“Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.” - Alan Greenspan
Quick note: This article focuses on how my mind thinks through situations and how it led to my thesis. There are fewer references here, but it gives you a view into my mind.
Setting the Scene
Who am I
Nature and nurture. I believe I am the sum of my genetics, the society I was raised in (nature), and the actions taken by those who raised me (nurture).
Secondly, self-awareness has become an important pillar for me. I try to be radically honest with myself so that I don’t live in a fantasy of who I would like to be. Instead, I try to live in the objective reality of who I am, with the drive to do the work to become the person I want to be.
Upbringing
I've distilled all the lessons and frameworks I had growing up to the following 5.
Deliver against your commitments and see things through to completion.
Try the things that interest you (while also adhering to point 1).
Education is king.
Be physically active and a part of team sports.
Live by a set of life principles found in Hinduism.
The above doesn’t do it justice but brings forward some key parts of myself that I see strongly today in how I approach the world around me, so it's very relevant to help you see what influences my thinking. It will become apparent, but the two that have become more prominent in my thinking are my religious upbringing and trying the things that interest me.
All of these principles were drilled into me in a way that most Australians would see as a strict Asian upbringing. In hindsight, it was exactly what was needed to ensure that I committed to things enough to maximise my potential.
Educational foundation
BSc: Bachelor of Science (Physics) - The University of Melbourne
MBuss: Masters of Business (Science & Technology) - Monash University
I was an aspiring astronomer & astrophysicist in high school and pursued this into university. I quickly realised that while I loved the mysteries and concepts of the cosmos, I didn’t have the mathematical ability my peers had to pursue this. At this point, I opted to complete the degree (Point 1 from my upbringing). After graduation, I pivoted into the business side of R&D as I saw the potential for me to remain close to the cutting edge of research by acting as a bridge between science and business to create commercial value.
In hindsight, this was the perfect combination of disciplines that has led me to where I am today.
Career
I had aspirations to pursue technology commercialisation, but I struggled to find a job in the field. While I won't shy away from the fact that I wasn’t the best at it, Australia also has an innovation challenge compared to our counterparts in the US and, as a result, has fewer of these roles available. This forced me to pursue other industries, ultimately leading me to Optus and a career in sales and consulting in IT.
My focus began with telecommunications but quickly shifted to cloud computing in the early 2010s and then to smart cities in 2015. The drive was always to be at the forefront of emerging technologies. Both cloud and smart cities needed salespeople and consultants who could simplify complex technology concepts and articulate how they created commercial value (Effectively what my masters equipped me with)
Along side the day job I also serve as a Non-Executive Director for Non-Profit boards and have done so for almost 7 years. I saw this as a way to volunteer my time to give back to the community. Board roles are all about leveraging your experience to govern how companies operate, always ensuring they act in the organisation's long-term interests. Whats key about this experience isn’t its seniority, but rather that it provided me a very clear distinction between operating a company and governing one. It improved my ability to question more effectively to determine something's true intent and blindspots.
Similar to my educational background, which was all about bridging the divide between science and business, my board career helped bridge that gap between the board and the front lines. Practically, it's about simplifying operational complexity so that the board and executives can make effective decisions. Conversely, it's about translating the decisions made by the board and executive into operational plans.
PhD Pursuit
The genesis of my PhD came from the realisation of my board work with non-profits and my sales and consulting work in technology. It became clear to me that there was a market gap in how to deliver digital transformation successfully within non-profits. After exploring this thesis, I came up with a proposal that Swinburne University of Technology eventually accepted, the title of this being.
A Public Value View of Digital Transformation in Australian Third Sector Organisations
I only completed 1 year of the 6-7 that it was forecast to take. Still, in that time, I completed a relatively detailed literature review to understand what research had been done in this space. This part of the PhD ensures that my initial thesis hasn’t already been explored because a PhD is all about new contributions to the field. This is where I was first exposed to the Public Interest Technologies (PIT) concept, which will form the third pillar of my thesis. I’ll explore this concept in more detail in the next month or so with The Bitcoin Curve.
That was an incredibly short introduction to me, and if I were to summarise it.
I have a curious mind that loves to explore the cutting edge. I’m a jack of all trades and use that to help bridge diverse audiences, from technical to business and operational to executive.
Framing Bitcoins Principles
Head & Heart
Having worked in technology for some time, I’ve had the opportunity to see many technology projects go from start to finish. When I first started, I took a very technical approach, always prioritising the best technical solution to the problem. At the time, that was because I truly believed that technology was the silver bullet for most of the problems that my customers were facing (I was a science graduate, after all).
