My earliest exposure to crypto is fuzzy, sometime between 2012-2013 but something was certain: Bitcoin was on the minds of netizens, especially those in software development circles. It's difficult to trace which article or post kicked off my fascination with crypto, but I distinctly recall reading something and getting a very uneasy feeling: I was missing something. So many unanswered questions rooted in "why is Bitcoin so revolutionary?" that these posts failed to deliver an answer.

I had one option dangling in front of me for some time: read the whitepaper. Those of you wielding hindsight are probably guessing what happens next, but…

The Bias Towards Action was not uniformly natural for me. In some contexts, like programming, the bias was always on. In others, I greatly preferred to calculate my moves carefully and make one precise decision. I’m not a particularly fast reader, so picking up research papers was always a calculated decision based on others vetting its contents. And even so, just about every paper I had read before was dry, drowning in irrelevant mathematics, and bored me to tears.

This time was different. While there was no shortage of people espousing to read the whitepaper, I picked it up primarily out of frustration of not understanding the complete picture of what made Bitcoin tick. What would have normally been a calculated decision became a leap into action. That said, I still sat down extremely skeptical and ready to move on if the first page was rife with research jargon.

Imagine my surprise when I found it rather approachable. My young self, with little to no cryptography experience, resonated with every bit of this paper. While some sections of the paper did require me to revisit numerous times, which I did, it did not require software magic that did not exist. The system Satoshi described felt very tangible.

The astute among you who know my background will be quick to notice that I was still in college at this time, so my personal evaluation of the whitepaper may have been easy to dismiss in a sea of other computer science students. I counter this with a few unusual highlights:

1. I built a parallel data processing pipeline for markerless motion capture at my first programming internship in 2008.

2. Around 2011, I took a course in peer-to-peer networks. For the final course project, I built a network that distributed work to train an AI neural network that could read English characters from images.

3. Internships from 2011-2013 at SpaceX and Zefr exposed me to ever increasing levels of building scalable software.

The prevailing theme here is building software that solves problems at scale, often involving networks of computers coordinating on a problem. This experience translates uncannily well to Bitcoin.

When I began to explore the second-order effects of Bitcoin, I was floored at how instrumental it could be in revolutionizing money. A switch flipped in my brain, revving up my bias towards action. Sometime between 2013 and early 2014, my Bitcoin-related activities took a leap. I printed paper wallets. I referred friends to Coinbase and offered to buy the Bitcoin they received from the early signup. I even experimented with CPU mining which had long since given up to GPUs and ASICs.

But you know what might surprise people the most? I coded up an app that accepted bitcoin and never released it. In early 2014 there was a flurry of posts about so-and-so building a bitcoin app, losing keys, and being unable to recover user funds. I wasn't ready for this. I got cold feet and decided the potential payoff of the app being successful just wasn't worth the risk of losing user funds and getting enormous backlash. The decision precision part of my brain was active again.

This sort of paralysis really should not have been the reason for not releasing something. I would later learn what forcing myself to act could have looked like: collecting early user feedback, iterating, proper test coverage, and redundant offline backups. Unfortunately I had already moved on.

It wouldn't be until years later (2017) that I would take the plunge working on Bitcoin software again. During this 3-year gap, my life changed pretty dramatically. I graduated from UCLA which was no doubt surgically calculated. The bias swung back towards action as I took a spontaneous and transformative journey to Taiwan and Japan. The bias ebbed a bit when I executed a pre-planned move to Silicon Valley to start work at LinkedIn (which also exposed me to the next level of software scaling: hundreds of millions of users). Action kicked back into gear the day I met the love of my life, whom I would later marry. There was a lot to distract me from Bitcoin.

After this whirlwind of life transformations, I found more time to revisit Bitcoin and that happened to be right as the Blocksize War was in full swing. There was a lot of drama, and I wasted far too much time reading 2nd and 3rd hand accounts of what was happening. It wasn't until I repeatedly encountered technical-sounding articles with incorrect or misleading conclusions that I began to wise up. I needed to learn from the source material (take action) instead of trusting vague conclusions from randoms on the internet (“calculate”). When it came time to begin my education of Bitcoin source code, I didn't have a clear idea where to start. The most varied opinions were easy enough to find on reddit.com/r/btc. Completely unaware of it at the time, I estimate the majority of what I read was written by those at Bitcoin Unlimited. From this, I came to the conclusion that while the Bitcoin Core code had the most "flight heritage" and eyeballs, the Core team was difficult to work with and hostile to newcomers. I had personally witnessed multiple online communities collapse due to overly self-important people. I suppose it made me a bit weary of joining that community, so I explored other options.

Before going into what happened next, it's important to unpack and reflect on what happened in this moment. While Bitcoin Core certainly did generate an environment that was difficult for some people, I would later learn that this impression was a necessary byproduct of a group of people with no patience for low competency. In a project with such high stakes as Bitcoin, this was unavoidable. The impression that Core was hostile to newcomers turned out to be largely fiction. Anyone with some degree of competency, patience, and receptive to feedback was welcome to participate. That fiction was one of many stories peddled by Bitcoin Unlimited to tarnish Bitcoin Core's reputation. Unfortunately for me, that tarnished reputation put me into calculation mode and significantly delayed my involvement in working on node software at all. I hesitated to work on Bitcoin Core and some time thereafter discovered Bitcoin Cash was due to fork off in August.

I did the napkin math and the block size increase felt like a foregone conclusion. Increasing maximum throughput from 144MB/day to 1142MB/day simply did not generate technical concerns since this was orders of magnitude below the scale LinkedIn operated at. I figured smart people must be working on Bitcoin Cash somewhere. I just had to find them. I noted two node implementations worth exploring: Bitcoin Unlimited and Bitcoin ABC.

In September of 2017, I sent an email to Bitcoin Unlimited asking for an invite to their development Slack channel. About 3 weeks later, I followed up. I never did receive a reply. This was disappointing as my impression, at that point in time, was that Bitcoin Unlimited was very active.

I was struggling to find the right place to start. While hanging out in a public Bitcoin Cash chat server, I indicated my interest in development. Mengerian, aka Antony Zegers, asked if I was interested in helping build Bitcoin ABC. I got that long overdue invite and submitted my first patch in November.

Taking this leap to build open source software for Bitcoin Cash had such a profound impact on my life that I eventually quit my job to work on it full time, and this concept of Bias Towards Action would show up with increasing frequency in the years that followed. Considering that Antony was responsible for ushering in my involvement, it’s incredibly fitting that he was also the grand champion of this motif within Bitcoin ABC.

You know the story doesn’t stop here because you wouldn’t be reading this if eCash hadn’t been forged from a persistent Bias Towards Action. That same ethos turned uncertainty into momentum, hesitation into decisive leaps, and abstract ideas into a battle-hardened protocol. I would have never been a part of any of it were it not for a series of moments that demanded I move before I felt fully ready, each one testing and ultimately strengthening my character.

In the end, the greatest value of this ethos is not what we built with it, but what it continues to unlock. Every meaningful project, every breakthrough, and every personal transformation begins with the same quiet choice: to act rather than slip into decision paralysis through endless calculating and over-precision. As you close these pages, consider where your own Bias Towards Action might be waiting to be exercised. The next step may feel uncomfortable, but history shows it is almost always worth taking. The story is still being written, and the next chapter could be yours to shape.

My Crypto Origin Story: Turbulent Evolution of Bias Towards Action