Jacob Hamilton

In 2015, Jacob was pursuing grad school in philosophy when he took a seminar on "Bitcoin and Philosophy" that convinced him the critical path of 'doing philosophy' in our time leads through Bitcoin and the revolution it unleashes, not academia. He changed course, learned to code, and started in the industry as a web developer. In 2019, he discovered Urbit, a project to reinvent and restore sovereignty in personal computing and networking whose uncompromising and long-termist approach reminded him of Bitcoin, and he's been passionate about the potential for these complementary technologies to change the world together ever since. This year he's finally made the leap to work full-time on bringing Lightning to Urbit, starting with an Urbit-native BOLT implementation and adding submarine swaps, integrations with Urbit's app ecosystem, and soon a Taro implementation. Simultaneously, he's made the "real life" leap out of the US, joining other Urbiters and Bitcoiners in El Salvador, Mexico, and Honduras to make the word of network states and sovereign individuals a reality.

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