During the 2008 presidential election, Vijay Boyapati quit his job as an engineer at Google to campaign for Ron Paul in New Hampshire. A few years after that, he discovered bitcoin, and in 2018 he published an essay on Medium titled “The Bullish Case for Bitcoin,” which got widespread attention and was translated into more than 20 languages.
Boyapati, an Australian native who now lives in the Pacific Northwest, launched a fundraiser on Kickstarter to expand the essay into a book, and it was released at the star-studded 2021 Bitcoin Conference, which was held in early June in Miami.
Reason caught up with Boyapati in Miami to talk about inflation, how bitcoin fits with the Austrian school of economics, his libertarian origin story, and what he thinks has to happen for bitcoin to finally become the new global monetary standard.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie, edited by John Osterhoudt, camera by Jim Epstein and Noor Greene, additional graphics and thumbnail by Lex Villena
Photo: George Skene/MCT/Newscom
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