Prejudice, the Final Boss Across Realities
Photo by Selene Jin @ Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada
My life's work is the next chapter of human reality.
The long-anticipated convergence of our digital and physical worlds is not a future event but the tectonic shift we are living through. My journey has been to navigate its fault lines and search for the principles that can build a more equitable, more meaningful union of these two realms.
This work has unfolded in three chapters.
Chapter I: Behind the Avatar
The first chapter was written in the crucible of early MMORPGs. In the 2000s, this was more than a game; it was a prototype of a new social fabric. At my peak I ranked #16 globally in WoW Arena, and my identity was forged in merit, strategy, and camaraderie. Behind the avatar, my gender was unseen; I was a leader. The connections felt real precisely because the biases of the physical world were held at bay.
When a viral interview revealed my offline identity, the virtual brotherhood I had built disintegrated. The lesson was stark: prejudice is the final boss across every reality.
Yet the diagnosis also hinted at a cure. It convinced me that one path to a world with less prejudice is to make virtual interaction the default, where trust is earned through shared struggle, collaboration, and character long before physical-world biases can intervene. In such a world, genuine friendship is the foundation, and offline identity becomes context or sometimes irrelevant. Prejudice is not just confronted; it is starved at its source.
This is the hope I carry. My mission is to empower the architects of this future – the creators of games and anime who are raising the next generation on these principles, with tools to build these new defaults for human connection.
Chapter II: Scarcity and Stakes
My time in these early worlds revealed a second, deeper flaw. The social fabric was built on a broken economy. Every epic gear I earned, every piece of gold I accumulated, was fundamentally weightless. In a reality made of bits, anything can be copied at near-zero cost. An asset that is not provably scarce cannot hold value. It is a simulation of wealth, not wealth itself.
Without scarcity, a true converged reality remained out of reach. For our virtual lives to have real stakes, our creations, our labor, and our property must have real, persistent value.
This led me to Bitcoin. For the first time, I saw a solution: a mathematical proof that a unique digital object could exist, free from the threat of infinite replication. It was the foundational protocol for unforgeable value. My work in the crypto ecosystem was a direct continuation of my mission: to architect the tools that would make this new economic reality, one built on a foundation of provable truth, safe and usable for everyone.
Chapter III: From Reset to Resolve
In 2023, the abstract became brutally concrete. A cascade of family tragedy and financial loss wiped out my world. For more than a decade, my overriding purpose had been to overcome the challenges of being a first-generation immigrant so I could be a bridge for my family to a better future. In an instant, that purpose, and the path I thought we were on, were shattered.
I was left with the core questions my life had been asking. From that ground zero, a new, unshakable clarity emerged.
When you have nothing left to lose, your conviction is what remains. My vision of a more equitable, more meaningful converged reality was no longer a distant ambition. It became the way forward. It became my reason to get up in the morning.
The resilience forged in that fire and the hard-won clarity that followed form the foundation of my work. My mission is no longer just a professional pursuit; it is the meaning I now build for myself and for the future we will all share.
