About

July 30^th, 2024

Welcome to my blog. I am a Software Engineer who wants to fill the world with Truth, Goodness and Beauty. I don’t know fully what that looks like, but I have an inkling of the direction that I want to explore.

My life has been blessed with discovering my passion from such a young age. My father brought me a computer and hook it up to the internet when I was 7, and I was instantly hooked on this magical tool. I still remember the day I first created my first video game and publish it online, and was in awe of the amazing leverage and creativity that this tool provided. I got to share the game with the world, where thousands of people around the world get to enjoy my game and discuss it. I got to talk with people from all corners of the world, who don’t know me personally and might be of different background or religion, and get to discuss ideas with them as complete equal. The Internet was, to me, was the most beautiful invention of mankind. I truly did believe that I am a part of a journey to infinite flourishing and freedom for all people of the world. To grow up with that Internet is something I will cherish forever.

An unsatisfactory world of adulthood

I went to college and got a Software Engineer job at some big tech companies. The money I enjoyed certainly helps me build a sizable egg nest for a good comfortable life, yet life has become incredibly unsatisfactory. Buildings become more and more ugly, going from the structures that would awe the people to soulless boxes of glass optimized for cheap and built purely to house people. Arts that used to entrance the watchers with timeless details turn into random splashes of color as if drawn by 5-year-old purely to disrupt the scenic harmony and capture attentions. On the consumer product side, foods get smaller and smaller, with worse and worse qualities. Devices that use to last for years are now intentionally obsoleted, to be replaced with products that have ever more basic functionalities locked under subscription model.

Not even the Internet escapes this fate. While from the technological advance perspective, the Internet certainly has fulfilled its role of democratizing information to everybody, we still see visible in many Internet products. Websites no longer allow you the freedom to explore, instead it uses content recommendation to flood with contents that constantly jolts the people’s neurons and exhaust their dopamine reserve, only to then serve as many ads to the eyeballs as possible. Personal websites that used to have beautiful characters and individuality are replaced with bland, commercial looking design that is “brand-safe”, and look the same everywhere. There are still cool corners of the Internet here and there, but most of it have become bland and uninteresting.

I was able to make money studying and doing the things I love, and yet it has not made the world to be a place of Truth, Goodness and Beauty that I dreamt of.

Broken monetary system

I believe the world does not have to be that way. After reading The Bitcoin Standard and The Fiat Standard by Saifedean Ammous, I realized that much of this comes from a completely broken monetary system, designed to slowly leech people of their wealth and force humanity into short-term thinking and high time preference behavior. The effect of this monetary system on various aspect of life is certainly fascinating and certainly something I hope to discuss in details in my materials. In short, I believe the current system cannot hold forever. The world will have to move to Bitcoin Standard, where various avenues of thefts are closed off, unproductive and short-term businesses are replaced, and governments must significantly reform to reduce its size, surveillance, and wars, which appear endless especially in the United States. Money is not everything, but solving money is 70% of the world problem. Only once the current monetary system is taken out can the world focus on its problems, and flourish in Truth, Goodness and Beauty again. Humanity not only can return to its past glory, but can exceed it hundredfolds with the technology at our disposal. The incentive structure, however, has to be corrected first.

Which leads to the question: What will I do about it until then?. The point where Bitcoin became standard, I predicted, will be around 2045. Until that point, I think it is vital to educate to as many people as possible about all the current avenues of leeches. Slavery in the 21st century does not look like that of the old, where you have masters with their slave patrols watching over the cotton plan and ready their whips and guns to violently suppress those who tried to escape. Instead, it is offered as financial products, surcharges, interest rates, fees that take away a few cents and there, yet doing so on the scale of an entire population. They are abstract concepts that take wealth away not by force, but by mathematics and probabilities. These products don’t take directly from a group of poor slaves by threats of violences and forces. Instead, it tries to take a little bit from everyone. No wonder people are oblivious to different forces taking their money. By providing knowledge about how these different forces work at play, I believe I can contribute to keeping as much money in the pocket as possible.

What this blog is about

This blog will have three main sections:

1. Finance: This section will contain a series of blog posts discussing Finance and Bitcoin. I hope to dive deep into the current broken world of Finance, and provide you with tools to help you protect as much money as possible. I offer lots of interactive visualization that brings a deep & unique perspective to the world of Finance. The mathematics of Finance, as depressing as it is a tool for ruthless capital accumulation, is also extraordinarily beautiful. Finance itself is not evil; it can, much like Bitcoin, be used for good under the right setup and circumstances. Its understanding and exploration is vital if we are to build a better world of tomorrow.
2. Bitcoin: This section explores Bitcoin itself, and how the world looks like under Bitcoin standard. Personally, I don’t think this section has been explored fully. Saifedean Ammous mostly bases his interpretation on Gold Standard banking and finance. The reality is that the world of Bitcoin Standard will be filled with much more complex interaction due to the zero-cost transaction of information. Understanding equity, betting, profit expectation, cryptos in the world of Bitcoin will be crucial if we are to use Finance to build a world of genuine human flourishing.
3. AI / ML and C++: These two section continues my fascination with technology and is my contribution to the knowledge of the world. Here, I will document my progress on my own projects and ideas, as well as giving my take on how the technology will progress. Open-source, to me, is the only place in the world where real academia still actually happen, and I want to continue contributing and help the world build beautiful products.

My commitments

I want to make three important personal commitments from this blog. The first one is that I will not offer any subscription product. Financiers, insurance brokers, regulatory consultants make money on charging fees, which incenvize the creation of ever more Byzantine government regulations. Bitcoin will demonetize all of this, but until then, we all have to become hedge fund managers. The only way for this effort to be ethical is for everything to be free, open-sourced. Everything will be available for free and will only be funded by ads.

Secondly, because the knowledge in the blog can affect real life finance, I pledge to make everything open-sourced. This very blog is currently hosted on GitHub, where you can check the code and check every equation. I want my arguments and my math and my code to be checked so that the tools and arguments get better. All contribution and change to the repository will be welcomed.

Finally, I am committed to not using AI to write materials. While I will certainly use AI to help me write visualization code, I find written materials by AI to be average and uninteresting. AI companies try to generate content that maximizes usage time to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible. This leads them to take on writing style that is eclectic and bland in order to express largely safe and uninteresting idea. This tool belongs to automating office work, not to express interesting new ideas.

Thank you for visiting and enjoy the blog! I am looking forward to our fruitful discussion in Social Media and in the articles. Let’s build the world together.

Undercover Economist