The other day while preparing for my future Amaury interview, I had a small epiphany.
I was thinking about people like him, and Antony Zegers, and I’m guessing other members of Bitcoin ABC, all of whom came to see themselves as libertarians long before Bitcoin was ever a thing.
Since I’m someone who was completely oblivious to ideas like economic freedom until well after I fell down the crypto rabbit hole, it has always both impressed and baffled me that there were people out there not only thinking about, but also fighting for, these things.
One reason is because it’s not like these guys escaped from some communist regime or authoritarian state. They’re from places like France and Canada, which are probably considered some of the freest places on Earth, though maybe not as free as we thought.
Before crypto, I never met people like Amaury or Antony. All the people I knew wanted to do well in school, get a job, fall in love, and live happily ever after. Nobody was complaining about taxes, or worried about money printing, or losing access to their bank accounts.
Truthfully, I guess most people I know still don’t worry about those things, other than maybe the part about taxes.
So I started to ask myself why do some people wake up to these concepts so much earlier than others. For me, I only woke up to it because I was incentivized to after investing in crypto. But for Amaury and Antony, apparently they came to it through books. Books written by economists and philosophers that warn about the dangers of tyranny and central planning.
While this made perfect sense, it never really clicked for me. Maybe because I’d never been interested in reading those kinds of books, probably because I always thought they would be long and boring, but also because I couldn’t imagine a book having the power to open my eyes to a new way of looking at the world.
As someone who pretty much only read fiction as I growing up, I was used to reading novels and feeling as if I’d gone on a long journey. If it was a good novel, it might even have an effect on how I felt in that moment, but they never altered my reality.
Except maybe one.