never succeed. some believed a bachelor's degree is not enough. some required me to have proof that my startup is financially viable. It was at that moment that I realized had I even found a cure for cancer, it would have been lost in meaningless jargon and bureaucratic death loops. I knew that I lacked knowledge in some areas and had no business expertise, but I was willing to fail and I was willing to learn. but the privilege to even try was not given to me.

After failing to achieve anything meaningful, I tried looking around my university for answers. In the Electrical engineering department, no one had any idea what I was supposed to do. I was told to consult with the student services centre. there they said that I should get in touch with a side organisation to Manchester Business School known as manchester entrepreneurs and that they might be able to help me. I remember that day that the person behind the desk laughed and told me I shouldn't have my hopes up and that I and other international students are nothing but a cash grab for the university. I ignored this individual's words of wisdom and continued my search. I talked with the head of the Manchester Entrepreneurs and I explained my inventions to him. At first, he was scared when I told him how connecting electricity to muscles is good but after going in-depth about EMS he understood what I had achieved.

A device that would trigger 206 muscle groups using a specific kind of electrical current, which would then cause micro-tears in the muscles. when healed these tears would cause hypertrophy and have the same effect as lifting weights and letting gravity tear them. EMS technology already existed but my invention targeted everything and did this wirelessly. He finally gave me an offer, but it was not what I was looking for. He told me that the university would sponsor me to stay 1 more year in the UK and have all rights to my invention/patent, but I would have to pay for everything else myself. this deal would've been virtually impossible for me at the time considering my situation.

To further elaborate on why this option was virtually impossible for me: A month before this meeting, I had gone to London to attend Google's startup camp. I remember that when I arrived in London I stayed with my 94-year-old aunt. I only had 7 pounds in my bank account from which, I paid 2 pounds for water. my parents couldn't send me any money from Iran and I barely managed to pay my tuition and rent. That day after attending the seminar and not being able to benefit from it in any way, shape or form, I had to walk around 30 km on foot across London to get to the train station and get back to Manchester. This was my financial situation as a student in the UK.

And I wasn't the only one who lived like this, I knew 2 other students (a Chinese Microbiology PhD and a Romanian History Master's) who were part-time escorts just so they could make ends meets, some of my British friends had to work part-time, and a lot of other international students had to do whatever it took to pay for their degrees. people like me that came from a third world country didn't even have the option to take out a loan. Others had the privilege of using inflation to their benefit by spreading the cost of a degree over years, but not us. One could say that this system has been designed to extract money from the students of the poorer countries and put it in the pocket of those who can take out loans. I needed a miracle and a miracle did come. A giant orange, electrically mined middle finger to the financial status quo that had treated me so horribly. That miracle was Bitcoin.

If it weren't for Bitcoin, the UK would probably kick me out as I would not have been a good "cash grab" for them. I discovered Bitcoin around 2016 through one of my friends, he told me how he had collected 4 BTC by mowing lawns and doing garden works back in Norway. At first, I didn't take the idea seriously but when life became difficult and I was trying to survive, I read more about it and became fascinated with it. Keep in mind that as an Iranian, I could not own any stocks or bonds or even a credit card. Bitcoin and hard cash were the only financial instruments that I had access to. It even took me 6 months to open my first bank account after arriving in the UK. All banks rejected me simply because I was Iranian. I had not done anything wrong, I was simply born in the wrong country. For 6 months, I was going from one bank to another to have a simple debit card, Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Barclays, all refused to open me an account. Only after one of the staff at my department personally came to see the manager at a Lloyds branch, was I able to have an account.

I bought my first bitcoin for less than £300. I used to do all sorts of efficient odd jobs that paid the highest per hour and would convert everything to bitcoin. I would donate blood, get £150 and buy bitcoin with it. I would donate sperm and convert it to bitcoin, I would do clinical trials and convert everything to bitcoin. I would buy tickets to concerts and sell them and then convert the profits into bitcoin. And during my final year at university around 17/18, I started selling my bitcoin savings to pay for rent and my tuition. If it wasn't for bitcoin I would not have been able to finish my degree. I would not have survived my final year. That same year an Iranian friend of mine committed suicide because he couldn't pay for his degree and he couldn't go back to Iran because he did not have a military exemption. I don't know to this day if he survived or what happened to him afterwards.

