Voorhees is extremely based and a very cool guy...he has consistently "put his money where his mouth is" and has been a major positive for the Bitcoin world as a whole.

His non-Bitcoin stuff is mostly limited to his stewardship of the Shapeshift platform. Of course, I won't bother trying to convince anyone here why such a platform is a good thing (as many folks on SN are wary of even acknowledging anything other than Bitcoin as being legitimate whatsoever), but the truth is, it's an entirely decentralized and trustless, automated service which people can use to swap between a huge number of different crypto assets. So, if nothing else, it is an additional funnel that can be used for people to turn their increasingly worthless shitcoins into good, solid Bitcoin.

Plus, he ran Satoshi Dice back in the day, haha. Seriously though, he's consistently had very good takes on so many subjects and is one of an increasingly small (depressingly so) handful of people who are both highly visible/popular in the cyrpto space but not afraid to speak his mind on topics many would often shy away from. When the government/IRS tried coming after him for Shapeshift, he spent years working to re-tool it into a fully decentralized (truly) platform that can remain operational in it's form because there's literally no one for them to go after. Frankly, that's just something that I personally feel almost obliged to support ideologically.

Oh yeah, and one last reason I can give for Erik being rad (before this starts to veer into some kind of a 'glazing' post or read that way) is that when he finished transitioning Shapeshift into a decentralized DAO, he created a shitcoin for it and gave away airdrops to people who were users of Shapeshift. I happened to be one of those users, and I received a very generous airdrop allocation, essentially for doing nothing but using the site to convert ETH that I had been mining on spare gaming PCs into Bitcoin to stack and save...I took all of the "FOX" tokens (the Shapeshift shitcoins) and sold them and bought more Bitcoin with the profits. If you ask me, that's a win-win-win.

I have to agree. He debated SBF about FTX on some podcast before the whole thing blew up and made it abundantly clear (to me, at least) that it would do so.