Jimmy Song has written two books and countless research articles about Bitcoin. He was one of the 100 most influential people in the ecosystem in 2019.
Jimmy Song, who has been developing software for over twenty years, started with the construction of the decentralized economy in 2014, specifically with the projects of Monetas and Armory Technologies, Inc. His current fame as an educator and supervisor of various successful developments have spread throughout the ecosystem.
Song, the author of Programming Bitcoin and professor of a postgraduate course in blockchain programming at the University of Texas in Austin, shared his opinion on the ecosystem in Latin America.
This developer, who attracts people’s attention with his cowboy hat, has over 160,000 followers on Twitter. He also carries stickers with his digital signature so that those receiving his autograph in his new book can authenticate it.
Regarding why Bitcoin works where other deposits of securities have failed, this expert notes that it is the only currency in today’s global economy that allows its users to safeguard value since even the dollar is so vulnerable that it is prone to inflation.
The author cites the case of China, where thousands of people buy second apartments in practically empty cities to protect the value of their savings, thus creating ghost towns. He also mentions that governments worldwide facilitate financing them through concessions to large companies managing the global market.
The educator explains that the current global economy keeps bright people busy with tasks that do not totally exploit their creativity and intelligence. Instead, they must sell their time to obtain and protect value, which slows the advancement of the human race.
Song believes that it is often preferred to create goods and services to make more money, instead of investing time in research. In his opinion, having more small businesses interested in the well-being of local communities would help improve everything. He considers that the nature of Bitcoin provides a very robust alternative to change this scheme.
The issue of privacy has been one of the most widely discussed in recent times among the most influential figures in the ecosystem. Both Jameson Lopp and Andreas Antonopoulos are always defending its importance; however, Song does not believe that a perfect level of privacy can be achieved.
The defender and follower of technology asserts that he would not sacrifice the principle of the 21-million limit for privacy since it seems one of the best features of the algorithm. For him, Bitcoin works because it is self-sovereign and nobody can take it away from its owners or make it lose its value through inflation.
Song thinks that the problem with current money is that government systems can remove and intervene in money as they wish. He mentions the case of exchanges that are forced to deliver their users’ data and claims that taxes are a robbery.
To conclude, Song shares information about his most recent publication The Little Bitcoin Book: a basic guide on Bitcoin and the decentralized economy for beginners, co-written with Timi Ajiboye, Luis Buenaventura, Lily Liu, Alexander Lloyd, Alejandro Machado, and Alena Vranova. It should be mentioned that it has already been translated into several languages.
By Alexander Salazar