All the while I was barely making my rent and tuition payments, time was passing fast and I was a final year student. Britain was struggling with Brexit. Trump had sanctioned Iran to bits. I was low on cash, my grades had taken a hit under the pressure I was under, Theresa May had changed the law so that International students could only stay in the UK for 3 months after their study was finished instead of 2 years. I remember that during my final year, I applied for so many jobs at all the companies I could think of. I applied to Jaguar Land Rover, Rolls Royce, Google, Unity, weird accounting companies, startups, fintech companies and law firms. I got rejected by all of them. It felt as if my prestigious degree from a world top 20 university, my scholarships, my 3.9 GPA, my inventions and everything I worked so hard for were for nothing. I remember that one day I searched for the word "unfortunately" and started counting the rejection letters. There were more than 1200 of them.

So There I was, graduated but defeated. Even my parents couldn't attend my graduation ceremony because of visa limitations. I couldn't find a job, I couldn't even have a chance to bring my startup to life, and I didn't have any money to pursue a master's degree. I had to go back to Iran, a country that felt like a prison to me and I had done everything in my power to escape it.

For the first few months, I felt like someone who was on drug withdrawal symptoms. A complete failure. Some of my relatives were gossiping behind my back. My friends in Iran were surprised that I had returned. Some believed my grades were probably bad, my uncle spread the word that my degree was fake, and my aunt spread a lie that my medals were fake. there HAD to be a reason as to why I couldn't stay in the UK. little did they know that that year, because of Brexit, even the biggest companies were laying off employees. They didn't know how work visas worked, and that international employees would be wage slaves on bureaucratic razor wires. Even If I managed to get a work visa, I had to work 3 years to get back to point 0, and then 2 more years to get a PR. if the UK government changed the law during this time or if an employer decided to lay off an employee, that person would have a very limited time to find a new job or all their hard work towards a PR would be reset. This legal nuance allowed employers to abuse international students all they wanted. I talked with many alumni of my university, former international students who were now working in various companies. most said that their employers would threaten to revoke their visa or fire them over the smallest inconveniences, raises were rare and the mental state of these people was terrible for the most part. of course, this differed from one industry to another, but junior engineers in general were one of the most easily expendable. With all these things considered I still preferred a wage cage in the UK over going back to Iran. I kept convincing myself that it was only 5 years of possible misery and then I would have some form of basic freedom.

So I was back in Iran. as terrible as it felt at first, I felt relieved. A clean slate and a new beginning. I had a few things on my mind at the time: I wanted to never worry about money ever again. I wanted to invent new things and bring them to market, I wanted to show the world how broken the passport/visa system was and I wanted to escape the Islamic republic for good.

I started applying for tech jobs in Iran. From startups to the biggest tech corporations in Iran, I also applied for companies abroad. As for companies in Iran, the pays were so low that I gave up immediately. I remember an offer I received from a company so I could be their ML engineer and help them design a TF Computer vision model. They wanted to pay me 15 million rials a month (that's $45 a month) for a full-time position that I had to be physically present at their office, I calculated that it would take me 250 years to pay back my degree if I worked at this job :D

I rejected their kind offer so the CEO of the company kindly took to Twitter to write a long thread about "privileged scum" like me who would never work hard to achieve anything. This whole debacle ended up in the news in Iran [ I'll go into more detail about this story in my book]

I didn't give up, I applied to other big companies in Iran such as Cafe Bazaar, but the same problem existed. Slave labour wages. the best offer I got was from Cafe Bazaar at the time, 80 million rials for an ML project management role. I tried to negotiate for a $1000 a month salary, but they took back their offer.

I tried applying for companies abroad, but smaller companies would immediately reject me upon discovering that I am Iranian or not get back to me at all. The only offers/interviews that were somewhat successful were from bigger companies such as Google or Microsoft. I still remember my first Google interview to this day. It was an offer from Google Japan. I remember studying a whole month for it, memorising pointless search algorithms, doing quizzes on hacker rank, all the while ignoring the existential question of why I had a degree, didn't my good grades prove I was capable of this or that I could adapt? the day of the interview came and... power outage. Right, when I had my interview. I remember the question had something to do with ramens. I was sitting behind my laptop, with no internet, trying to not have a mental breakdown, thinking what do ramens have to do with google.

