Terminus, Foundation, Hari Seldon, were the first names that popped into my head when I first heard about Bitcoin back in 2012.
Which is why I was particularly fond of phrases like "Bitcoin is the tool for freeing humanity from tyrants and oligarchs, disguised as a get rich quick scheme."
Looking at how Bitcoin was design, not just the software, but all of it is amazing. Bitcoin is not just lines of codes, it's not just some clever tokenomics or game theoretical model in action, it runs much deeper than that, it runs on humanity itself and everything that has happened is or has become part of its design.
I've always half-jokingly expect Satoshi Nakamoto to reappear in a recording somewhere, at some point in time, revealing the second, third, and fourth stages of the design like Hari Seldon, I was on the lookout for the Mule and the counterplan. I know I will not live long enough to see it all panned out and that the full story can only be retold in history books.
With Nostr, I feel like Bitcoin 'stages' is becoming more apparent. The first adopters of Bitcoin, like the librarians of Terminus who are focused on recording a perfect history, are focused on the perfect money, the cypherpunk future, they get into fights on what would be the best way to improve and curate Bitcoin.
The second group are the traders, gamblers, analysts, and investors, while my brother who orange pilled me falls into the former, I initially fall into this category, and like the merchant princes, they see a different future for Bitcoin, they think of it in terms of profit and losses, of hedging against inflation, as store of value.
Then the next group comes the thinker, the economist, those who come to understood Bitcoin as hard money that is separated from the states, the anarcho capitalists.
And now some people are staring to get to know Bitcoin through Nostr, these are the freedom lovers, people who are censored by their tyrannical governments, people living in despotic regime, to them Nostr is freedom of speech and they'll discover Bitcoin as freedom to transact.
What is interesting is, Bitcoin as freedom money, integrated into freedom technological stacks we see today could not exist without those who came before them.
Like any other revolution, Bitcoin faces a seemingly insurmountable wall of resistance and to overcome that, we need the Cypherpunks who will hold fast to their ideals, we need capitals and funds to defend ourselves, we need people who could elucidate Bitcoin for the masses and newcoiners, and we need the freedom fighters. The timing, the sequence of events that has happened could arguably be seen as planned, as a part of the design.
Today, Bitcoin has grown from being a tool for freeing people from tyrants and oligarchs, disguised as a get rich quick scheme into something more, something different.
In time we'll learn that Bitcoin is only disguised as money, that it is so much more, like how Nostr is disguised as a social medial protocol. And we'll never be prepared.
(Now let's just hope it doesn't end the same way)
