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Having spent the first 20 years of his career in software development, Jake Ryan has had no difficulty wrapping his head around the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
Still, it took him more than seven years since bitcoin’s creation in January 2009 to make his first direct purchase of the digital currency at around $480 apiece in 2016.
What convinced him to finally make the leap was not the utopian vision for bitcoin shared by many ardent fans in the tech world, but the antifragile nature of the digital currency.
There were many times that bitcoin could have died, Ryan said, pointing to the spectacular demise of the Tokyo-based crypto exchange Mt. Gox in 2014 as an example. Once the world’s largest exchange, Mt. Gox was targeted by hackers and lost hundreds of bitcoins worth millions of dollars at the time.
Unsurprisingly, bitcoin’s price plunged with the incident, which resulted in…