I’ve engaged with enough professional shitcoiners, or shitcoin-adjacent tradfi deliquents, to have noticed a hilarious pattern to their butthurt reaction to nobody really caring about ordinals, BRC20, or whatever they are migrating to of late.

keep in mind what a monster breakthrough shitcoining on bitcoin would be to their business models, btw (which I may or may not get around to writing up soon - this isn’t it, fyi). given shitcoinery at large is finally fading away, this spins up another 5+ years of complete and utter nonsense marketing and the FOMOing management fees that follow spouting this bullshit confidently enough.

what they’ve converged on to explain resistance - apathy, even, given I wouldn’t say I care one way or the other. yay fees! - is the idea that bitcoin development works in a top-down manner and has “priests” (they like this kind of religious vernacular, which I’ll come back to) who decree what projects will and won’t be worked on.

the level of projection here is astounding. it’s an open network. you can work on whatever you want. we are talking about ordinals NFTs in the first place because you already did it! you ran the scam! you got out with the money! and you’re upset that … you weren’t congratulated for it more?!?

it’s completely insane. contrast that to the alternative: they fucking despise lightning and there is no end of deliberate misrepresentations they won’t tell about it to aggrieve how hurt their butts are. obviously lightning isn’t perfect (nothing is perfect - it’s engineering, not art or, as they are more used to, performance art) but notice that isn’t their object level complaint because they don’t have the technical understanding to frame it that way. they describe their complaint as if it were anthropological, something like: the “priests” decreed all scaling efforts will focus on lightning, and lo, it was so.

again, it’s an open network (this time on top of another open network). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken to founders who are building on lightning because, unlike whatever crypto ecosystem they already spent 3 years toiling away in achieving nothing of practical value but doing free marketing to unscrupulous financiers, lightning actually works. they appreciate the design methodology. they *choose* to work on it. it is as bottom up a phenomenon as could be imagined and yet to the reactionary shitcoiner, it must be top down. how can it be explained any other way? what else could make people want to work on an ecosystem with no money printing if not central and ideological coordination? iT dOeSnT mAkE aNy SeNsE!

(fun fact: now they are learning what nostr is, they recycle all these same patterns of thought. "why would you work on decentralized social media? don’t you know we tried that in crypto? don’t you know you can issue tokens on bitcoin now?!?”)

so people aren’t using one free and open tool because they’ve been told not to by their church, but they are using another because they have been told to by their church. it couldn’t possibly be that they’ve decided to work on one and not the other because they *understand how they work and what potential value they will have long term, not to their unscrupulous financiers, but to their users and to the world.* nope, couldn’t possibly be that. must be the religious dogma.

now obviously we can expect object level discourse agitating for defi, DAOs, and all that kind of nonsensical bullshit. but, again, it’s frankly a more anthropological examination that fascinates me. what is it they are saying about the people involved? is there a social analysis rather than a (quick and boring) technical one?

self-congratulatory as this unavoidably is, what they hate is the raw meritocracy. money means nothing, reputation means *something*, but by and large ideas stand on their own. there is a fascinating subtlety here around the human (i.e. anthropological) response: because this stuff is technical and has to *actually work*; because it isn’t just aesthetic; because it serves a purpose and is validated in the real world; there is some objectivity to what is and is not a good idea. now, you can’t deduce it. it isn’t math. there will always be pros and cons. but it isn’t just taste either. some things *objectively* work better than others. there is nothing “open minded” about praising poor engineering.

honest, intelligent people attracted to the intellectual meritocracy will, therefore, on a long-enough time horizon to allow for battle testing the ideas, for teasing out pros and cons to a satisfactory degree, tend to agree on which are the best.

now, these people have bad ideas and get mad they can’t buy or shame or whatever else the meritocracy into getting onboard, so they project all this crap about “clergy”, “anointed”, and whatever other religious vernacular fits their cargo cultish misunderstanding of what it is they are looking at in the first place. heathens to this church are treated as brave, independent trailblazers, fighting back against an intolerant majority (by freely building one kind of free stuff over another 😕). that almost everybody independently concludes that these ideas are bad, because they proudly have rigorous standards for evaluating merit, BECAUSE THIS STUFF MATTERS AND IS BIGGER THAN YOU … they see as groupthink; as monotonicity; as the hierarchical broadcast of dogma.

and by the way, build to your heart’s content. as mentioned above, I don’t particularly care, and I think most people are the same. just don’t demand I like whatever bad idea you are working on. the problem is not “the builders” of reformist lore, it is their financial exploiters, of whom this is all downstream …

they all come from a world in which bullshitting hard enough will tend to yield a positive return in the end. obviously, in such an environment, everybody’s bullshit contradicts everybody else’s and yet everybody still wins. the idea of meticulously working to weed out bullshit and narrowing in on the actual truth is extremely uncomfortable if this is all you have ever known, and what you now expect to find.

as alluded to above, the funniest part is the projection. everything I’ve just sarcastically outlined is in fact its very own meme. it circulates in these cliques and infects any host susceptible to non-explanation for this culture shock. *it is not arrived at independently via rigorous reasoning*. it literally is the hierarchical broadcast of dogma.

and it’s ramping up for another 5+ year wave. enjoy! 😃🥳

Bitcoin is not a plan B.

