Finally publishing a speech I was invited to give remotely to the Strike
team a while ago (via the intercession of a late common friend, RIP <3). It's mostly the same presentation I gave at NoobDay in Riga last year, about "Bitcoin Cultures":
Discussion
👀
The origins of this speech are actually more ancient: the first time I reasoned about the Venn diagram it's based on was during a podcast. Then #[2] asked me to write an article about it for Citadel21, but I never delivered. At the Unconfiscatable Conference, in Las Vegas, I was asked to give again the speech given at Adopting Bitcoin Conference, in El Salvador: "The Perfect Lightning Wallet". But last minute I got an inspiration and changed my mind (and slides):
This was prepared in about 20 minutes (really), full of inside jokes and exaggerations for the lulz, so I felt like I needed to put out lots of corrections later on. For one, #[4] rightly pointed out he's out of place in the weird spot of the diagram I forced him to. He *is* indeed, the closest thing to the unironical center of the diagram (tech startup CEO, original cypherpunk hacktivist, austrian maxi):
Also, Alex Goldstein pointed out to me it was not very effective to use the term "Revolutionaries" to label all politically/culturally passionate Bitcoiners, since many of them are not, some even being the very opposite: literal "reactionaries" (I mean it in a positive sense). At the same time I wanted to give a better account of the role played in all that by "Bitcoin maximalism", since friends like #[5]
and Peter Rizzo were wrinting stuff, while my last my contribution on the topic had been this (long) talk:
Another thing that pushed me to review my semi-serious Las Vegas speech was this presentation by Sergej Kotliar, where he separated (imo correctly) "Bitcoin the tool" from "Bitcoin the movement", but in a way that triggered a lot my Venn-related autism, because he ascribed to the "movement" only the subset of cultural idiosyncrasies I would ascribe to the "Austrian/Maximalism" subculture ("low time preference", "HODL", "NgU", "no shitcoins", "hyperbitcoinization fixes this", etc), and to the "tool" some memes that are imo very much part of the cypherpunk subculture ("privacy", "dissidents", "wikileaks"), itself very much part of the "movement", not of the "tool", which I think would instead include, from a pragmatic PoV, most of the gambling-related uses Sergej call "the Casino":
For all these reasons, I was very happy when #[6] asked me to give a more elaborate version of the speech in Riga. Unfortunately nobody recorded it, there. So, I was very happy to give it again for Strike, thanks to the ghost of a lovely Rockstar (RIP <3).
Enjoy.
That was a LOT of fun last year Giacomo - thanks 🙏
I may have invested way more time than initially imagined answering this YouTube comment about "Bitcoin progressives", under my last published video. May as well publish the wall-of-text here too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otoz02b9PiY&lc=Ugw_uHM7aPz6oURCSsd4AaABAg.9o7CZ2NFMiH9oN75OChcak