I was angry, I had helped my friends get into Apple and Google, I had helped them take their startups off the ground, and here I was thinking that I would die in a ditch somewhere in Iran. I had so much built-up hatred toward bureaucracy and HR and any gatekeeping system that I gave up on working for any company at that period. I kept asking myself why should another human decide my worth and tell me if I'm good enough or not.

So I got back to trying to bring my startup to life. I found an angel investor in the city of Mashhad. Went to see the guy and after I explained my idea and the companion app that I had designed for it he became very interested. I remember how his eyes lit up and he told me that he would take me to Germany where he "has a Holding and 3 companies with 11000 employees" or something along those lines. We exchanged contact details and he told me he would update me on the details. Everything seemed good until after a while he vanished and I got the news that he was barred from leaving Iran (ممنوع الخروج).

After this, I had a few more attempts at trying to bring my startup to life but all of my attempts failed. I tried contacting angel investors, but even if they were interested they didn't know how to sponsor an Iranian, I tried contacting startup accelerators but to no avail, I tried cold messaging and in-mailing on LinkedIn, I tried Twitter and none of the things I tried paid off. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I had to take another route and that I had to postpone bringing inventions to life until I was in a more stable position.

So I did the most irrational thing humanly possible. If foreign countries want to treat me like a 3rd-degree citizen, and the Islamic republic has turned Iran into a prison for me, then I would create my own country! So came the idea of ILISIUM, a digital country, a borderless safe haven for those who want to escape prison states such as Iran, Syria or North Korea, but don't want to be labelled and treated like 3rd-degree citizens by other countries.

My idea was that there does not exist a country for those who do not want to belong to a country, at least the idea doesn't exist. So I got to work. I designed a website for ilisium.org, coded a social media for it called Pantheon with PHP, and designed the front end with angular. I designed a bank for it called the Bank of Ilisium and wrote the whitepaper for it. Everything was ready to be pitched. So I started looking for the right people. whom would I contact If I wanted to establish a new form of state, a nation of outcasts? I had a few connections from when I was studying in Manchester, son of a hedge fund billionaire, daughter of a prime minister,... through them I got in touch with a few UN reps, international lawyers, legislators and VCs.

Unfortunately, most of the replies I got were very harsh. They ranged from disheartening to straight-up death threats, I got news from one of my friends in silicon valley that certain celebrities had taken interest in my idea, but without me in it. things started to spiral out of my control and at the time I didn't have the means to exert my will. There were many things I lacked. So I had to move on. With each passing day, it became more clear to me that my Iranian passport would close as many doors as it could for me. From not being able to have a credit card, to having to wait years for visa approvals to even having an Apple ID, there was always an asterisk for me in the T&C of every service.

I want to talk about what happened to ILISIUM so much, mainly because I believe much of today's talent is being wasted in countries like Iran, If Stephen Hawking was born in Iran, he would've been executed due to heresy, if Elon Musk were born in Iran, we wouldn't have Tesla now. The world desperately needs a more efficient passport system and a buffer state. But I'm afraid, even after 4 years, it is not still time to completely reveal to the world what ILISIUM could become. I will one day hopefully reveal everything when the time is right or even try to bring it to life.

In parallel to this, I was also doing various machine learning and crypto projects. I decided to start a bitcoin mining farm which was a total failure and I only made a small profit compared to the effort I put in. I tried to run an art gallery NFT project in Tehran called Monolithic Ministry, which also failed because my co-founder was not helping, and later I discovered that she tried to steal the idea ( which she did ) and stick her own brand on everything. During all this time I failed to do a single profitable project with my fellow Iranians. Part of the reason I believe was the economic situation in Iran and the sanctions and part of the reason was the general decay of Iranian society's moral compass due to the death of religion and culture in Iran. after all, in a closed system entropy only increases.

After all of these failed attempts, I felt that the two best remaining options for me were diving headfirst into the rabbit hole of crypto and applying abroad to study for a funded postgraduate degree. So I did both. I started applying and gathered all of my savings and all of the gold that I had saved over the past 20 years to put into my crypto projects, about 20,000 dollars to start with.

