From Engineering Projects to Bitcoin Curiosity

My name is Jack DeBrabander, and I didn’t grow up thinking I’d spend hours reading about cryptocurrency. I’m from East Lansing, Michigan, and for most of my life I was focused on school, sports, and later engineering. Bitcoin felt like something distant — internet money that people joked about.

Growing Up in East Lansing

I’ve always been curious about how things work. As a kid, I used to take apart gadgets around the house just to see if I could put them back together. Sometimes I succeeded, and sometimes I didn’t — but I always learned something. That curiosity stuck with me all through high school and eventually led me to Michigan State University.

At MSU’s School of Packaging, I learned how to think like a problem solver. It wasn’t just about what we were building; it was about asking why and how to improve it. During my internship at Central Process Engineering in East Lansing, I got to apply that thinking to real-world systems. Some days I worked on small tweaks in control systems. Other days I helped implement adjustments that ended up improving efficiency and even boosting revenue. Those moments taught me that systems are fragile but also flexible — change one part, and you can change the whole outcome.

Discovering Bitcoin

Around that same time, I stumbled into the world of Bitcoin. At first, I laughed it off. I figured it was a fad, like digital Monopoly money. But I kept hearing about it, and eventually my curiosity won.

The first serious article I read about Bitcoin framed it less as a financial tool and more as a system design challenge. That got my attention. How do you create a network that’s secure, reliable, and not controlled by one single entity? That felt a lot like the engineering puzzles I was already interested in.

I’ll admit, once I opened that door, I couldn’t stop. I read blogs, joined forums, and even found myself explaining Bitcoin to friends at coffee shops in East Lansing. Some rolled their eyes. Others asked good questions I didn’t have answers for. The more conversations I had, the more I wanted to dig deeper.

Connecting Engineering and Crypto

The connection between my engineering background and crypto became obvious. In packaging, we think about sustainability and efficiency. How do you design something that protects the product, uses fewer materials, and doesn’t waste energy? In blockchain, people ask similar questions: how do we process transactions faster, scale systems for more users, and reduce the environmental footprint of mining?

It was eye-opening to see how my studies connected to something as new and different as cryptocurrency. I began to treat Bitcoin less like an investment and more like a case study in design. What worked? What didn’t? What could be improved? That perspective helped me stay grounded instead of just chasing price predictions.

Looking Ahead

I don’t know exactly where Bitcoin or blockchain will be in ten years. Nobody does. But what I do know is that the same curiosity I had as a kid in East Lansing — the same curiosity that carried me through engineering classes and my internship — is the curiosity that keeps me interested in crypto today.

For me, Bitcoin is less about getting rich and more about understanding systems. It’s about the excitement of trying to solve a puzzle that the whole world is working on at once. That mindset, I think, is what will keep me learning, asking questions, and maybe even contributing to solutions in the future.

At the end of the day, I’m still Jack DeBrabander. I’m an East Lansing native, a Michigan State graduate, and someone who likes to take things apart and see how they work. Bitcoin just happens to be the puzzle I’m most interested in right