Jack Liu: Fulfilling the vision for Bitcoin

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Senior executive Jack Liu is leaving his job at Circle to help fulfil the destiny that he sees for Bitcoin. He’s set out his thinking in a manifesto that, appropriately enough, he’s posted on the Bitcoin SV blockchain.

Starting with a quotation from the English poet and visionary William Blake (“to see a world in a grain of sand”), Jack’s message take the form of a letter “to my future self”. In it, he writes about the utopian future he hopes he’ll one day inhabit.

There’s no mention of Bitcoin in his post, but there are hints of themes that will be familiar to those who have speculated on the kind of changes that a complete crypto revolution might entail.

So, for instance, he hopes for his future self that “your world will be frictionless and marked by truth, freedom and fairness. Your world will truly be one that is defined by human imagination and honest work.”

Ideas that Bitcoin could allow the fair valuation of all work are hinted at in the desire that “people would be able to afford the one luxury that could not be bought – time – by reaping the true value of their labor.”

Jack’s taken risks to follow his belief in Bitcoin ever since he quit a well-paid job in investment banking and moved to Silicon Valley six years ago, to investigate the crypto business.

Since then, he’s worked in many different roles in crypto, most recently as Managing Director, Asia for the crypto finance company, Circle. Many of those roles, including Chief Strategy Officer at OKCoin, have meant building products that create better bridges between the worlds of fiat and crypto.

He explained the motivation behind his move: “this industry is so messed up right now,” he said. The problem is that today “we have one use case” – betting on the price of cryptocurrency. And that’s spawned numerous pointlessly competing coins. To realise the full efficiency gains that Bitcoin makes possible, Jack argues, we need more kinds of transactions, not just financial speculation: “a thousand different use cases, not a thousand different coins”.

As he explained in a recent podcast, he has a much bigger vision for crypto. Speaking to CoinGeek, Jack said that although he is “super-bullish” about the future of Bitcoin (“I’m a growth mindset person”), his latest message is intentionally cryptic – no pun intended. But it’s only the first announcement of his future plans, with more details to follow.

One of Jack’s concerns is the urgency of the need to increase the number of transactions on the blockchain because of the halving of the block reward next year. That way, miners will be compensated by transaction fees to make up for lower mining rewards. As to whether that can be done by next year, Jack sounds confident – and hints that his current plan involves working on a solution.

Finally, I asked why Jack is putting his faith in Bitcoin SV rather than other currencies. “I don’t think I’m picking BSV,” he said, “I think I’m picking Bitcoin.”

If Jack is right, “we are about to enter a new phase in the global economy”. Talk of a crypto bear market will end as the cyclical economy will be relegated to history. Fasten your seatbelts and stand by for a brighter Bitcoin future.