I had a few ways in mind that would help me make money with crypto, one was through developing and the other was investing. I knew that I couldn't develop under my own name at the time as I thought if I made too much money it would attract unnecessary attention and I didn't want that. Also during the same time period, GitHub closed all Iranian accounts and to this day people don't believe me when I tell them that GitHub itself deleted my account. after a while, they reactivated Iranian accounts but the contents of these accounts were gone. So publicly developing as an Iranian was an obvious mistake.

So, I came up with a pseudo-anonymous identity and an investing plan.

I won't talk about my web3 identity here but to this day no one has made the connection. I will however talk about my investment plan and some other developments I did.

Since I witnessed the 2017 bull market first-hand, I knew what cryptocurrencies could do. Miracles could happen in a really short amount of time. I also saw that despite the fact that bitcoin was the most proven cryptocurrency with the most well known long-term gains, it wasn't the highest gainer of each market cycle. I saw the rise and fall of bitcoin from 300$ to 20K and back down to 3k. I saw the rise of Ethereum, Neo, Xem, Ripple and Augur and I witnessed their fall, all from the sidelines, in my bitcoin bunker. It felt like witnessing the apocalypse. Nonetheless, I knew the opportunity existed in the crypto market and I also knew that as an Iranian, this was my only option.

I started my research on youtube. Watched documentaries about money, the history of money and the modern fiat system. Subscribed to top educational channels (favourite ones being Into The Cryptoverse by Dr Benjamin Cowen, Numberphile, DataDash, 3 blue 1 brown) started reading books, listened to podcasts and discovered people through forums and social media, I rigorously filled as many gaps I could in my knowledge of blockchains, money and crypto. 1000s of hours of research later, I felt that I understood everything. From the BTC whitepaper, to why it was such a necessary invention to the C++ code running the network, to intricacies in its design and how MEM pools handled transactions, the importance of block size and why the reward halving was such an important driver in BTCs price. I studied the concept of blockchain and understood the miracle of Smart Contracts and what they would be capable of in the near future.

Through my research one interesting discovery was this BitWise SEC report, in it, they talked about how they were identifying market and data manipulation by certain exchanges and how their investment vehicle would solve some of these issues. I dug deeper, behind their flagship ETF, the BitWise 10, there were few less talked about hidden investment vehicles. Microcap ETFs. Also, they had a tool on their site that would visualise their behaviour and returns. Unfortunately, they have removed this section of their site but here's what it roughly looked like.

The charts and the data were amazing, I had made 1000% gains by buying bitcoin, but this data showed me that, had I invested a tad differently, my profit margins would have been astronomically higher. An index of 70 top market cap coins grew 100,000% from the market cycle bottom, nowhere else on the planet, in no other industry, in no other market was such a thing possible.

I calculated that even if I made a tiny portion of this amount, I could make my first million. 1 million was only about 5000% away from 20k. I knew still that this would be risky, firstly the data showed that there were diminishing returns with each cycle as markets were becoming more efficient and secondly I knew that past performance had nothing to do with future success, who knows, governments of the world could've all gone full North Korea and fractured internet to bits. That would be the instant death of crypto. Or maybe a war could break out, a recession, or some other kind of unknown black swan event, but this was a risk I was willing to take.

I knew that the next halving was just around the corner and I knew that this could potentially light up the crypto markets again, I had also studied macroeconomics during my research endeavours and knew about the possibility of inflation that would drive up the asset prices. From bond market yield curve inversions to real estate stagnation in developing markets such as China... the more I read the more I was convinced that bitcoin would rise again, and with it, the rest of the crypto market.

I devised a plan, I looked at the top 100 coins and did some backtesting using a website named Shrimpy, then I tried to make a portfolio that mimicked an ETF. I did some calculations and came up with a 3D risk map of the top 100 coins. The logic behind my decision making was fairly straightforward.

Let's say that bitcoin was going to go from 10k to 100k, if I put all my money on bitcoin my money would be multiplied by 10 ( this is not possible in reality, a time-weighted average value is more reliable but for the sake of hypotheticals I am explaining like this), now let's imagine a second coin like Ethereum, it could go from 200$ to 4k, that's a 20x. now let's imagine a third coin that would do a 50x. My methodology would distribute the portfolio based on equal outcomes. an egalitarian approach so that 20k would be distributed in a way that 10k of bitcoin, 5k of eth 2k of the third coin would all have an equal outcome of 100K, this way I could hit the entirety of the risk/reward spectrum and not lose out on any opportunity cost.

