

I wanted to be a mechanical engineer growing up, I was always playing with Lego and building little mechanisms. Then I had a physics teacher who got into the subject of physics vs engineering. He told the class about his brother who was an engineer for some electric motor company, and how his team would spend 18 months fiddling with the parameters of a motor, and they’d throw a party if they increased efficiency by 0.5%. I couldn’t disagree with his assessment that that sounded boring and soul-draining.
It sounds like the perfect job for a certain kind of person, and I am not that kind of person.
Yup, all boils down to faith in the currency. For something like the dollar, it’s backed by faith in the US government. For something like Bitcoin, it’s backed by faith in the resilience of the blockchain and the value buyers place on it. Emperor Norton minted his own currency which was accepted all around San Francisco based purely on the fact that people accepted it.