The man in the beanie
and glasses, sipping a flat white, looks very at home in amongst Sydney’s Bondi
crowd. But he is not there to talk to me about the surfing or café culture. We
are there to discuss bitcoin, and in particular, the book he has written about
bitcoin.
Gustaf van Wyk is man
who wears many hats (today’s is a blue beanie). He is architect, designer,
artist, bitcoin enthusiast and now, author. An Idiot's Guide To Bitcoin is a book which, he says, “makes it easy for the
average man to get involved with bitcoin.”
But how did a man, who
comes from South Africa and started out studying architecture, come to write
and illustrate a book about digital currency? For a start, it came down to
passion. “What made it possible for me was that I was passionate about it. I
can’t do anything I’m not passionate about,” he says. It was for that reason
that architecture fell by the wayside because he was not able to “sit at a desk
and draw line drawings for someone else for ten years.” He began freelancing
and bar tending but it was bitcoin that got him “really excited.”
“I discovered bitcoin
about two years a go,” he tells me. The way he discovered it, he says, “is an
interesting story,” and one which started out on the Silk Road, the underground
website, known for being an online market for drugs, aka the “ebay for drugs”.
The site accepts bitcoin and this was where Gustaf was introduced to it,
although he could instantly see its potential was a lot bigger than the black
market. “I have a bit of an alternative view on life and I could see through
the fact it was drugs and that caught me and I thought this is really
interesting, and I took it from there.”
His alternative view
stems from the belief that “the use of force has no place in human society.”
Once we are on this subject, his eyes light up and it is clear this is one area
he is passionate about. “Bitcoin immediately to me was the removal of force
from economics. It comes down to volition and mutual consent. There are no
third parties, no pressure. I’ve always wanted something to fight for and there
are so many causes and you do your bit here and there, but nothing was really
an umbrella cause, and bitcoin became that for me. Through bitcoin I could see
a better world. I’ve never been able to project a better world through any
other projects that have come my way. Bitcoin was that – I immediately started
learning as much as I could and finding out what was going on and getting
involved. In fact I only used Silk Road twice and after that, then I started
buying bitcoins and trading them,” he says.
He admits to initially
making “a bunch of money,” just through bitcoin’s value increasing as he first
bought them when they were around $10, but he says, “I quickly realised, you
can’t treat bitcoin as a commodity. It really is a means of trade.” Is he one
of the “bitcoin millionaires”? No. “I spent them too quickly, I was too
enthusiastic,” he laughs.
He is, however, a
libertarian. He seems hesitant at first about labelling himself as such. “There
are a lot of connotations of words,” he explains, but then he nods and is
certain. “Yes, absolutely. Yes, I am a libertarian. As far as the root of the
word libertarian, as in liberty and freedom, then yes I am a libertarian. I
think mankind only has one right and that’s freedom; all other rights are derivatives
of that right.”
Some of the things he
says seem to follow the same school of thought as the bitcoin evangelists, people
such as Roger Ver and Erik Voorhees. He agrees. “But one my big influences,
which I am proud to admit, was Ayn Rand, growing up: her theories on
objectivism and the basic human right of freedom, and how she arrived at that
point, where objectively our minds are our survival mechanism. We don’t have
claws, we survive with our minds and therefore we have the right to use our
minds. That’s where it comes from for me… The freedom to do what I want, as
long as I don’t violate that exact same right of someone else."
"It came down to
a very simple truth and that is freedom and bitcoin was that, and when I saw
that, it was so exciting.”
It was, he admits, like
an epiphany, although he laughs, “There was no moment. It was probably over a
matter of weeks, but by the end of those weeks, once I had really cleared up
what bitcoin was in my mind, and I had gone through it, I knew it had to be
driven as hard as it could.”
So, today that is
exactly what he is doing and An Idiot’s Guide To Bitcoin is his way of doing it.
The 100-page e-book, available from his website, first establishes, “what is money?” by giving some context
and background, before taking the reader on a light-hearted, and at times
humorous, journey into the world of bitcoin.
What makes this book
even more unique are the beautifully-drawn illustrations, which are
interspersed throughout, usually at the start of each chapter. “That was the
most fun part,” he says. “Some of them are a little bit cryptic, just a bit of
fun to add my own flair because I am an artist. I think I did about one hundred
drawings before I chose the right ones.” He tells me he might add some more and
he has left himself open to do that, by publishing this book as version 1.0. “Bitcoin
is a new thing and it is growing. I can’t release a book and sit on it. But
that’s part of the fun, keeping up with things.” When I ask him about that point,
about how quickly the bitcoin ecosphere is evolving and how the statistics are
becoming outdated, he smiles. “The phrase ‘at the time of writing’ comes up
often,” he says.