There were some challenges with this way of modelling however, for example, it was very difficult to extrapolate what a coin would do, would Chainlink go from 2 cents to 2$, 20$, 50$ or 1000$ and how much of my portfolio should I allocate to it. After all, there were infinitely possible wrong answers and just one right answer, the goal was to get as close as possible to the correct outcome with data from the past ( eg. how a similar market cap coin behaved ) and data from the present to predict the closest possible outcome.

the second thing was that I wanted to maximise the number of these equal outcome packets. So I used all the knowledge I had in machine learning, data science, MatLab and programming to create a portfolio that would solve this mathematical equation.

The next step was converting my savings into Bitcoin. Remember that Iranians have never had access to services like Visa, MasterCard or PayPal. And I knew that I couldn't use any exchanges because I would have been immediately banned. So I started to look on the black market. And eventually managed to buy a few BTC with my 20K. I then bought a VPS and through many layers of security, I finally opened my Binance account and made my purchases. about 30-40 coins, distributed according to my model. things were starting to look good and I was starting to make money until Murphy's law decided to show up again.

All the markets crashed. A certain virus was running rampant across the globe and had taken its toll on humanity's highly globalised supply chains. It felt horrible, not because I thought I was wrong or that my miserable life savings of 20 thousand dollars had been slashed in half but because initially I had shared my plans with some of my friends and they took a hit because of me. I had a gut feeling that the markets would recover but what if I were wrong? what if I were blinded by hubris? Luckily my analysis was correct. day after day, everything started to balloon, The Fed and other central banks had to stimulate their currencies and so the money printing began. bitcoin went back up to 6K where I had made the majority of my investments, then 7k, 10k, 13k, and suddenly, on the 30th of November 2020, It broke its previous all-time high, and I had increased my portfolio to about 200k everything was going according to plan, my friends and relatives who had listened to my "crazy theories" would call and thank me and explain how ecstatic they were.

At the same time, I decided to investigate newer projects in the crypto space, from social tokens to experimental projects being launched on various launch pads. For example, a cool new token appeared at the time by the name of pancake swap, it was an ERC-20 token on Binance's new smart chain. For just a few cents per token. I took some of my profits from my less risky investments such as BTC, link and Ethereum and started doing more direct investments. 10000 $cake for a few grand. As this investment started doing good, I, also put money into some other Binance launchpad projects. Projects and protocols such as Alpha finance, Band Protocol, Litentry, Fan tokens and many more.

As time passed and my investment grew, I suddenly received an email from Binance for KYC. I felt like a black person with makeup in a whites-only saloon. I had to pick up my bags and go. I started to withdraw funds from Binance and go full DeFi. As I removed funds I noticed that the warning disappeared. That's when I realized that your account would get flagged if you got big enough. Nonetheless, the grind continued. I used Binance's 3x leveraged ETF coins such as BTCUP or BNBUP to have some leverage and as soon as I would make a certain amount of profit I would extract the funds out into different wallets and track them in notebooks and portfolio management applications. All the while, I also started messing with DApps. I created arbitrage bots, messed with liquidity pools, and created airdrop farming bots. I did everything and eventually, my first 20K portfolio hit the 1 million dollar mark.

Weirdly enough, the happiness from reaching a million did not last long. That number was meaningless to me. and when I looked at home prices in some cities around the world, like Hong Kong, London or New York, I would feel that with 1 million I would just be a miserable middle-class peasant living an average life and be forgotten for eternity when I'm dead. I had an imaginary leaderboard in my head where I would compare myself with all other humans, living and dead. People from all wakes of life were on this leaderboard. Gandhi, Jesus and Hitler. A butcher that lived his life on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Mayan soldiers, dead babies and unknown samaritans. The leaderboard was absolute, it didn't care about circumstances. it didn't care about my shortcomings or race or skin colour. I just knew there were 85 billion people on it and I was getting closer to the top.

