Bitcoin Is A Teacher

And A Bottomless Rabbit Hole

“After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

— Morpheus, 1999 film The Matrix

When trust erodes between institutions, stakeholders, and the broader community, individuals can be led to educate themselves more deeply and build a road to self-sufficiency. Once you discover something for the first time, you become immersed in it. I know this because it happened to me when I truly saw Bitcoin for the first time.

In late 2016-early 2017, a lot of life decisions were happening all at once. I graduated from business school, co-founded a company, got married, and bought a house. Of all of these life-changing events, nothing was more painful for me than the process of buying a house. It felt like the middlemen were extracting wealth without providing any reciprocal contribution to productivity. I would come to know this as “rent-seeking behavior.” Rent-seeking behavior creates nothing of value. The culprits, third-party intermediaries, included the banks, agents, and whoever else got paid fees to shuffle, print, and fax documents. It was this entire process that made me challenge my assumptions about…