One of the great things about capitalism is that the free market ultimately decides whether you are right or not. In my case, the early part of my career was met with many lost sales due to my heavily technical approach. It took the words of an early mentor of mine to make it click as to why. He said, “People buy from people they like and people they trust”. It's something that stuck with me till today because it highlights the actual thing that the free market values and that is trust and relationships when it comes to sales.
It doesn’t matter if you have the best solution in the world; if the person who ultimately decides to spend the money doesn’t like or trust you, you will never see a dollar from that customer.
This forced me to rebalance my worldview and realise that I needed to build trust and then wow with technology. I was already very technically strong; all I needed to amplify that strength was to focus my efforts on my underdeveloped ability to build professional relationships with customers. Over the next few years, I focused most of my time on learning from successful relationship salespeople (rather than technical sellers). I slowly developed my own style of professional relationship building that I use to this day.
Distilling this down to the learnings I took from it and continue to use as a north star today, I need to strike the right balance between EQ (Emotional quotient) and IQ (Intelligence quotient). I visualise this through Ying and Yang.
When you look at the above, it visually says two things to me
You need to find a balance between the two different elements, with both wrapping around the other.
One cannot live without the other, and you can see that dot in each half of the opposite colour. Suppose I take a more practical approach using the sales example above. How can I build a trusting relationship (EQ) with a customer by incorporating an element of my technical abilities (IQ)?
Once I made this realisation, I started to see variations of this pop up more often. It wasn’t just the trust and relationships version but more and more it was about unconscious human behaviour. Unlike trust and relationships, which can be a proxy for quality, these behaviours were at complete odds with our best interest. A few examples are
Smoking: It's unhealthy and can lead to cancer and other disease, yet the pleasure it gives people through its addictive qualities makes people do it anyway.
Culture of Convenience: This includes driving to work instead of using public transport, buying lunch at work every day instead of making your own, and buying bottled water instead of bringing a water bottle with you. This is when spending on this convenience is beyond your current financial ability.
Brand: A Toyota will as reliably get you from point A to point B when compared to a BMW, yet people will go beyond their comfortable financial means to buy the BMW. I’m sure you can think of any expensive vs cheap, brand vs no brand product and come to the same conclusion.
Debt: We will spend on a credit card because it's easy, even though we know we will suffer with repayments in the future. More often than not, we spend more than we know we can afford.
Each of the above (and I’m sure you could come up with plenty more) wouldn’t make much sense logically for someone who was purely IQ-driven. However, looking at this from an EQ lens (I know that this is more behaviour rather than EQ, but go with me), you ask yourself, what is driving this behaviour that is so at odds with our long-term interests?
This is where I instinctively know the answer but haven’t yet done the work in detail to understand it properly. My instincts point toward evolutionary biology, specifically how our genealogy evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in the environments our ancient ancestors had to live in. This leads me to my initial conclusion that some of these behaviours are hard-coded in us, and it takes our more modern rational brain to overwrite them.
The above examples are all modern manifestations of this but could be aligned with more primitive ideas of
Comfort vs. discomfort—This could also be pain vs. pleasure, but seeking comfort or pleasure was rewarded (by making us feel good), thus incentivising us to work toward it consistently.
Survival - The thing in the present is worth more than the future as it satisfies our survival necessities i.e. food, shelter
Status - The thing that tells people I’m more capable or successful elevates me amongst my peers and makes me desirable.
All the evolutionary biologists and psychologists are probably reading this and tearing me a new one right now, so I apologise to them. The above was to help convey a train of thought with some logic to help you understand where my perspective comes from. That perspective is that our biology and subsequently our psychology, which has evolved over millions of years, manifests itself today in behaviours that are at odds with what is best for us. These may have served us well in our prehisotric pasts, however no longer do in the comforts of our modern civilisation.
Lessons from history
The other part I draw from my upbringing is my religious foundations.
I was raised a Hindu and was exposed to a religious upbringing that instilled the values in me that I carry today. When I say I was a Hindu, many people reading this will instantly think of praying to gods and following a strict set of rules. But my late father once told me something that has stuck for me beyond just prayer and rules.
“Religion is a way of life.”
He didn’t emphasise that I had to pray to a god in this context but rather told me that religion has a set of principles and values that help guide the decisions we make and the way we live our lives.
As I started to go deeper into my science education, I thought about that more objectively and started looking at other regions and how they varied and were similar. I started to see that the rules that the religion had weren’t just things that required blind faith but had a lot of wisdom behind them that provided a net benefit to people who followed them.
