“Money is power, power is freedom,” says Yago. “If you can control people’s access to capital, you control their freedom. That’s why property rights matter. They are the ultimate access control.”
Yago’s worldview has been reshaped quickly. Born into a family of Holocaust survivors, he grew up in South Africa. There, several of his relatives were forced into exile and were named terrorists by the government. As a child, he played a small role in the survival of the family, smuggling gold coins from the country with his clothes to avoid capital management.
“I did this between the ages of nine and eleven. I knew what I was doing and what was at stake,” he recalls. “What I felt was not fear, it was a responsibility.”
The experience left him with deep beliefs. Money isn’t just about financial freedom. It is about survival, sovereignty and human dignity.
Yago is a firm believer in technological advances. “When you look at history, it’s not ideology, it’s technology, not politics, but politics, that really changes human life,” he says. “Slavery didn’t end because people suddenly became moral. It ended because the Industrial Revolution became economically unviable. The same applies to almost all major social changes.”
But he is not a blind optimist. “Technology doesn’t automatically improve everything. The Internet, for example, was built on the promise of decentralization and free access to information. Today it is dominated by a small number of engineers who act as digital overloads.
“The Internet had no property rights from the start. It was a fatal flaw. Instead of a free and open network, we got a digital version of the Pharaoh who controls the Nile.”
This is where Bitcoin, or more specifically Bitcoin, comes into play.
When Yago first read the Bitcoin white paper in 2011, he received a revelation.
“That was the lack of parts. The foundation of digital property rights. Suddenly, online ownership was not theoretical, verifiable, enforceable, and independent of government and businesses.”
Bitcoin introduced the idea of a decentralized ledger, a record of ownership. However, Ethereum expanded its vision by introducing smart contracts, enabling verifiable distributed calculations.
“A big innovation at Ethereum was that we could validate calculations as well as transactions. But we did so through redundancy, forcing every node to re-execute all calculations.
Yago’s latest project, Bitcoinos, aims to solve that. By using zero knowledge proofs, Bitcoinos can validate calculations without performing redundantly on all nodes.
“Instead of putting everything on the blockchain, we just store evidence that the calculations have happened correctly. This is a fundamental change, allowing Bitcoin to run decentralized applications on a large scale.”
This opens the door for Bitcoin to become a platform for not only currency but for all forms of property. “Imagine a world where ownership of real estate, stocks, digital identities and more lives on Bitcoin’s global ledger. That’s what we’re building.”
According to Yago, the crypto industry is a teenage year. “It’s all banging on the door and saying, ‘I hate you, mom!” Here, Mom is a central bank, regulatory authority, traditional finances. That’s fine. Teens need to push boundaries up.
Over the next decade, Yago hopes that blockchain technology will enter into early adulthood, more stability, responsibility, more integration, integration into the real world. “The crypto industry was about experimentation. The next stage is about scaling and maturation.”
Yago’s way of thinking is not stopped with Bitcoin. He sees a world where digital sovereignty extends beyond money and encryption offers direct access control to rights, freedoms and even governance.
“If the rights are actually about access control, encryption can enforce them more effectively than the law. Rather than relying on the government to grant US rights, they can be encoded into a distributed network.”
He is also worried about AI. “My son grows up hearing a voice in his head that is not his or mine. It’s AI, he guides and mentors him. That’s inevitable. The question is, who controls that voice?
Here, Bitcoino’s core breakthrough, verifiable calculations, become important. “We need a way to prove that our AI systems are acting for our interests, not someone else’s system. Otherwise we are handing over control for the future.”
Yago believes that Bitcoin’s role in shaping this future has only just begun.
“The world’s largest institutions are beginning to use Bitcoin as their global ledger. The network effect is already in motion. Now it’s time to expand what it can do.”
With Bitcoino set up to launch the Alpha Mainnet within a few months, Yago is sure this is the next leap.
“We’re building property rights in the digital age, and once we understand that, everything else falls in place.”
