I Read the Bitcoin White Paper and Didn’t Look Back
How I Found Bitcoin Before It Was Cool, and Why God Was Already There
I didn’t come to bitcoin looking for a trade.
That matters.
In December of 2013, I read the Bitcoin White Paper. Not skimmed it. Read it. Line by line. For nearly a decade earlier in my career, I was a proprietary futures trader. My world had been U.S. debt. Five-year and ten-year Treasuries. Eurodollars. German Bunds, Bobls, Schatz. Gold. Silver. Gasoil. Duration. Yield curves. Liquidity. Leverage, Technical Analysis, Ichimoku Clouds (9 and 26 so prevalent).
So when I opened that nine-page document, and read the first 26 words, my brain wasn’t thinking, “How do I make money on this?”
It was thinking, “If this works, it changes everything.”
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto www.bitcoin.org
Abstract: A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution. That was the moment. The quiet one. No fireworks. No pump. Just a deep internal recognition that something fundamentally new had entered the world. I didn’t have language for it yet, but looking back, I’d call it discernment. The Holy Spirit has a way of flagging things before your intellect catches up.
I was orange-pilled before we had a word for it. I was HODLing as HODL became a badge of honor. Interestingly on December 18, 2013, that typo became a theology. I smile every time I think about that.
At the time, I was living in Menlo Park, California. Ground zero for Silicon Valley. Sand Hill Road. Venture capital at its peak arrogance and brilliance. If there was ever a place where new ideas were debated, dismissed, funded, or buried, that was it. It was the perfect environment to test whether bitcoin was real or just another clever white paper.
Professionally, I was working at Comerica Bank in their Technology and Life Sciences division. My job was venture debt. Lending to early-stage, venture-backed startups. Building relationships with founders and the VCs who backed them. Asking questions. Lots of them. Learning how businesses actually scale. Learning what investors look for when they deploy conviction capital, not tourist capital.
That role trained me. Not just financially. Spiritually.
It taught me patience. Discernment. Pattern recognition. It taught me that the loudest ideas are rarely the most durable ones. And it taught me to listen carefully when something doesn’t fit existing categories.
So I started learning.
I fell into the rabbit hole the old-fashioned way. YouTube. Long talks. Deep dives. Andreas Antonopoulos explaining bitcoin not as a product, but as a protocol. A philosophy. A system. Nights spent rewinding videos, pausing, replaying. Reading forums. Studying game theory. Economics. Cryptography.
This wasn’t entertainment. It was formation.
Somewhere in that season, one of my banking customers, Matt Roszak, and I had a conversation about bitcoin. He was looking for a bank that could actually support companies in this emerging space. Not tolerate them. Support them. That conversation mattered more than either of us probably realized at the time.
Matt went on to start the Bitcoin Supper Club among countless other companies in the cryptoverse. An idea that sounds simple and was anything but. He invited me to the second event they ever hosted, at Spruce in San Francisco. About sixty people in the room. Maybe fewer. And yet, it was a literal who’s who of the people building what would become the crypto industry.
I love meeting people. Always have. That night felt like Pentecost for technologists. Different backgrounds. Different accents. Different motivations. One underlying conviction. Something new was being born. I desired to go deeper with all of them.
That dinner didn’t make me solely bullish. It made me committed.
My first bitcoin purchase came shortly after, on February 24, 2014, through Coinbase. Nothing dramatic. No screenshot. No announcement. Just obedience to what I believed was true.
All of this happened before AWS. That part matters too.
I tried, earnestly, to bank as many of these early companies as I could. You know the names. We all do now. But back then, they were just founders with conviction and limited options. Sadly, Comerica couldn’t get comfortable. A few accounts were opened. Most were eventually closed. It was painful to watch. Not because of lost fees. Because I could see what was coming, and the system couldn’t. Fortunately and humbly eventually most of them became my customers at AWS.
God often allows that tension. Seeing before stewarding. Knowing before building.
Along the way, I was fortunate to meet Dan Held and serve as his banker. In a moment of beautiful irony, he sold the first company ever acquired for bitcoin. ZeroBlock, acquired by Blockchain.com. I later banked his drone company, Hover. Dan remains one of the clearest thinkers in the space. A builder. A teacher. A steward.
In May of 2015, I attended the very first Consensus conference. Four hundred, maybe five hundred people. That was it. Vitalik spoke just ahead of Ethereum’s public launch. No stadiums. No celebrities. No Lamborghinis. Just builders, whiteboards, and big ideas. What a time.
I attended countless meetups. Warehouses. Coffee shops. Living rooms. Always the same feeling. This was not rebellion. It was repentance. A return to first principles. To honesty in money. To truth in systems.
Looking back, I see God’s fingerprints everywhere.
Bitcoin taught me patience.
It taught me obedience without affirmation.
It taught me to hold conviction through long winters.
Scripture says that wisdom cries out in the streets. Sometimes it also publishes a white paper.
I didn’t find bitcoin by accident. I found it by listening.
And the journey is just beginning.
Prayer 🙏🔥🕊️
Father God, Thank You for guiding our steps long before we understand the destination.
Thank You for planting conviction before outcomes, and truth before validation. Help us recognize what You are doing early, steward it faithfully, and remain humble as it grows.
Teach us to listen. To discern. To obey without applause.
May bitcoin be used for good. May systems serve people. And may everything we build honor You and bless generations to come. In Jesus’ name, Amen. ✝️💛