Why Bitcoin matters

Why I write about Bitcoin and why it's worth your time to read about.

Some personal news! I am delighted to announce that I have accepted a role on the Product team at Blockstream working with the Lightning, Liquid and Research teams on extending the things that can be built on top of the foundation of Bitcoin. I believe Bitcoin is the best available tool we have for building a better world and Blockstream is my best opportunity to contribute to the advancement of Bitcoin. I spent the last two years writing about why I think Bitcoin is the future and in that time I have only grown more eager to see that future come. Rather than waiting for that future I decided to help build it.

Inside this issue:

• Why does Bitcoin matter?

• Why work for Blockstream?

• What does this mean for Something Interesting?

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Why does Bitcoin matter?

Way back in 2009 at Brown University I was a grad student studying (among other things) Mechanism Design. It was a simpler time. Mechanism Design is the study of how to design incentive structures so that selfish actors in a system cause some kind of socially desirable outcome. Auctions and voting systems are good examples: everyone votes or bids selfishly, but a well designed system hopefully results in the right price or the right election outcome.

I say hopefully but to be honest mechanism design is not really a hopeful field. Mostly it is a lot of dry academic proofs about why we can never have nice things, like Arrow’s impossibility paradox or the Myerson–Satterthwaite theorem. I ended up leaving academia for Google because it felt like trying to improve existing systems was more useful than trying to prove they could never be perfect. But before I left I learned a lot about why these trade-offs are hard and why every practical system of human cooperation is always compromised and imperfect. The math behind making humans work together was both grim and unassailable.

All of which is to explain that Bitcoin is to me what a perpetual motion machine would be to a student of physics. It is beautiful and magical and impossible and fascinating. It is exactly the kind of idea that I gave up looking for when I left mechanism design behind: a radically new kind of human cooperation.

At heart Bitcoin is a shared unit of measurement for value — just as the meter is a shared unit of distance and the kilogram a shared unit of mass. Standardizing on a neutral, shared unit of measurement for value lets us work together the same way that shared units of measurement for weight, time and distance do. Bitcoin is a shared language and like any shared language it increases cooperation and trade. Bitcoin reduces the importance of borders simply by being borderless.

I believe that money is the most important tool of human cooperation and that Bitcoin is the best money that has ever existed. The separation of money and state is the most profound advancement in human freedom of my lifetime. Bitcoin empowers human rights activists to protest their governments, allows refugees to keep their wealth as they flee and protects the poor against the stealth tax of inflation. Bitcoin cannot be seized, frozen or diluted — it is the ultimate economic defense.

Bitcoin also subsidizes the creation of cheap, renewable energy and so will help usher in an energy abundant future. It also undermines the strength of capital controls, making it harder for authoritarian governments to fund themselves by confiscating (or debasing) the wealth of their citizens. Even for more representative governments Bitcoin will make it more challenging to fund unpopular policies — which means that Bitcoin will make it harder to fund the machinery of war.

In short, I believe Bitcoin represents a more peaceful, abundant and equitable future defined by freedom and free exchange. It is a future I am willing to work for.

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Why work for Blockstream?

Blockstream is a quirky company. They were founded in 2014 by a group of ten co-founders including now CEO Adam Back, who is actually cited in the Bitcoin whitepaper. They have a Bitcoin mining business and they run a Bitcoin satellite that broadcasts the blockchain worldwide. They employ the largest number of engineers working directly on Bitcoin core and other open-source Bitcoin projects like the Lightning Network. They also have a federated sidechain called Liquid.

A big part of what drew me to Blockstream was their commitment to building on top of Bitcoin and for the long term, even though it is often more complicated and less fashionable than the alternatives. Blockstream never built any private corpchains, never sold retail investors an ICO, is building on Lightning rather than Ethereum and operates a proof-of-work mining business rather than a proof-of-stake staking service. They have remained stubbornly idealistic and focused on the Bitcoin future.

The happiest and most productive stage of my career was when I worked on Chrome at Google. The Chrome team was also a group of stubborn techno-idealist engineers who wanted to make the world a better place by building an open-source tool that everyone would need: an internet browser. When we fixed a security bug we were protecting people. When we made a feature more accessible we were empowering them. When we shaved a few milliseconds off of load times we would multiply it by the number of Chrome users to calculate the number of human lifetimes that would no longer be wasted waiting for something to load.

We worked hard and we cared a great deal because we really believed our work really mattered — that the world would be better if everyone had better, safer, faster access to the internet. I still believe it. My hope in joining Blockstream is that I will find that same spirit: a group of technical experts who believe the right body of open-source code can change the world forever.

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Satoshi crosses the Delaware, Midjourney

What does this mean for Something Interesting?

Writing Something Interesting has been a deeply valuable journey for me. I have no intention of giving it up. Refining my ideas in public has given them greater scrutiny and accountability. Explaining them to others has made them stronger and more precise. Having a constant mental playground for word optimization also keeps me from gnawing at the furniture like an under-stimulated border collie. As Kurt Vonnegut once said, "Writers write. They don’t have a choice."

So rest assured that Something Interesting will continue. Certainly it will evolve but realistically it would always have evolved over time. Change is inevitable. One change that is less inevitable and more immediate is that I am turning off paid subscriptions and opening up the Something Interesting archives. Everything I’ve written will be available to anyone who is interested in reading it. I’m tremendously grateful for all of you who paid for my content — I can’t tell you how much that support meant to me as I wandered around in the dark figuring things out. Without your vote of confidence I would never have believed in myself enough to keep going.

Something Interesting is and will remain unsponsored. I don’t think joining Blockstream biases me so much as it reveals my existing biases, but it will certainly rewrite my disclosures page and it may change how you interpret my arguments or reactions. Aligning my career ambitions with my investment theses makes my views consistent but it definitely also makes them more focused. Hopefully the fact that I spent two years putting my views on the record before taking my first job in the industry makes it easier to sort cause from effect. I’m joining Blockstream because I believe in Bitcoin — not the other way around.

So I hope you will continue with me on this journey! Keep asking me questions, challenging my arguments, spotting my typos! The years ahead will be a time of chaos, confusion and opportunity. We are better off traveling together.