my first internet dollar

2am maybe 3, had x64dbg open, staring at hex values i barely understood. somewhere in there was the thing that made winrar ask you to pay. i just had to find it.

i'd been at this for days. not for school, not for marks, nothing. i just wanted to know if i could do it.

when it finally worked, when the nag screen just didn't show up, i sat there for a solid minute doing nothing. closed winrar. opened it again. still nothing. i remember grinning like an idiot alone in my room at 3am. never told anyone.

how it started

i never had a game boy. wanted one badly, but we didn't have that kind of money lying around for toys. what i did have was a pc and an emulator i found online.

pokémon, prince of persia, gta, claw, i went through everything. genuinely all i did was play games.

and that's basically how i got into reverse engineering. if i could figure out how to crack stuff, i could play whatever i wanted. just pure motivation.

the money i never got

around the same time i found out about link shorteners. the deal was simple you wrap a download link in ads, share it, get paid per click. i used linkshrink. dark green logo. i can still picture it.

i was already posting game tutorials on youtube how to crack this, how to mod that, so i just ran every description link through linkshrink. i'd refresh the dashboard like a maniac. $0.30. $0.87. $1.14.

then i found out about proxies.

turns out if you faked traffic from the US or UK, the payout per click went up. so obviously i did that. i'd dig through hacker forums for proxy lists, rotate IPs, try to not get caught. most of my accounts got banned. i'd just make new ones. at 15, this felt like i'd broken the system.

one small problem though: i didn't have a bank account. you can't actually withdraw internet money if there's nowhere to put it. so i just... watched the balance go up and figured i'd deal with it later.

years later, got an email. linkshrink shutting down. withdraw now.

still no bank account.

by the time i finally opened one, the site was gone. dashboard, balance, dark green logo, all of it. my first internet money, and i literally never touched it.

breaking things

after that i started getting more into actual programming. picked up python, and automating things instantly became my favourite thing to do. something about writing a script and watching it just do stuff for you, i don't know man, it just hit different.

i joined a hacker academy. my parents heard "hacking" and immediately assumed i was going to end up in jail. i told them this is what i want to do. they weren't convinced but they let me go, which in hindsight was very chill of them.

early days i was mostly just running tools i found on forums, stuff made by faceless accounts with anime pfps and insane reputations. half the time i didn't fully understand what i was running or who i was running it against. but i kept going. the first thing i actually built myself was an instagram bot. after that i couldn't stop.

i spent a lot of nights on forums where people shared things you genuinely could not find on google. not because it was hidden, but because nobody outside those circles cared enough to look.

my username on a x (better not mention it) forum was borrowed from a character named marcus holloway, inspired from watchdogs. it started getting some traction after i shared something the community thought was valuable. the platform gave me a special rank, which meant access to basically everything on there. i'd lurk like a ghost, never reacted to anything, never talked to anyone, just quietly took what i needed and left. looking back, it was me exploring the intenet. never went there anymore.

oh and according to my friend, the most useful program i ever wrote was a brute-force script to pull his crush's details from the college admin portal. priorities.

honestly though, every system i broke into taught me way more about building things than any course ever did.

hackathons

i was 18, joined college, and found out about hackathons pretty randomly. walked into my first one with zero expectations. forty-eight hours later, we won.

the part i remember most isn't the prize or anything. it's that moment during the build when everything is clicking, the code works, the pitch makes sense, and suddenly this thing you've been doing alone in your room for years actually matters to other people too. this was before ai could write code for you, so every line was ours. felt good.

after that we just kept going. our team would sign up for everything and we kept winning.

each hackathon compressed months of learning into one weekend. ship fast, pitch under pressure, build with strangers and somehow trust the process.

then covid happened and i suddenly had nothing but time.

that's when i got back into crypto, i'd messed around with it in school but this time i went deep. writing contracts, airdrops, grants, meme coins, yield farming, random protocols appearing and disappearing overnight.

i remember finding a loophole in how brave browser distributed its tokens and built a tool to automate it. it wasn't anything serious, just something you could automate if you knew how. gray area? yeah probably. never shared it publicly. but me and my friends made a couple thousand dollars off, back then, it felt cool reverse engineering and breaking systems to gain advantage. college life was fun indeed. mini mr robot.

the bet

campus placements came around. got a couple offers. never really cared about the job search if i'm honest.

the boys from high school, adithya and rajat. we'd always meet up whenever i was back home. one of those conversations just kept going and refused to stop. that became cofount.