Following the Money

Following the Money: From Gold to Bitcoin

Part 3: Where concerns about monetary systems lead to a fateful discovery of cryptocurrency

The graveyard shifts at London clubs were slowly killing me, but they also gave me something unexpected: time to think during the day while everyone else was at their conventional jobs. In those afternoon hours, while recovering from another 4 AM finish, I started following threads that would completely reshape my understanding of how the world actually works.

It began with what I came to recognize as fascinating patterns in how legal personhood actually functions. Starting with birth registration, I traced connections through incorporated legal personhood, legal jointure and enforcement mechanisms, all the way to bond markets and debt structures. How do birth certificates create legal entities? How does legal jointure bind individuals to obligations of these artificial persons? How do these obligations connect to financial instruments traded in bond markets? Each answer led to deeper questions about money itself, or more precisely; debt.

The Rabbit Hole Opens

The more I learned about the global financial system, the more concerned I became about money printing and the long-term stability of fiat currencies. This wasn’t abstract economic theory - I could see how monetary policy decisions made by central banks affected real people’s lives, often in ways that weren’t immediately obvious but were deeply unfair.

My response was probably predictable for someone with my hands-on approach to complex systems: if the system is broken, opt out. I decided to “buy out” of fiat currency and into what I thought was a more stable store of value: silver.

Physical metal felt more real because it represented actual collateral rather than debt - promises of future productivity that constitute the accounting error at the heart of our financial system. But precious metals also had obvious limitations. Storage was complicated, transactions were cumbersome, and verification required specialized knowledge. As a hedge against monetary system collapse, silver made sense. As a medium of exchange for daily transactions, it was practically useless.

Bitcoin: The Second Encounter

This investigation into alternatives to fiat currency quickly led me back to Bitcoin, which I had encountered during my college years and considered as a micropayment mechanism for a music platform project I was calling “busk” but was ultimately overwhelmed by the white paper. This time, I approached it with the systematic curiosity that had served me well in audio engineering and venue management.

The timing was fortuitous - I was rediscovering Bitcoin just as the infamous DAO hack was unfolding in 2016. The cryptocurrency space was experiencing its first major test of how decentralized systems handle catastrophic failures. Instead of being scared off by the chaos, I was fascinated by how the community responded, debated, and ultimately evolved their protocols.

I started buying ETH at around $7, about a year before the scene exploded into what would become known as the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) cambrian explosion. From my perspective as someone who had watched bands release music through creative commons and learned how alternative economic models could work, the fundraising innovations happening in crypto made intuitive sense.

The Cambrian Explosion

I ingested every second of what crypto people called the “cambrian explosion” - the period when hundreds of new blockchain projects launched, each with novel approaches to mechanism design and token economics. This wasn’t just about new forms of money; it was about entirely new ways to organize human cooperation at scale. Coming from the music industry, I understood how powerful new distribution mechanisms could be. Creative commons had allowed Neon Flea Circus to reach audiences and generate revenue in ways that traditional records would eventually be forced to adopt. Similarly, ICOs were allowing projects to raise funds and build communities without traditional venture capital gatekeepers.

The mechanism design aspects particularly captured my attention. Each project had to solve fundamental questions: How do you incentivize desired behavior? How do you prevent gaming of the system? How do you balance the interests of different stakeholders? These were the same questions I’d encountered when designing sound systems for different venues, just at a much larger scale and with much higher stakes.

Slovakia and Serendipity

Among the projects I was tracking was Pillar Project, which was building something they called “the personal data locker.” The concept resonated with me - using blockchain technology to give individuals control over their own data rather than surrendering it to centralized platforms.

When Pillar invited people to Slovakia for an unconference they were hosting, I decided to go. This wasn’t a calculated career move; it was curiosity-driven exploration of the kind that had led me from guitar playing to sound engineering to AV management.

The unconference format itself was interesting - no predetermined agenda, just passionate people sharing ideas and seeing what emerged. It felt like the kind of environment where cross-pollination between disciplines could happen, where someone with my weird combination of audio engineering, venue management, and crypto enthusiasm might actually contribute something valuable.

A month or two later, I found myself hired to work with them on the personal data locker project. The transition from London club technical management to blockchain startup was jarring, but the underlying pattern was familiar: join a project that’s trying to solve interesting problems, learn everything you can about the domain, and figure out how to make complex systems actually work for real people.

From Sound Systems to Economic Systems

The shift from optimizing audio equipment to designing economic mechanisms might seem dramatic, but the fundamental challenges were surprisingly similar. Both required understanding complex feedback loops, managing competing constraints, and designing for real-world conditions rather than theoretical ideals.

In audio engineering, you learn that the best theoretical solution often fails in practice due to room acoustics, user behavior, or equipment limitations. Similarly, in crypto mechanism design, elegant mathematical models often break down when they encounter actual human psychology and economic incentives. My experience troubleshooting sound systems under pressure - diagnosing problems quickly, implementing workarounds, and iterating based on feedback - turned out to be excellent preparation for the fast-moving, high-stakes world of blockchain development.

The graveyard shifts had ended, but the real all-nighters were just beginning. Cryptocurrency markets never sleep, protocol upgrades can’t wait for convenient schedules, and when something goes wrong with a smart contract, the entire community is watching in real time.

Patterns and Preparation

Looking back, the path from precious metals to Bitcoin to joining a blockchain startup reveals a pattern that would define the next phase of my journey: following genuine curiosity wherever it leads, even when the destination isn’t clear at the outset.

The investigation into monetary systems wasn’t driven by a desire to join the crypto industry - it was driven by a need to understand how fundamental systems actually work. The technical theater years had taught me that complex systems often behave differently than their designers intended, and I wanted to understand whether our monetary system was one of those cases.

Bitcoin and blockchain technology represented something I hadn’t encountered before: technical systems designed from the ground up to be resistant to capture by centralized authorities. After years of working within existing institutional frameworks - record labels, venue owners, equipment manufacturers - the possibility of building new institutional frameworks was electrifying.

The personal data locker project at Pillar would turn out to be one of the most challenging and educational experiences of my life. But that’s where the real adventure begins - the transition from observer to participant, from someone who learned about blockchain technology to someone helping to build it. The money trail had led me to Slovakia, and Slovakia had led me to the crypto frontier. What I didn’t know was that I was about to get a crash course in organizational dynamics that would make the chaos of Shoreditch bar management look like a meditation retreat.

But first, I had to survive what I can only describe as one of the most intense learning experiences of my life - a masterclass in emergence, uncertainty, and what happens when passionate people try to build the future without a clear roadmap.

Next in the series: “Into the Chaos: My Pillar Project Initiation” - where blockchain idealism meets organizational reality in ways no one could have predicted.