"Time is the Great Equaliser" Meet the Writer Andrei Rotariu AKA Crypt...

This story is a part of Hacker Noon's Meet the Writer series of interviews. The series is intended for tech professionals contributing the most insightful Hacker Noon stories to share more about their writing habits, ideas, and professional background (and maybe a hobby or two).

If you too would like to start contributing to Hacker Noon, you can do so here.

So let’s start! Tell us a bit about yourself. For example, name, profession, and personal interests.

Hi Hackers! My name is Andrei Rotariu. I’m 36 years old and hail out of Melbourne, Australia (currently locked-down, and living with a curfew in place, yay freedom!). During the daylight hours, I’m a hardware safety guy for a large power tool company. But under the cover of darkness, I like to get involved in all manner of crypto-related stuff. I’ve done a lot of dumb experimental sh*t over the years. I blew up a laptop trying to mine this peculiar Cryptocurrency called Quarkcoin one time. Another time I won 2 Million Dogecoin playing roulette and then mostly lost it all. I could have been retired on a yacht somewhere by now.

Currently, I have a blog series running called Crypto Fireside which I publish both on Medium and right here on Hacker Noon. Crypto Fireside is an interview-style Q&A blog where I talk to folks from the Cryptocurrency and decentralised world about all manner of things, usually, its projects they are working on, businesses, start-ups, that kind of Origin/Founder story thing.

I started Crypto Fireside because I noticed most of the Crypto and blockchain-related content out there usually revolves around one of two things: Money or tech. But here is the thing; there are real people behind these projects. Real people with real stories, and real struggles. And that’s what I wanted to talk to them about and bring those stories out to the world. Who knows, one of these stories might motivate the next Satoshi Nakamoto.

Interesting! What was your latest Hackernoon Top story about?

I interviewed Christian Winter, a young German entrepreneur, about his music and lighting business and about how he was opening his venture up to Cryptocurrency through Bitcoin Cash. Christian like many small businesses was affected by Covid, the lock-downs and measures and was just slowly coming out of that at the time we put the story out there.

The Bitcoin Cash technology allows Christian to market to different clients but also offers them a different way to pay for services and even allows him to receive tips during events. You can read his story here.

Do you usually write on similar topics? If not, what do you usually write about?

I started my writing career (paid writing) freelancing and writing funny content as a copy and content writer for online businesses and marketers. That was probably 15 or so years ago. I claimed at the time to be one of the only humour-content freelance writers on the web and would be asked to write sales pages for guys that would create creepy dating programs or gag-gifts like manly scented candles with scents such as beer and cigarettes or diesel covered overalls.

Like most things in my life I kind of just aim in the direction that I like and figure the rest out as I move forward and so in a sense I kind of stumbled into writing about Cryptocurrency because of a project I fell in love with at the time. They were going to decentralize the entire world wide web and free us from the tech oligopoly. It’s called SafeNetwork developed by a Scottish firm called Maidsafe.

One thing led to another, and well, here we are.

The aim is to eventually move Crypto Fireside onto its own hosted platform and give it the attention it needs. The Cryptocurrency and blockchain space feels like the early Internet days right now and so there are a lot of cool and interesting projects and people behind those projects for me to write about. The world needs to hear about these things and so there’s no end in sight for Crypto Fireside right now. In fact, it’s just the beginning.

Great! What is your usual writing routine like (if you have one?)

Because Crypto Fireside is a Q&A interview style format, my routine has had to evolve.

Normally I would write whenever I felt inspired, I’d just get it out of my head and slowly edit and craft it when I had the time, early mornings or at night would work really well for me in the past.

However, now that I work on the story with another person I have had to come up with a different system and so far what I have been doing seems to work well.

I usually spend some time talking or web chatting to the interviewee to get a really good grasp of what it is they do and then I will draft my questions, usually the questions are styled the same way but I do tweak them from time to time. I send the interviewee a shared doc, allow them time to fill it out and send it back, I’ll review it get back to them with clarifications or follow up questions and we go from there.

