Happy christmas everyone! 🎄
"And payments? They might emerge, or they might not. If they do, it will be because people are already operating in crypto-native contexts where crypto payments actually make sense, not because we've convinced a café to install a Lightning node for the three customers per year who want to perform monetary revolution over their cappuccino."
nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzpv4r8ckj89whq7j4rlqy8mpdhzm9t0a7f9tw4hadh4s45y8huxnjqythwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnswf5k6ctv9ehx2ap0qy88wumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmv9uqp2sjhtpz523pe29v8ymnhve39ger8dc6y6msqjupkd
I don't know if what I wrote makes sense to you. But this is my current state after 13 years around blockchains. I am definitely not a fan of large blocks, but I am also not a fan of small ones. Both the Bitcoin (small blocks) and Solana (large blocks) approaches seem too extreme to me and perhaps in a way go against what I want - which is a global decentralized financial system that eliminates the power of current institutions as much as possible. Solana explicitly opens the door to these institutions, .. and Bitcoin's small blocks and the "digital gold" narrative do essentially the same thing, only indirectly...
Thanks for mentioning Andreas. When I started with Bitcoin, he was my primary influence. I don't remember him talking about price or "digital gold"—his focus was freedom, neutrality, cross-border payments, alternative financial systems. His five pillars of an open blockchain still resonate with me. The timing of his declining relevance in the Bitcoin community coincided exactly with the tribalization around Bitcoin Cash. His vision was Bitcoin and Ethereum complementing each other, but that perspective came from a pre-tribal era. Like Satoshi, I think Andreas expected things to evolve differently.
I'm still uncertain about Bitcoin Cash. When the fork happened, I sided completely with small blocks—I was probably at my most "bitcoin maximalist" then. I approached it from technology and decentralization, but I was also more consumerist, caught up in speculation, and didn't understand the broader implications. Then I tried MakerDAO and other early Ethereum protocols, and everything shifted. I began seeing the power of smart contracts the way Andreas did, but I also witnessed the Bitcoin community's growing hostility toward them. To me, smart contracts were an obvious continuation of Satoshi's vision—another form of totally open, unregulated markets. I didn't view ICOs and the surrounding chaos as proof of failure; quite the opposite. Every open market begins in chaos, then gradually develops understanding and self-regulating mechanisms as participants learn. I still don't understand Bitcoin maximalists who actively fight open markets. The contradiction wasn't obvious initially, but it compounded over time.
Even as an early Ethereum enthusiast, I supported small blocks and championed Layer 2s when they emerged. My skepticism only developed these past 2-3 years, watching L2s proliferate. A friend who was skeptical of L2s warned me they would invite greater institutional and VC influence trying to capture the space—reality has largely vindicated that warning. We achieved a highly secure, decentralized base layer, but everything built on top exists in fragmented chaos. Nobody can definitively assess how decentralized it actually is (I see strong parallels with Lightning Network). We traded decentralization for opacity. I realized this isn't a binary problem—it requires understanding context. The most technically pragmatic solution isn't always best for long-term ecosystem health. L2s and small blocks offer immediate comfort and scalability, but they defer chaos to later stages and other layers. Ethereum committed to a rollup-centric roadmap, and most people stopped caring about L1 scaling like sharding. I'm no longer certain this was the right choice.
Which brings me back to Bitcoin Cash. Through my Ethereum experience, I'm revisiting old decisions and questioning whether the solution was ever as binary as the community framed it. Perhaps a middle path would have served us better in the long run.
krypto, VPNkyyy, far cry 3, pokemon, náboženství, bohové, demokracie, anarchie.. v tomhle videu je všechno :) Jeden z nejvtipnějších Mikýřových kousků #czech
Truth & Treason (2025) #movies
The story of Helmuth Hübener, the youngest peaceful fighter against Hitler's regime, who was convicted and executed by guillotine at the age of 17. It's classically pathetic as WW2 films tend to be, but this is one of the better cases, def an interesting story.
“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde
One of Emma Stone's favorite movies is Forman's Firemen's Ball... wow. I've never been a fan of Hollywood actresses, but Emily is a different story :)
1080p YouTube quality... more epic than Nolan can ever be...
"Anyone who believes that they will never be tempted is a danger to themselves and the people who rely on them."
Still thinking what was the role of government agencies in this...
If you wanted to neutralize Bitcoin, would you ban it or just convince Bitcoiners that using it betrays it? Turn p2p cash into digital gold you never spend, make HODLing revolutionary, let the community police itself. You wouldn't need to compromise code—just amplify voices during the block size wars, fund some conferences, let tribalism finish it. Now the most dangerous financial tech ever sits in Coinbase accounts, perfectly surveilled, while everyone thinks they won. Coincidence?
I'm not saying Bitcoin Cash had the right answer either. The right path was probably somewhere in the middle—preserving Bitcoin's utility as peer-to-peer cash while maintaining decentralization and building toward programmable money. But that required coordination, nuance, and willingness to experiment.
Instead, we got an enormous coordination failure. The community fractured into tribal camps, each claiming the one true vision. Bitcoin maximalists rejected all innovation. Bitcoin Cash pursued its own rigid orthodoxy. The middle ground—where Bitcoin could have evolved as a platform for economic freedom while remaining true to its cypherpunk roots—never materialized.
Everything that followed stems from this failure. The tribalism, the narrative capture, the rejection of tools people actually need, the "price them out" mentality—all of it traces back to that moment when Bitcoin culture chose ideology over pragmatism, purity over utility, and walls over bridges.
I think Bitcoin didn't resist institutional capture during 2015-2020—they embraced it through narrative control.
The shift to "digital gold" wasn't about principles—it was about abandoning Bitcoin's original purpose. Peer-to-peer cash became "store of value". Scaling became unnecessary. Smart contracts and DeFi became threats instead of natural extensions.
