Journeys

"Apart from having a good wife, I have everything I need in life, and money is not going to get me more of what I need."

"Lots of my friends lost their savings because banks suddenly shut down and nobody would guarantee their life savings. So this was like quite a shock.”

"My wife claims that I live in the future all by myself. And once in a while, society ends up coming to where I have been sitting on the road and waiting for them for a long time."

Dan Held is a Texan who doesn’t drive a truck, drink beer, love Trump, or watch sports. He's a tech enthusiast who isn't into coding. He looks like a typical preppy dude, wearing a white-button-up shirt and carrying a swoop haircut, but he flies drones, tinkers on full nodes, and...

“How advanced would the United States be if you couldn’t send money from New York to Florida? From New York to California? From Oregon to Washington? It wouldn’t be the United States! It would be a mess of all these squabbling little city-states that can barely get it together.”

“I loved crypto. I loved the libertarian ideas. At that time, everyone was talking about freedom, about privacy, about the necessity of changing finance, about giving back financial freedom to people. I really believed in that and I still believe in such ideas.”

“If you’d asked people in the late 1800’s what they wanted, they’d have wanted a faster horse and buggy. They didn’t know they wanted a car.”

“In the future, I think people will use money without even knowing what the underlying technology is. Whether it’s the Bitcoin network, Lightning, Liquid, Litecoin or anything else. In the end, that’s going to be abstracted away from the user. All they care about is sending value.”

“Ultimately, the future is not something to be predicted at all. It’s something to be achieved.”

“The Treasury can just snap their fingers and print money. Bitcoin doesn’t work that way. Here’s this alternative financial system that I’ve never really thought about before. All of a sudden I was like, huh, there’s something here.”

“Obvious ideas are obvious after the fact.”

“I started to see that it was the blockchain community who would be happy to have me. My expertise was appreciated instead of being looked down upon.”