As to "freedom to choose my research topics":
How can you justify to yourself to take money from the people at gunpoint to research bitcoin for hundreds of hours? How about researching wasteful spending by tenured professors?
Hint: I am a professor of
computer science. Guess where the idea of bitcoin came out of?
And methinks that if I could prevent a few folks here losing their life savings to scammers, Brazilian or otherwise, that may already justify my salary. Which may be more than I deserve, but is not exactly taken at gunpoint from them,