I knew to give my life meaning I had to think in exponents and in higher dimensions. Money was just a tool, a means to an end and it had become obvious to me that the distance between ten thousand and 1 million was the same as between 1 million and 100 million. both were two logarithmic steps away from each other. at first, the method of achieving 100 million dollars might seem very difficult and different from getting to 1 million dollars. After all, if you buy 1 million of a coin whose entire market cap is 10 million you are manipulating that market. Even if the coin increases tenfold, you can't sell everything, because your paper gains would evaporate. this is why when you grow big, deep liquidity becomes very important. it's the same game played on a different platform. If you have 100,000k in bitcoin, you have a paper value and you can only TWAP in and out. The wealthier you become the higher you climb on the liquidity ladder. Same game, different rules. Here you can create debt ramps and intricate credit architectures to extract as much value as possible without crashing your paper value and so on... But in the end, wealth is just a simple tool. a means to a greater goal and that's it.

My grind continued until I got past the 10 million mark. I was growing some of the biggest wallets in all of DeFi on different chains. At the same time, I was feeling confident that I could help move my family out of Iran, for good. After much research, I decided that the optimum path would be to acquire 5 Turkish passports for my family. On paper, Turkey had the quickest time to a passport and it also had a bright future in 10-20 years' time. I also had secured offers from Columbia, Brown and CMU and was planning to go to the states, this way my parents could visit me a lot easier and by the time my Master's had finished my funds would be unlocked. But oh boy, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. From scammy lawyers to greedy projects, and on the crypto side, from smart contracts going wrong, and protocols being hacked to excessive KYC that lead me onto some dark places. In short, I lost millions here. The pinnacle of it was not being able to get verified with an investor's ID card on any service due to my nationality and one of my Opensea Accounts getting deleted due to IP tracing Back to Iran. I wrote this tweet thread that explained the situation and later got contacted by a Reuters reporter about the matter.

https://twitter.com/eeleeyaa/status/1499486579563372549?s=20&t=gY_fkN0ItwV3P7Pe5IjP-g

I might write another article about my horrible investment experience in turkey sometime in the future so that maybe if you were intending to invest abroad you would avoid my mistakes.

Now I am currently playing the waiting game, while I was in Iran, to get a US student visa I had to go from Tehran to Istanbul and from there to Pakistan because it was the only US embassy that would accept Iranians. all other routes were closed due to covid and political reasons. a 24,000-kilometre journey for a 5-minute interview. Climate catastrophe FTW. I wrote a report about this and sent it to my university and they could not believe this was real. I will publish that report someday. Months went by and I now have my Turkish passport but just as I got that single piece of document, the US embassy in Turkey closed down until October 2023. I am now re-evaluating my goals and deciding what I should do with my life, a much-needed pause.

I want to end this article with a thought experiment:

A few centuries ago, Pineapples were a luxury. Only the elite could afford it. thousands of dollars for a consumable fruit. but now, pineapples are everywhere. they're an ordinary fruit.

I think the future is a lot like the medieval pineapple. Eventually, the meaning of "exclusivity" will vanish. everything will be available for everyone™***. The cost to produce and consume will fall drastically as artificial intelligence and robots take over labour. From hyper-efficient cars to luxury watches, human engineering and craftsmanship will be blown out of the water. So what will happen to "value"? Value of hard work, the value of actions and values of societies. The "religious value" died long ago and humanity hasn't successfully found a replacement for it. just like a recently orphaned child clinging to a lifeless husk of a once guiding mother. Certain thinkers such as Dr Jordan Peterson [standing on the shoulders of Nietzche and Jung] have concluded that there is no safe alternative other than religion to guide humanity's values and they might have a point (albeit it pains me to say this as a freethinker/atheist). The collective unconscious can be viewed as a neural network, an entity with inertia, and just like a computer-based neural network, it can't immediately change. But clinging on to the past is not an option as well. Humanity needs new values. Finding these values is the difference between a utopian future and a nightmarish dystopia, however arbitrary they might be.

A nice way of gaining intuition about these values is by reading Logical Induction and AI safety papers that tap into the design of Artificial General Intelligence. If we designed such a thing, a pseudo conscious entity that passed the Turing test, how would it define what's "good" and what is "bad"? How would it define its own "values" or how should we instruct it about its values?

