I made a mistake during my Bitcoin lecture last week in the university of Bologna. One I’m not going to repeat. I assumed something. And I shouldn’t have.
Since I was talking about my job, I told the students that a big part of it is debunking myths around Bitcoin...
You know, the usual stuff: Bitcoin is a Ponzi, it’s going to zero, it’s killing the planet. I built like 15 slides for this. I was ready to fight. Ready to debunk every single one of them, one by one.
So I asked them: “What’s something negative you’ve heard about Bitcoin?”
Silence. No one raised their hand. No one mentioned pollution. No one said anything about volatility or scams. These were 22 years old, curious, open-minded, and genuinely there to learn. They didn’t have myths to unlearn.
So there I was, spending the next 20 minutes talking about gas flaring, carbon-negative mining, and all the reasons Bitcoin is not what “they” say it is. But “they,” in this case, didn’t even exist. The only person bringing up those narratives was me.
And that’s when it hit me. All these years in the Bitcoin scene have trained my brain to always be on the defensive. To expect resistance. To anticipate criticism. And that mindset slowly killed a part of the joy I used to feel when I first learned about Bitcoin.
Back then, no one had told me it was bad. I just found it exciting, revolutionary, empowering. My brain wasn’t busy filtering negative takes it was busy being amazed.
That beginner’s energy, that childish awe, that sense of discovering something precious, it’s something I want to reconnect with. I don’t want to be the person who walks into a room full of open minds and immediately starts talking about the bad things people say.
I want to talk about freedom from banks and government, creativity, women empowerment, potential. I’m not saying I’ll stop responding to critics when necessary. But I want to stop assuming that everyone is a critic.
There are way more people out there who are just curious, interested, open to learning, than there are loud contrarians I’ll never change the mind of anyway.
From now on, I want to speak to the curious ones. Not the ghosts in my head.