Illustration by Gustaf van Wyk
Within the book there is
a little history, a sprinkling of statistics and importantly, some practical
information about how to use it, including useful websites and simple
explanations of much of the terminology surrounding ‘crypto-currency’. “If you
read the book with no technical background, apart from knowing what the Internet
is, you will understand it,” he says.
Simplifying the concepts
was very important to Gustaf, especially as he comes from a creative background
and, by his own admission, the two worlds, of art and finance, are often very
separate. “We don’t really know too much about finances, especially when it
comes to the bigger vocabulary of accounts and things,” he says. This is where
bitcoin taught him a valuable lesson. “You assumed money was a complex thing,”
he says, “and through bitcoin I learned money really is not a complex thing and
it shouldn’t be a complex thing. They hide so much from us through complexity
and then you just accept that you do not understand it. Then the question came
to me: What is money really then?”
This was the question
that inspired the first two chapters of An
Idiot’s Guide To Bitcoin and really got him thinking about how big the
financial industry has become, quite literally. “The tallest buildings in the
city are always the banks, when money is really just a facilitation between two
parties. It has become a third entity, this powerful thing in the middle, and
bitcoin to me was back down to the basics of what money is: just a facilitation
between two traders, people who have value to offer. It becomes an exchange of value with no
strings attached and then I realised that people need to understand that money
is not complex and I wanted to show them that, and bitcoin was the vehicle.”
He even says his third
chapter, outlining what bitcoin is, comes down to a simple idea that, “bitcoin
is money.” He adds, “Everyone tries to describe what bitcoin is on the Internet
and everyone has a different little phrase or solution but at some point, you
don’t need to understand what it’s all about, you just need to know that
bitcoin is money.”
But what about the
future of bitcoin as money? Gustaf believes it will not necessarily be smooth
sailing. “The nature of bitcoin threatens the nature of the world right now: all
this banking and all these centralised powers. If bitcoin is going to succeed,
they stand to lose a lot of that power. I realised if bitcoin is going to have
its day in the sun, it is going to have to stand its ground to these people at
some point. That fight will come because these central banks, they are not
going to go silently into the night, why would they?” It is another reason
behind his writing An Idiot’s Guide To
Bitcoin. His “effort,” he says, to promote bitcoin to the wider public,
“because I believe our only hope for the survival of bitcoin is if it grows, if
enough people use it and if the bitcoin economy grows."
The banks and central
authorities are not the only obstacles, he believes, facing bitcoin. Gustaf
thinks the issue will be wider than that; that the struggle is going to be
“with the Western world.” He explains, “Because I’m from Africa, I pay a lot of
attention to what’s happening there. The developing world is absolutely poised
to pioneer this revolution, if you want to call it that, because their national
fiats are inflation-ridden, over-taxed and over-controlled; the places with the
highest buy into bitcoin is the developing world.
“Then you have the
western world, who are complacent, who are comfortable, who are kept that way
and who don’t have an immediate, on the ground need for bitcoin, where the
developing world do.”
It is those parts of the
world where he is keen to go and do more work. He talks about bitcoin wallet,
Kipochi, and its integration with M-Pesa, Kenya’s hugely popular mobile payment
system (used by over two-thirds the adult population there.)
He hopes that it can take off in countries such as India. “If it can go viral
in India then a sixth of the world’s population will accept bitcoin. That would
be wonderful. These are the places I would like to work and do more promotion,”
he says.
“Maybe it is time for the developing world to be the pioneers in
something.”
For Gustaf, there are
many other avenues he would like to explore and he is not afraid to admit one
of the reasons he wrote the book was because he needed to make some money as
well. He announced the sale of An Idiot’s Guide To Bitcoin just a week a go and already has had over 100 sales. He tells
me he is making just enough to survive on while being able to promote the book
and work on his other “bitcoin endeavours”. One of those involves hosting a
free “bitcoin for beginners” event in Sydney at some point in the future. He is
also looking into getting a physical version of the book printed with the help
of crowdfunding.
Finally, I ask him how
he envisages the future for bitcoin. He laughs and looks a little sheepish. “I
don’t know if I should admit this. The full potential of bitcoin is beyond our
imagination. I don’t think we would recognise the world that we live in because
if you think about the main purpose of political borders — to protect national
economies — if everyone is trading in a global economy, those borders become
obsolete. I think about the world John Lennon asked us to imagine … I think the concept of one world economy that
is not centralised is so massive, that we can all live as one.” So does he
think John Lennon would be in favour of bitcoin? “Absolutely,” he says. “I don’t
doubt that for a second!”
Gustaf’s own enthusiasm for
bitcoin is contagious and it’s fair to say, the bitcoin world has probably not
heard the last of him. “The book is really
just the beginning,” he says. “I’m just testing the waters.”
By Louise @ Bitscan