Papers such as this one (click to read if you're interested) give us this intuition that intelligence and values are two completely separate things. An AGI can be designed so that it turns everything into milk puddings. It can design and create machinery to reproduce and then convert everything into milk puddings. It can strategies and win wars, it can invent contraptions, it can solve equations all for the grand goal of converting everything into a milk pudding. it could eventually turn all of earth into a sentient goo of milk pudding madness and go on to consume the entire galaxy. Occam's razor can be sharp you see. So how does a sentient milk pudding AI relate to values and the future of money?

In certain countries such as Iran and China, Money as a source of value will evaporate. and technology will turn into a tool of ideological enslavement. Allow me to demonstrate what I mean. Back when I was still in Iran, I got a strange job offer, with an astonishingly high budget of 150 billion rials. Something that was magnitudes higher than any other job in Iran. The job's description was that I had to design and train a computer vision model that would detect women with CCTV cameras and detect if they had HIJAB or not. If they didn't have the Islamic Hijab on, they would automatically receive a warning via a text message, and they had to pay a fee. When I received this offer, I lost my mind. I was furious. The same social credit system that was implemented by the CCP in China was coming to Iran. Mixed with bullshit Islamic law. I refused this offer and roasted the person that offered me this.

Time passed and I heard someone else had implemented this technology. I don't know who sold their dignity this cheap to cause more suffering in Iran. Maybe some remote developer that is far attached from all the consequences? Not long after this, people started getting these SMS messages. ( The image below is one such message )

Now, what if this idea is taken to the absolute extreme? Cameras all around Iran, Making sure Citizens do 5 prayers a day otherwise they lose Islamic credit. In the past, the morality police did all of this. They punished or possibly even tortured you if you didn't have a hijab or drank water during Ramazan. But now, with the help of technology, suffering can be automated. It's Ramazan and a camera picks up that you drank alcohol? You now have to go to a whipping bot to get whipped 72 times and pay a penalty to remove your sins, then a smart contract automatically gives back your rights. Just like the Pudding bot, the Islamic AGI bot designed by the Islamic republic can achieve its arbitrary goals via whatever means necessary. Islamic republic can at first build a nuclear bomb to deter all forms of foreign intervention and over time develop the Islambot. and arbitrary value that creates a religious utopia for some and a hellish dystopia for non-believers.

This Story can be somewhat different for other countries. Technology is a double-edged sword, sharpened by the passing of time. Ideally, the find the path of least suffering and push everyone in that direction. One example scenario is that Elon's Neuralink succeeds, and brain-computer interfaces become the norm. If he somehow doesn't use Starlink + Neuralink + Optimus combo to enslave humanity and dominate the earth, we can enter into a neuroactive metaverse, free of physical form, where exclusivity does not exist and all that is desired is just an electrical signal in the brain. everything that can be seen is an electrical signal, perception of taste and touch and hearing. All just Action Potentials that can be manually excited with electrodes instead of the human nervous system. You'll own everything your heart desires. Groups of people can form their own frictionless societies with values of their own. some will glorify internet monkeys and worship them and some will bask in the glory of digital hijab on sci-fi creatures. everyone living in peace and harmony, without bloodshed and suffering. Of course, to achieve this, there are many challenges that need to be overcome. We should make sure the fourth turning of the western civilization coupled with the Thucydides trap doesn't cause nuclear armageddon and send us back into the stone age, and also we need to make sure that we don't accidentally fry the earth with climate change. These are the most immediate challenges. As for me, I have witnessed enough death and suffering that I want to make sure it doesn't happen to more people. I believe the world needs visionaries from hermit countries and warzones to solve and prevent problems and catastrophes that first worlders aren't even aware exist. And in the next 15-20 years, I want to be one of those visionaries. Foot Note: There are many things that I didn't get to talk about in this article such as how I lost millions of dollars due to false price readings of price oracles in a Perp DEX, engineering technicalities, How I ended up in and survived 3 terrorist attacks, the PS752 incident, Cypriot casinos, Sociology of a theocratic nation and how it relates to technology and many more interesting things that are worth talking about. If life allows, I will go into detail about all of these topics in my book and maybe some other articles. Also if you read this entire article, Kudos to you. Reading long articles from strangers online is a gamble and on that note, let me know if this article was helpful to you in any way? any feedback is appreciated. Fin. Ilya Arbabi