I won't go into full detail about all my personal realisations but instead provide a few examples below that help explain the conclusions I’ve drawn. While these are conclusions I hold today, I expect that with further reading and experience in the space these will evolve over time, so I am very open to anyone who wants to challenge this.
Religious wisdom
First, I want to say the following is a personal realisation of what I observe and is not an expert view on religion. This can be a touchy area, so I wanted that to be clear. The reason I will write it anyway is that it shows how I interpreted it with my background and, subsequently, what has led me to my thesis. With that disclaimer, let’s dive in
Being raised as a Hindu, I should start here. In Hinduism, the cow isn’t a god but a like god. That’s an important distinction. But why?
If you slaughter a cow, you will get meat for the next few months. If you look after the cow, it will provide you with labour to till the fields for crops and milk that can sustain you as well.1 That makes a lot of sense and looking after and living with the cow was in our long term best interests. The fact that it needed to be spelled out showed me that it was intervening in something we humans may have opted to do; thus, it was correcting behaviour that was inherently built into us.
There are many of these examples across different religions.
Jewish and Isalm faith and Pork
Jewish faith
The Torah (Pentateuch) contains passages in Leviticus that list the animals people are permitted to eat. According to Leviticus 11:3, animals like cows, sheep, and deer that have divided hooves and chew their cud may be consumed. Pigs should not be eaten because they do not chew their cud. The ban on the consumption of pork is repeated in Deuteronomy 14:82
Islamic faith
Generally, so long as it was affirmed that no impurities came in contact with the meat served in western countries (which are mostly governed by the People of the Book), then it is considered Halal. 3
With what we know about the cleanliness and disease risks associated with pork at that time (think worms, swine flu, trichinellosis), the language that pigs were unclean and didn’t chew their cud makes a lot of sense, and this action saved us from deadly disease.
Islam and Debt
“Islam does not prohibit debt; it recognises the fact that people may face circumstances that necessitate borrowing. However, it emphasises caution, responsibility, and most importantly, the intention and effort to repay the debt promptly. One of the foundational elements in Islamic financial ethics is the prohibition of 'Riba' (usury or interest). This reflects, among many other things, the Islamic principle of social justice, ensuring that the burden of risk is not disproportionately placed on the borrower and preventing exploitative lending practices.”4
This one is closer to the Bitcoin ethos and the wisdom around debt and debt slavery.
My interpretation of this may be completely wrong, and I expect that religious leaders would explain why. The point I’m making here is that what I see with the above is that religion already understood this thesis as far back as 6,000 years: We need to intervene where evolved human behaviour (as discussed above) is at odds with our long-term survival. This is what I refer to as religious wisdom.
7 Deadly Sins
Religious wisdom, as described above, intervenes when human behaviour isn’t in line with our long-term goals. I had to think about this for some time to figure out how to examine other problems with this same lens. Then, when watching an anime (The Seven Deadly Sins), the title hit me. The framework already existed.
The principles framework I will introduce in part 2 next week revolves around the 7 deadly sins. The premise is that Bitcoin has solved, in a simplistic way, the expression of human sin in money.
When you look at Bitcoin and map it on top of this, you realise that the technology behind Bitcoin is just a tool and that its success is its ability to tackle the behavioural challenges of human nature. In a similar way that I couldn’t be successful in sales without the relationship and trust of the customer (EQ) and the technically competent solution (IQ). Bitcoin’s blockchain (IQ) cannot succeed unless properly designed to tackle human nature (EQ).
To bring this back to where this article started, Alan Greenspan (Former American Federal Reserve Chair) who is quoted at the top of this article knew this as well. “Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere”. With Bitcoin, we have a solution.
I believe it’s a unique lens on Bitcoin, and hopefully, it will help advance not just Bitcoin but adjacent industries with a Bitcoin philosophy. In part two next week, I will dive into this with significant detail that will leave you with my view of Bitcoin’s principles and a framework that can be applied to other industries to start scaling Bitcoin beyond money.
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https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/religion/festivals/cow-hug-day-2023-why-is-cow-so-important-and-worshipped-in-india/articleshow/97774622.cms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_restrictions_on_the_consumption_of_pork#:~:text=The%20pig%20is%20considered%20an,and%20do%20consume%20its%20meat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_restrictions_on_the_consumption_of_pork#:~:text=The%20pig%20is%20considered%20an,and%20do%20consume%20its%20meat.
https://www.qardus.com/news/the-islamic-perspective-on-debt