Terrence Yang

My Greatest Life Influences

My late parents were teachers, so I had an unfair advantage in the public schools I attended from kindergarten through high school.

By the time I was born, mom was a homemaker and dad kept teaching. We were decidedly middle class. While we were frugal (I always looked forward to getting nice hand me down clothes from family friends), we spent a lot of time together as a family eating meals at home and in mostly Chinese restaurants, and travel.

I carry those spending habits to this day.

My parents were good at saving, but not good at making money and not good at investing. Dad lost money in stocks, futures and then just bought CDs from banks. But we did fine.

Nowadays, given the bank issues, risks of inflation, depression and currency debasement, people have to be portfolio managers. It’s ridiculous, costly and a waste of time. That’s not even getting to the billions of people living paycheck to paycheck or in poverty.

Why I Bitcoin

For me, it’s about freedom and putting people on a more equal footing with government and big special interests.

Growing up, my parents told me horror stories about the Chinese Communist Party. Both my late mom and my late dad’s side of the family were on the losing side of the Chinese civil war.

My dad’s side of the family had all our possessions confiscated during the Communist revolution or Cultural Revolution — gold, jade, jewelry, real estate, stocks, bonds, etc.

Bitcoin is not just hard to confiscate, Bitcoin is also credibly limited in supply, easy for anyone to confirm it’s real by running a full node, (contrast: fool’s gold, and gold-plated tungsten, etc.), easy to divide to smaller pieces and easy to send across space. Peer-to-peer Bitcoin transactions are hard to stop.

My friends have used Bitcoin to take basically their entire net worth to escape capital controls and unfair laws in China and South Africa, etc. to come to the U.S.

I work at Swan in hopes that I can do my part to help real people — human beings — buy Bitcoin before big institutions do and before government tries to kneecap it — and to help give people something that helps them stay as free as they can in an increasingly surveilled and digital world.

Bitcoin is hope.