“Why do you work for free?” — Many people ask me, especially my girlfriend: “You work much more, than people who work for money, you didn’t have a job for years, you are getting fat, why do you have money anyways?” The answer is simple: Passion pays off, even if we have no money in mind, we are positioning ourselves to the flow of money, we are doing many favors on GitHub, in emails, in public forums, and sometimes they are greatly rewarded, sometimes we can see a shitcoin pump is coming from miles away. You often hear people saying on Reddit: “Bitcoin developers are working for free in their free time”, which is mostly true, but it always pays off in some strange ways. And in the end if we ever need money, companies will always stand in line to hire us, because of our opensource work.

But there is more. We could make more money at companies why wouldn’t we? Well, many of us, do. Ever wondered why no Chinese developers in Bitcoin? Their culture is different, they almost always choose money over passion. But in our world money is not that important. We are just programmers, we only need jeans, t-shirts, pizza and coffee. What else would we spend on? We don’t go to events and stuff.

Events. Bitcoin events. Bitcoin meetups. We like them once in a while, but not too often. People there only want to get rich quick. We want to do conversations about merkle proofs and bloom filters, they want to know which shitcoin will be pumped to the sky tomorrow. Their interest is different. But their interest is still more aligned with us, than our friends and family. Friends and family, huh? You mean ex-friends, before Bitcoin times, we have no common interest anymore, our life is Bitcoin.