I wasn’t looking for Bitcoin. It found me in the middle of an engineering problem.

Between mid- and late 2010 I was lead architect on a project called Mirror. The purpose was easy to explain and hard to build: a distributed file synchronizer, with no central server. Any client should carry the full history, and conflict resolution would be delegated to the user.

I was already obsessed with distributed computing within the limits of the time. A devout disciple of design patterns. A fan of Barbara Liskov. I studied SICP a lot. I wanted to build systems that didn’t need to ask permission from any central point to function.

With my team, we created an algorithm we baptized EAI — sounding like the Portuguese question “e aí?”, a casual “what’s up?” between machines. That’s what the nodes did: they exchanged their file lists, compared the hashes, and validated the differences. Simple and direct. In a second stage, inspired by librsync, we split files into hashed blocks and transferred only the delta. With that we gained efficiency in transfer and, as a bonus, a granular history of every file.

It was in one of those optimizations that the story turned.

I needed a hash algorithm faster than the MD4 we were using in our customized librsync. I went looking for alternatives. I found BLAKE. Through BLAKE I got to Bitcoin. Through Bitcoin I got to the paper.

I already had a certain preparation for that encounter without knowing it. I’d been using Linux since the beginning of 1996 — Conectiva and Debian, when installing a free operating system was almost an act of faith. I took part in the public-key signing ceremonies the community organized. Cryptography was part of my life, but I’ll admit it: it was more fun than conviction. I didn’t take it as seriously then as I do today.

When I read Satoshi’s paper, I was drawn to two things.

The first was the architecture. The elegance of proof of work solving consensus in a P2P network was beautiful to see. It was the kind of solution I admired — the ones that seem obvious after you’ve read them but nobody had thought of before.

The second was the economic problem: the separation of money and the State. Something that, after all these years, I realize has almost become a Freudian slip in the ecosystem’s narrative. But in that moment, for me, it was revolutionary.

It happens I wasn’t working in an academic vacuum. I worked for banks. And for the São Paulo Stock Exchange.

I had daily proximity to the technical and business problems of the financial system — the inefficiencies, the layers of intermediation, the absurd costs of reconciliation. And suddenly I had in my hands the paper of a system that proposed to eliminate all that at the root.

Of course I couldn’t keep quiet.

I walked the corridors of Bovespa — today B3 — avidly talking about Bitcoin. I said one day they’d give in. They called me crazy. I don’t need to say they were wrong.

Around 2014 I went to New York because I’d been told there were people trading bitcoin in person in a square. Also, I had an acquaintance working at an exchange. By then I was already carrying scars: I had lost some bitcoins in the Mt. Gox hack. What’s left of that episode is a letter in Japanese that I keep to this day as a war relic.

In New York I helped with outreach and operations at the Bitcoin Center, where I met many people who later became known names in the ecosystem. The atmosphere was electric. Nobody there was sure of anything, but everybody was convinced something big was happening.

From there to here the road was long and full of curves.

I helped create the first Brazilian stablecoin. I led teams across various blockchain projects. I contributed to proposals tied to BIP 300. In 2020, I co-founded a protocol for hashrate derivatives. In mid-2021, I wrote a Lisp for zero-knowledge circuits using Groth16 and Bellman — because sometimes the best way to understand a technology is to build tools for it.

I co-founded CS Digital, recently acquired and listed on the Nasdaq.

I visited countless conferences. I met hundreds of people in this ecosystem. Some brilliant, some lost, all of them moved by some version of the same restlessness that grabbed me that afternoon in 2010 when I just wanted a hash faster than MD4.

Looking back, what impresses me isn’t the size of the journey. It’s the fact that it started with a small, specific, mundane technical problem. I wasn’t trying to change the financial system. I was trying to synchronize files faster.

But that’s how things happen, isn’t it? You pull on a thread and discover it’s stitched into the whole fabric.