Why Bitcoin matters to me

Philosophical reasons

I am deeply moved by the democratic, censorship-resistant and seizure-resistant properties of Bitcoin. I grew up in India in the 90s around stories of the importance of physical gold to insure against the government. As a child in an urban, upper-middle class family for whom the system worked, I didn’t believe it at first. Later, I saw inflation eat away at my parents’ ability to buy a modest home. At the time I did not understand how closely related these two things were.

I believe Bitcoin will:

• Create falling prices and minimum involuntary employment (the Federal Reserve antidote)
• Reduce malinvestment with clearer price signals
• Hold politicians and central bankers accountable
• Make it harder to fund wars against the will of the people

I want to help make that world for my children.

Technical reasons

My background in large-scale distributed systems set me up well for working on Bitcoin. However, the adversarial, second-order thinking required to build a public consensus network was completely new to me and has me obsessed. To build a network that anyone can join and no one can control is a significant leap in what humanity can achieve.