First, let me share a little bit about my background. I immigrated to this country when I was five years old. My father's sister married an American soldier who had been stationed in Korea, and it was through her that me, my brother, and my parents all eventually joined her in this country known as the land of opportunity.

If I really think about it, I can't imagine doing what my parents did. Lugging two little kids halfway around the world to a country where you don't speak the language, don't know the culture, with hardly anything but the clothes on your back.

But they did it because they believed in the American dream. They decided they would rather take their chances in a place where they hardly knew anyone than stay in a place that lacked political freedom.

I wish I could say everything worked out as planned and we lived happily ever after, but within the first few years my father died of cancer leaving my mother to raise us on her own. Needless to say, we experienced some difficult times.

It's hard not to wonder if that may have contributed to my life long obsession of wanting to become rich, though in many ways I went about it all wrong. Rather than focusing on working hard and making something of myself, I was always looking for the easy way out. I didn't want to do it the right way, just the fastest way, and I ended up wasting a lot of time, money, and energy with nothing to show for it.

Eventually I grew up and realized that the only real way to make money is by working hard, even if it's doing something you might not love or be passionate about. I've been fortunate and now I make a decent living and have more money today than at any other point in my life, but yet I still don't feel wealthy.

Most of us think of wealth in terms of our net worth. Everybody wants number go up, but what if the numbers we're talking about don't really matter?

The past year I watched as the government printed trillions and trillions of dollars, none of which came to me. Meanwhile everything has gotten more expensive, meaning the purchasing power of my dollars has only gotten weaker.

It's becoming riskier and riskier to just let your money sit there in a savings account paying almost zero interest, so you feel compelled to put your money in potentially dangerous investments because nothing really seems safe anymore. In other words, I feel trapped, like I'm caught in a system where I'm going to always feel like I have to run as fast as I can just so I don't fall behind.

For me, being wealthy is the opposite of that. Wealth is about freedom. The freedom to live your life the way you want rather than to slave away doing something you detest. Being wealthy means being free from having to worry about things like your money losing a significant amount of its value because some politicians decided to screw you over. Or even worse, because the government decides to take it right out of your bank account like they did to the people of Cyprus back in 2012-2013.

To me being wealthy also means having control. Where your future and your life is in your hands. I want to know that I can leave my money to my kids and not have half of it get taken by some bureaucrats. I want to know that if I did decide to immigrate to some other land like my parents did, I can take all my money with me across any border without fear of having it confiscated.

And this is exactly what eCash is aiming to do. To put the control back in the hands of the people and give them the freedom to be able to know their money isn't going to get inflated into oblivion or taken without your consent. eCash is focused on building the necessary infrastructure to ensure the network is always safe to use, and so that when the number does go up, it keeps going up instead of crashing like a house of cards.

The only way to do that is to create value that is recognizable to others and thereby increase demand. That's why the talented people at Bitcoin ABC are working hard to scale the network so that XEC can become the best money the world has ever seen. Their mission is to enable every human on the planet to participate in the global economy, peer-to-peer, without having to pay enormous transaction fees or wait for long confirmation times.

I fell in love with crypto because it allowed me to imagine a better world, a world where I don't have to trust someone else with my financial future. But in order for crypto to succeed in the way that I hope, it must be reliable, useable, and not force us to depend on custodians who may be no better than the dirty politicians who are in power today.

While so many in crypto are fixated on getting rich quickly, the people behind the eCash project are focused on building real wealth. That's why I'm invested in XEC, because it's trying to solve the right problems and it's success will allow me to become wealthy in the only way that truly matters.

(Bonus clue 7: I've heard this is rather common among the French)

Wealth Redefined

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