but I think I’ve had a semi-religious experience regarding Bitcoin this morning. I honestly didn’t think that could happen here again.
Time * work energy * security = fruition. Got it.
But I was wrong. Or maybe I’m just elated that I’ve almost managed to find a way to spend some curiously salted utxos, and also recognizing that I perhaps haven’t been amazing at taking the past few years in stride.
Regardless, I’m still here in a sort of casual awe at how it creates perfect economic seasons where money can cool off. Where people can reflect. Yes. We also need rest. We aren’t ASICS that can take data 24/7, crunch it all, and not bug out.
Sometimes Bitcoin is worth more (ironically, bear markets, once you see it), so you work harder for it then. That’s the case going forward, maybe the next year or two. Maybe be a little harder to find cheap steaks in the meantime.
But I can rest assured knowing that all the energy I put through a PoW system such as Bitcoin allows me to know that the work I do as a human, which I also have to align with my ethics on a personal level, will only grow in value as epochs move on.
Then there’s the inevitable expansion of bringing in new souls to Bitcoin every epoch. We all introduce our friends and family. They come in. Then you see them bringing in folks. They are learning now too finally, and they want to understand better what the properties are at the core.
It’s like a heartbeat sort of, but one that happens only once every four years. An expanding pulse. More people interested, but only half as much supply suddenly available on futures market, which runs in backwardation to USD.
That’s another thing that happened since coming across Bitcoin in grad school—it’s taught me about all sorts of other markets.
Should pretty much be always two constants of the market—Bitcoin going up (hope rising from the ashes of pseudo-governments destroying their own money) and the VIX going down (people realizing shit is probably not going to be as bad as they feared). Else=print recession.
There will always be forks, and gambling, and hash wars, until society sort of writ large learns to respect the internet (the ultimate time machine) as a whole really for the public depository (library) of codebase that it is
But it also means that mined pristine bitcoin is maybe easier to debug than bitcoin that has been salted a few times over, as it’s moved across time, and different platforms, and shot back and forth between nodes running different rules.
I mean, even at it’s essence, every shitcoin out there currently sitting in some strange SIMS metaverse where you use it to pay for your dry cleaning, it’s ultimately just an extended expression of the Bitcoin ledger—some history of transactions that has aged toward the graveyard of usability, by being exchanged over and over, but for the sake of novelty more than profit—over in the land of the present where every bad idea has surely been tried (let’s make a coin that tracks the supply chain, ugh) and even some good ones, have failed.
I also suddenly get why Luke wants smaller blocks if we really want to make this something that will be attractive to people in 2070. And especially 2170.
That sort of shit absolutely matters when you get to the point of devoting your life’s work toward using a money that is the bane of every other money’s existence.
We aren’t just a bunch of nerds anymore. Militaries hire out kiddos like Jason Lowery these days just to better understand Bitcoin themselves.
It literally feels like the beginning of an evolutionary bottleneck sometimes.
And it’s why you probably want to be mining during these times of global peak energy, regardless of whether it costs a bit more where you are hashing it.
I think this journey has simply taken me longer to understand than others who actually were competent “shadowy supercoders” back in the 1990s and 2000s.
But now I find myself here at 40 teaching myself to code—not even for work—or to put my name in the GitHub, but to just better understand the pros and cons of every argument. And of course, to debug some of my own bitcoin, which I put through a strange self-attack of salting by not understanding some of the rules and acting carelessly over time.
And, of course, to understand BIPs enough that I make good decisions in the future regarding how I run my node.
Here your vote actually does matter. Like there are literally only ~50k votes, STILL, GLOBALLY, and even amongst those running nodes—some don’t even have a clue what they are doing.
They maybe just bought a Ledger last week and stored their first UTXO. Hell, maybe they never even downloaded core. Maybe they pay someone smarter than them to “vault” it for them. I can certainly grasp why people like Saylor would do it—even have to do it.
Because, let’s face it, when you put ideas out to other humans—sometimes the bad ones prevail first, and only through growth do we adapt to better practices. How many of us especially wish that we had made one or two decisions differently over the past few years?
And Bitcoin, well, Bitcoin is still really just the longest decentralized ledger outside of some strange setups like Church or AA.
Oh, and it’s global and free to use also.
