Learn more about BPI Senior Fellow Andrew Bailey in the latest installment of our Meet the Fellows series.
What do you do for work?
I am a Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College in Singapore and in that capacity, teach and write about money, philosophy, and politics.
Soon — timing here depends on the mercy of American immigration law — I will be a Professor at the new Bitcoin Research Institute at the University of Wyoming. Wyoming is very different from Singapore. That difference should be stimulating. And it will be great to live up in the mountains with Bradley Rettler, and to dedicate much more of my time to thinking about bitcoin.
How did you wind up in your current role?
As a kid, I liked to argue. I'm sure it was super annoying for everyone else, but I had a great time thinking up weird reasons to believe weird things, and then going to battle for them in conversation. Up through my final year of college, I thought that meant I should be a lawyer. Lawyers get paid to argue, after all, and paid well. But somehow I got waylaid by the questions of philosophy — intractable, weird, omnipresent — and went to graduate school instead of law school. I made a choice then to build a life more around thinking than around money.
For someone with my demographics and interests, it was by no means guaranteed, or even likely, that I'd get a job in academia. But I lucked out, and even got tenure and a full professorship and the freedom to think about whatever I liked. I am grateful for it all. Above all, I'm grateful for my students. They've thawed the humanity in my cold robot philosophy professor heart. And they pull me, always, into the real world.
How did you become interested in researching Bitcoin?
Bitcoin has been on my radar for over a decade now — a curiosity, a speculative bet, an intriguing technical oddity. But for years it wasn't much more than those things. In 2015, I wondered if it would just fizzle out. But it didn't. And starting somewhere around 2016 or so, my students wanted to talk about it. A lot. And they never really stopped. So I indulged, and slowly started integrating bitcoin content into my classes. Around the same time, I was asked to lead the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics major at my college, which meant hanging out with social scientists and learning how they think: a useful skill, as it turns out, for thinking about bitcoin.
By 2020, it became clear to me that bitcoin is no mere curiosity, but an increasingly important global force. In a world where digital autocrats are on the rise, we need tools to fight back, now more than ever. Bitcoin looks to be one such tool, alongside other cryptographic contraptions such as Tor and E2EE messaging. It would be irresponsible to notice all this and not bring every intellectual resource to bear in understanding and evaluating bitcoin, it seems to me. So that is what I try to do.
What are your most significant intellectual interests aside from Bitcoin?
Beyond money and bitcoin, I teach or publish in such areas as: metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and cross-cultural philosophy. My early published work defends the view that we are living human animals (as opposed to, say, brains or luminous spiritual beings). More recent metaphysical work, culminating in two short monographs, concerns our value as people and links between human nature and conceptions of the divine. And I've been teaching a cross-cultural philosophy curriculum for a decade now — approximately one third Chinese, one third Indian, and one third European.
I am also enamored with the Legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien and all things Inklings. I rarely let a day go by without reading at least a few paragraphs or pages one of them wrote.
How have your views on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency broadly changed over time?
As hinted above, I take bitcoin much more seriously now than I used to. Bitcoin is, at present, still a niche money. But it's already a player on the global stage that cannot be ignored. For every major news story — war, inflation, tariffs, housing markets, electoral politics, borders, cultural realignment, you name it — there's a bitcoin angle. Back in 2015, we'd go nuts in the forums when just one obscure merchant announced they'd be accepting bitcoin. In 2025, we expect, and find, major bitcoin stories in mainstream venues almost daily. Bitcoin is here, and it matters.
As for cryptocurrency more broadly: I will happily study just about anything, and reject the tribalists who'd socially punish crypto interests outside of bitcoin. I spend a ton of time working to understand how various crypto doodads work, in fact. But I return, always, to the king — bitcoin. There's nothing else out there quite like it.
What misconception about Bitcoin do you hear most from your colleagues?
If there is a single root to the many misconceptions I hear from colleagues about bitcoin it is this: that what is reported by mainstream sources reliably tracks what is important, or backed by the evidence, or true. The opposite is the case, in my experience. Mainstream sources fixate on short term price movements (this is noise, not signal) and outdated research on bitcoin's externalities (much of which is derived from a single debunked paper that's over five years old now). I wish they'd wise up. I do my best to help accelerate that process.
What misconception about Bitcoin or the subject of your research do you hear most from Bitcoin enthusiasts?
The idea that bitcoin is inevitable — that, as a matter of historical necessity, bitcoin will rise in value and usefulness and actual use as a global money — is both widespread and foolish, in my view. It leads to complacency and unnecessary systemic risk, in fact.
Casual reliance on custodial wallets may be a good example of the complacency I have in mind, even though it in fact imperils both users and bitcoin's overall capacity to serve as a useful check on autocratic rule.
Another area of complacency is research. Centralized crypto projects pour millions of dollars every year into supporting academic research across the disciplines. They have that luxury.
Bitcoin, by contrast, has no active or controlling 'foundation', nor does it have a centralized issuer who can print tokens for free and sell them for real money. But make no mistake: academia matters. Senior figures in economics, philosophy, politics, energy, and computer science do not change their minds easily. Students and young faculty, by contrast, tend to be much more open-minded. And where their minds go, so goes the future. Misinformation trickles down a long sewage pipe, from scholarly journals, to media, to public opinion. We'd do well to stop that pipe, and to build a better one that carries the fresh water of truth. That means investing now in research efforts that focus on bitcoin.
What are your hopes for the future of BPI?
Here are three outcomes I'd love to see in the next few years:
Favorite novel?
I already mentioned Tolkien, above, so I'll give another answer. This time, a collection of stories rather than a novel: Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri.
Favorite U.S. President?
I don't simp for politicians.
Who is your biggest intellectual influence?
Alvin Plantinga, Satoshi Nakamoto, St. Anselm, J.R.R. Tolkien.