The Bitcoin Cash fork was messy, but it revealed the choice: preserve Bitcoin as a tool for economic freedom and innovation, or constrain it into a narrative institutions could control. Bitcoin chose the latter. They built walls around what Bitcoin could be. DeFi? Bad. Smart contracts? Unnecessary. Stablecoins? Scams. Anything that gave people actual financial tools got branded as betrayal.
Later, when VCs moved to other chains, Bitcoiners claimed they'd been fighting institutional capture all along. But they'd already been captured—just by narrative instead of investment rounds. They'd let institutions define what Bitcoin was allowed to become.
This is what Bitcoin culture has become. Not tools for economic freedom. Not permissionless markets. Just gatekeeping disguised as inevitability.
The promise was financial sovereignty for everyone. The reality is celebrating pricing people out. Measuring success by exclusion. "Be your own bank" became "fuck you, got mine"
They don't want more people to have economic freedom. They want the right people to have it—at the right price, with the right politics.
This is authoritarian thinking wrapped in libertarian aesthetics. Deciding who "deserves" access based on ideological purity.
Bitcoin culture doesn't want revolution. It wants a new aristocracy where they're the aristocrats.
And they call this freedom.
//Bitcoin Culture is Dead: How Institutional Capture Killed the Revolution
I discovered Bitcoin in 2013, and it felt like witnessing the birth of something genuinely revolutionary. Here was a tool that could enable truly free markets, permissionless exchange, and economic sovereignty outside state control. The promise wasn't just digital gold—it was the foundation for an entire ecosystem of voluntary exchange.
By the time I registered with BitShares and later MakerDAO in 2017, I saw the natural evolution: programmable money, decentralized stablecoins, synthetic assets—all the financial instruments people actually need to participate in global markets. These weren't betrayals of Bitcoin's vision; they were its fulfillment. They offered people practical tools for economic freedom, not just a store of value to HODL.
//The Betrayal
But Bitcoin culture chose a different path. Instead of celebrating these innovations as expansions of unregulated markets, the community turned hostile. Those who once championed permissionless innovation began gatekeeping what counted as "real" cryptocurrency. They built walls where there should have been bridges.
I watched this transformation personally within the Czech crypto community between 2020-22. The pretense of caring about broader crypto culture evaporated. What emerged was pure tribalism—Bitcoin good, everything else scam. The community finally stopped pretending they cared about freedom and went full orthodoxy.
//The Philosophical Failure
Bitcoiners had the opportunity to be moral and cultural guides—to help people navigate new financial tools while maintaining principles of sovereignty and decentralization. They could have been amplifiers of unregulated markets, celebrating every innovation that gave people more tools for economic freedom.
Instead, they chose the path of the ostrich. Heads buried in sand, fingers in ears, chanting "Bitcoin fixes this" at every challenge. When DeFi offered people access to financial instruments previously gatekept by traditional finance, Bitcoiners called it a scam. When stablecoins gave people in unstable economies a practical tool for daily use, Bitcoiners dismissed them as shitcoins.
They stopped asking what people actually need. They stopped caring whether their solutions addressed real problems. The only question became: "Does it serve Bitcoin?" Everything else—utility, adoption, solving actual use cases—became secondary to narrative maintenance and price performance.
The irony cuts deep: a community that once embodied cypherpunk principles of individual sovereignty now demands ideological conformity. A movement built on questioning authority now has its own orthodoxy, complete with heresy trials for anyone who builds on other protocols.
//What Remains
Bitcoin the technology may continue. Bitcoin the cultural movement—the one that inspired me in 2013, that promised liberation through technology—that's dead. It died when curiosity became heresy, when innovation became competition, and when serving people became less important than serving the protocol's price.
Yes, philosophical depth still exists in Bitcoin—there are still cypherpunks in the margins asking hard questions and building for freedom rather than number-go-up. But here's the tragedy: when those people need visibility, funding, conference stages, or development resources, they have to interface with the institutions that actually control Bitcoin's trajectory.
And those institutions—the conferences, the media platforms, the development funding—are completely captured by the commercial/institutional layer. Money and power concentrate around figures who explicitly represent institutional capture, people like Saylor who literally advocate for Bitcoin's integration into the existing power structure.
So you get this bifurcation: rich philosophical discourse happening in the margins while the money and power concentrate around institutional capture. What remains is a cargo cult, worshipping the form while abandoning the substance. Then when it's time to "represent Bitcoin" to the world, which layer gets amplified? The Longreads philosophers or the BTC Prague conference keynotes?
The answer reveals everything. The revolution didn't fail—it was captured. The cypherpunks are still there, but they're not the ones with the megaphone. And most Bitcoiners can't tell the difference.
Sometimes I think about moving to Shenzhen to build my own hardware wallet... I haven't found the perfect one for me yet.
I still think Hito (hito.xyz) has the best form factor for a hardware wallet. Credit card size, thin... I wish I had a Trezor like that
When I think about how governments could secretly influence bitcoin and make it historically irrelevant, planting "brainwashed puritan pleb" trolls and dividing the community seems like one of the most elegant ways.
The current world perceives "open source" as an inherently socialist concept and is beginning to serve as dogfooding for all kinds of leftists. I feel as if voluntarists have no answer to this. Open source plays no fundamental role in anarcho-capitalism and other liberal movements — and in my opinion, this is a mistake, because it is one of the most important components of the society of the future...
> "The problem is the same problem with many open source communities, in that they are rabidly leftist and obsessed with purging anyone who isn't so. So they practice the typical leftist tactic of constantly expnding their foothold (install base) and then proceeding to dictate who can contribute and donate and even speak."
Nice, starter packs! Thanks for link