I will be moving somewhere outside of this energy desert (California) while the economy sort of unwinds here I think, and maybe to a place with cheaper power—with a little more nourishing environment, both spiritually, and with regards to energy conversion.
Somewhere where time moves a little slower, helps me appreciate it for the short glimpse into other worlds I have for now. Hope to maybe buy a few miners over the next year or two and plug them in. But mostly, I want to just make sure that I can subsist off-grid too. Would love 100 acres complete with a creek I can milk for hydroelectric.
Tons of people I’ve met since 2011 just via Bitcoin—and I think one day Bitcoiners will be one of the largest global communities there is. Reminds me honestly in some ways of Burning Man. Like some weird mix of people who were children to those who went to Woodstock—but also had some deeper fascination and frustrations with how money has been managed.
But we are also the community that isn’t ever going to forget. We’ve grown up in a world of “taxation without representation”. And us Gen-Xers are especially miffed at being forced off the gold standard.
Bitcoin was born precisely because humans can’t keep their grubby little fingers out of the Cheetos bag, and right now there’s a CFO somewhere thinking “yeah, but that would be considered “extreme, so they will bail us out.” Repo market how big now?
Not everyone has to get along here—there are actually some epic and long standing feuds—but you also don’t want to limit out ideas just because someone you don’t like who has them.
The rules you run on your node are the rules your coin moving forward could be limited to in the future. If you pull a Jihan Wu, you could live to regret it pretty hard. Lot of Bitcoin got burned at the alters of misspends, Satoshi’s dice, mex, or “the next bitcoin”—basically humans just caught in a dopamine cycle of chasing.
Ultimately, life is a journey, and with any luck—you get to enjoy your senescence. But you also want your stored money to be spendable wherever bitcoin is spendable in the future. So really, do learn from other’s mistakes here.
You are adding risks with every salt or level of complexity you add, with every coinjoin, and even with every input you receive but don’t know the history of beforehand.
And that’s what I learned this week, as I’ve sort of dove into how I’ve managed to lock myself out of at least three child keys of a wallet.dat file that has just been evolving across different platforms over several years while also undergoing rule changes to the repository as well as general updates I make to the computer I’ve been storing it on—like Python, OpenSSL, etc.
Usually we do best with money when we aren’t obsessing about it. Bull markets actually make life pretty chaotic if you think about it. Took my months to figure out how to debug that shit. And yet elsewhere, someone else doesn’t even own Bitcoin.
In the end, you choose what your node accepts and sends. You are responsible for building your own firewall in life.
Jeremy had everyone in an uproar earlier this year, and maybe that’s a good thing—maybe each time some BIP drama goes down, or someone is forced to either learn how to code, or pay someone else to debug their coin—people will be pressed to better understand what Bitcoin really is.
The most decentralized, longest running codebase of money, but that is still open to change—not where it’s going to make you, mister big pants, a bunch of money—but absolutely open to change where the improvements are obvious, properly peer reviewed, and especially necessary.
My node (my brain as a metaphor) has admittedly been open to everything available electronically—hat tip to mIRC. Them were golden days. But I have to admit I’ve had some pretty unhealthy habits on the internet at times, and maybe even expressed autistic levels of seeking stimulation in the world of tomorrow—which has perhaps made for an extended adolescence of sorts. But that’s another thing you learn. Most adults are just old kids.
But at least I’m old enough these days to have a few skills I can still for money to someone who will at least pay me with more of those shitty dollars—at least as long as there’s still places on earth where I can work a trade, have friends, and mine Bitcoin. Or even better—maybe I finally get a job within bitcoin that pays in Bitcoin.
I think I spent so much time this past decade in a place of trying to compile and debug my own code in my head, so I can make solid decisions going forward—
because the speed of change isn’t slowing down anytime soon
because there are puppets out there like Janet Yellen who straight up admit that they didn’t realize adding 50% to the money supply would cause inflation
because the world is only going to keep changing—especially for Americans, as the world wakes up to their ability to pull a revolutionary assault on what money is, and even what rights are—Bitcoin is also the people of 180+ nations beginning the process of taking their money back from their governments.
Bitcoin isn’t perfect, but it sure as shit beats slaving away to fund a life subsisting under warmongers….
having to constantly hear two bloke both lead by 100 PR agents tell people why they deserve popular trust.
Time is a circle, unless you make bitcoin.
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