You’d think early entrants to the Bitcoin space were a faceless group of super coders armed with powerful mining rigs and algorithms that sought to accumulate as much of the asset as possible via mining and trading.
But while such a personality made part of the niche Bitcoin demographic at the time, other highly influential members of the space were crypto lawyers, educators, writers, and think tank men.
Roger Huang is one such individual. Back in 2014, when crypto information was scanty and much of the industry considered a hacker’s basement paradise, Huang became one of the first writers focusing on cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and their cumulative role in the broader area of remittances and payments.
He has since become a crypto contributor at Forbes, writing on topics ranging from Bitcoin’s role in countries like El Salvador, or how the asset is an alternative to the US-China great power conflict.
Today, Huang caught up with Cryptonites host Alex Fazel to discuss all things crypto, his start in space, predictions for the years ahead, Bitcoin forks, and other relevant, pressing topics that plague the industry.
Following are snippets from the podcast.
On how Huang got started in crypto
“In school, I was starting all these different startups and I realized the power of just code and power being able to build and create things. And so I got involved with this company called Springboard. It’s actually at one point, or I think it is one of the largest boot camps for teaching data science, UX design, and new tech skills.”
“It got me down this rabbit hole of open source technology. And I would say that I’m not just passionate about [it]. I build a lot of tutorials for coding, I built a lot of tutorials with Springboard, and these cover everything from basic JavaScript to more advanced kinds of machine learning algorithms on the Python side.”
“I’m very passionate about being able to build things. For example, I built a classifier that was able to look at Bootcamp reviews and try to infer the gender composition of the boot camps. So just like a cool little project. I’m really passionate about that kind of stuff and being able to empower other people to do that.”
On how Bitcoin helps the underprivileged
“I spent a lot of time trying to understand, maybe not at the deepest level, but trying to understand what happens with borderless people. At one point I went to Tijuana. And then at another point, I went to Athens and just kind of tried to understand you know what it’s like to be completely citizenshipless, completely borderless.”
“And what’s really interesting about that is that they have an internet connection. Like most refugee claimants, asylum seekers, they have devices, they have the internet. But what they don’t have is obviously citizenship. They don’t have the ability to be able to access these different banking systems or anything that we might ascribe in the conventional sense. And, this is a larger and larger proportion of the world.”
“What I found with Bitcoin, and some other cryptocurrency communities too, but mostly in the Bitcoin community, is that there is an interesting ideological intersect, where people you know see themselves as part of the lab scenes.
“They’re all unified in this idea that you know, that we want to tend towards more individual freedoms, we want to tend towards more individual liberty like and all things equal in these systems that we’re trying to create.”
Do countries already support BTC?
“Bitcoin in a weird way already has country-level support. Like, for example, if you could ban running Bitcoin nodes, then you could ban running Tor. I mean, I don’t think that’s something that Germany [could do that] because tonnes of people who run exit nodes into are actually based in Germany.”
“And so there’s a lot going on there in order to attack Bitcoin….it requires the governments of the world to get together, which I think is highly unlikely.”
(Catch the rest of the exciting CryptoNites podcast with Huang’s thoughts on Ethereum, investing, Bitcoin forks, and other trending topics right below!)
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