That is kind of the system I have been going with. And above all else, the hardest thing is promoting your work but it’s also the most satisfying part of it. In the modern world of writing, you can’t just write and publish something and expect it to take off. It’s not like the good old days where you’d get picked up by a newspaper or magazine and they’d send your story out to their syndicated network and voila’. You gotta work that hustle-muscle and push your stories. The successful modern writer is also a successful marketer nowadays.

Being a writer in tech can be a challenge. It’s not often our main role, but an addition to another one. What is the biggest challenge you have when it comes to writing?

Time!

You know it’s funny I write about Cryptocurrency and talk to people about these digital tokens and things and I think the most valuable ‘token’ on the planet is time.

I like to refer to this concept as Time Tokens.

Time is the great equaliser. Rich, poor, black, white, it doesn’t matter what side of the train tracks you come from, who you are, where you are from, your background, the amount of money you have in the bank, there are still only 24 hours in one day, 1440 minutes, and 86400 seconds. You, me, the baker, the butcher, the teacher, the girl at the gym or the guy behind the Crypto project you’re most fascinated with.

It levels the playing field. Billionaires can’t buy more of it. Sure they may live a longer duration of time because they can afford the best healthcare and yeah they have more time for leisure because they outsource virtually everything but that’s not what I am talking about. I am talking about the present moment. It ticks along a second at a time for all of us, and if you really think about it, we’re all only ever living in the now, there’s no real past or future you can enter. Only now. And it is this time pressure that creates stress in our lives.

We have all sorts of deadlines and usually, we’re juggling umpteen different things from kids, intimate partners, bills, projects around the house, work projects, screaming customers and now you gotta pull yourself out of that, find the time to sit down and focus for an hour or two. I mean, right now at this very moment that I am writing this my eye keeps going back to the clock, I literally have 5 minutes left before I need to get out of my striped pajamas, put some clothes on and leave for my day job.

This is the biggest challenge for most of us in the modern world. And in going forward I think that those things, be they technologies, habits or the way we structure our lives, those things that can free up or help us manage our time better, those things will be very valuable in the very near future.

I’d urge you, the reader to think about what it is you are doing with your time tokens each minute of the day. Are you using them to the best of your ability? Don’t waste them. Remember you only get 24 whole tokens per day, 1440 tokenoshis.

What is the next thing you hope to achieve in your career?

The ultimate goal is to work for myself and become truly self reliant.

Covid has solidified this even more for me. The fact that governments can decide which business is essential and which is not is absolutely terrifying. Melbourne in particular has been hit hard, not with Covid, but with Draconian measures. Im not going to get into the arguments for or against. It’s just the reality. During this crisis I’ve seen friends and family lose their jobs, livelihoods, and businesses. Everyone is essential and every person’s livelihood is essential.

I’m open to all possibilities but the one option that I am in favour of and will devote some of those time-tokens to, is that I take Crypto Fireside to the next level and give it the time, energy and resources that it deserves. This is the likely next move for me. I think Crypto Fireside can inspire and motivate the next generation of innovators and can become a resource for good. But like I say I am open to the possibilities, I’ve always had that entrepreneurial fire in my belly ever since I was a kid and the world is going through some very big changes right now, so who really knows what will happen next.

I’m a story teller at heart and there is a book or documentary in me somewhere in the future. It’s nothing I’m focused on right now but that would be one of the ultimate goals of my career too.

Wow, that’s admirable. Now, something more casual: What is your guilty pleasure of choice?

A cigarette or cigar, alcoholic beverage, to sit outside reading or watching some story about Skin-walker ranch or the Missing-411 topics.

Do you have a non-tech-related hobby? If yes, what is it?

I enjoy a good work-out but gyms are closed here and have been for a long time. It sucks because I’m just not a home workout guy. Outside of that: life stuff in general. Hiking, bushwalking, fishing, barbecuing, a good book or movie, hanging out with friends and family, travel. Those kinds of things that everyone enjoys.

What can the Hacker Noon community expect to read from you next?

That’ll likely be the next Crypto Fireside interview.

Thanks for taking time to join our “Meet the writer” series. It was a pleasure. Do you have any closing words?

Meditate. Spend 20 time-tokenoshis doing this every day and your life will improve in leaps and bounds and the world will be a better place for it.