It should be your plan A.

Just buy doesn't matter 😉.

I used to believe in political incrementalism- the idea that you can change things gradually through better election outcomes.

But maybe it was also just youth, I don’t know.

After spending many years studying how the current monetary system works, studying how past debt and currency cycles ended, and based on practical realities from the past two election cycles, I dropped any notion of incrementalism, at least for the big economic things.

Incrementalism works for minority groups to gain social and political rights. Religious people to practice without interference, women to vote, gay people to marry, etc. Immigration policies. Things like that. But it doesn’t work for the financial system.

Instead, history and current affairs suggest that things generally point in the same structural financial direction, uncontested, until there is a massive fiscal crisis, geopolitical crisis, and trend change. And that is when politics becomes critical in all aspects- as chaos develops, the group that has enough power to set the next order *really* fucking matters. They either build a platform of virtue toward the next cycle, or they fall into the unfortunately common paths of communism or fascism.

And it is not just ideas that triumph, but technology too. Technology plays a big role in which ideas are even workable. Both ideas and technology are important.

So when I realized incrementalism wasn’t working, I sought out other methods.

The weaker method is just social- I try to put things out there with my platform to encourage reason, empathy, human rights, etc. Not partisan but also not necessarily moderate, but rather grounded in firm principles of virtue ethics.

The stronger method is to play some small part in building something better. Alternative money. Alternative communication methods. Either explaining and recommending them to people, or directly venture investing in companies that build on them and help improve the UX and solve new problems.

That’s my goal. I want to do whatever tiny part I can to bring about more peace, more fairness, more opportunity, more growth, and less destruction.

Not everyone can be saved, because honestly, their mentality and belief system don't allow for it. The only thing you can do oftentimes is just wait and let them suffer the consequences of believing in lies.

I'm not talking about just Bitcoin.

WRONGTHINK

I just got fired for wrongthink.

Then I find out that my bank account’s been frozen, too.

I try to get an Uber back home but no cars will pick me up.

How did Uber find out I committed wrongthink?

I check my phone and apparently I’ve been banned from Instagram for the same reason.

Then a social worker knocks on my door and takes my son from me.

They tell me I’ve endangered my son by exposing him to wrongthink.

The State will now house and re-educate him, ensuring that he is only exposed to Government-Approved facts.

I feel my heart rate increase.

I try to turn some lights on, but it looks like my power has been disconnected.

I remember that I have some cash upstairs, so I decide to use that to buy some food whilst my bank accounts are frozen.

But the grocery store tells me that it can’t accept cash. So now I can’t even buy food!

I think I have some vague recollections of people warning me about the dangers of a cashless society…

I call all my friends for help, but none of them want to talk to me. They’ve all been warned about my wrongthink.

They know that if they talk to me on the phone for too long, they’ll get punished as well.

I call the police to see if they can help me.

They say no, but I’m referred to a Government-Approved Mental Support Officer.

I tell her my situation, and she listens carefully.

Once I’m done, I hear the Officer get extremely excited.

She tells me that the Government has a new solution they’re trialing for people in my situation: a Euthanasia Care Package.

She says it’s my best option.

The best thing is that it’s $0 up front! They just charge a 58% tax on my estate.

I ask if there are any other options, as this seems a bit heavy-handed.

But she says that Euthanasia is perfect for people like me.

She stresses that it’s a voluntary decision, but then adds that the Government will continue to deny me services until I opt in to the Euthanasia Care Package.

I sit on the floor of my living room in despair.

How could all of this happen to me?

And just because I noticed that the TV was telling me lies?

I didn’t even break any laws.

These days it seems that there’s one set of rules for the people who repeat what the news tells them.

And another set of rules for the people who speak out about the continuous stream of inconsistencies and outright lies that we are force-fed every day at 6pm.

And these lies coming from the TV seem so obvious to me.

So I wonder how other people don’t notice them. Why don’t they say anything?

And then after a while I realise that they must notice them, but they’ve been forced to ignore their own eyes by this machinery of coercion.

You see, governments, media, and corporations are now so interconnected globally that they can move in unison to unperson anyone who doesn’t say that 2 + 2 = 5.

And so I was unpersoned for wrongthink.

As if I’d committed a crime.

But I wasn’t tried by a court, I was tried by this new judicial system.

Where there’s no evidence, no trial, and no judge.

Just a verdict and a punishment.