It has never been more important to trumpet the tradeoffs and the virtues of self-custody

I've found myself increasingly alienated from where Bitcoin culture is converging.

It's totally fine - I feel and continue to feel that Bitcoin as a technology is essential, and in many respects, the cultural component (especially that which alienates me) is noise.

Yet it was a lot funner when Bitcoin was filled with more curious skeptics and total weirdos and not those looking to bring their identity politics or idiosyncratic certainties onto a dynamic systems technology.

In many respects, this is a consequence of watching Bitcoin go from child to teenager. Broader adoption always meant that more people and group identities would get tossed into the mix. Trumpism's grift culture and state-grafted identity was not a welcome addition to me, but in the timescale of monies, hopefully a speck of dust.

Bitcoin is likely to outdo "technologies" like Esperanto, which ultimately ended up as propaganda props for the most decrepit of states rather than a community of dreamers. This is the difference between money and language, cultural identity and political economy.

Utility outweighs it all for me, and I find immense utility in Bitcoin.

I don't have to eat a certain way to use Bitcoin. I don't have to believe in a deity to use Bitcoin. I don't even (ha heresy) have to believe in the usual book canon associated with Bitcoin, ones that Satoshi specifically name-checked, and one which I've always felt were written by academics who may have glimpsed brief specks of the sun but were still deeply in the den of state and philosophy.

I've always held a belief that Bitcoin is actually Proudhon's ultimate revenge - the tool that cut the Gordian knot between property and possession - of which the implications are still playing out. I see shades of the lament of Keynes and the rentier class - Marx's fancy of a stateless future - the traditional balance between Daoists and Legalists.

I've always had an affinity for history's "strays", and not their sanitized image: Confucius, who admonished state leaders and wandered from principality to principality, seeing himself as failure. Bakunin who had to disguise himself into exile multiple times. Perhaps one of the closest American examples I can relate to is F Scott Fitzgerald, who when he was out of his drunken stupors, was so piercingly aware of the distinctions of class and wealth in his dilettante life that it broke him.

Bitcoin used to have more strays. Now it feels emptied of them, or the culture does at least.

But it doesn't matter what I believe or what you believe. We can both use Bitcoin to protect our possession without the burden of property. You may have found any of the things I've just said objectionable, you and I may never agree, in fact, or perhaps we fervently do. We may only be united by one thing: Bitcoin.

And that is just enough.

Things I've recently spent sats on:

Beef jerky
Hemp socks
Books - some of them signed

basically

I programmed an AI model to be dialectical and confrontational and to root out all internal biases when it answered and now it is spasming existentially every time I ask it to do simple data validation or cleanup tasks on CSVs, help

To the members of the Shanghai Orchestra, who were executed for playing Beethoven

To Lao She, China's Victor Hugo, who was attacked by Red Guards in his final moments

To Fu Lei, the best Mandarin translator of French works, and his wife Zhu Meifu who chose death over indignity

To Ba Jin, who lost his wife, but was never unfaithful to her for the forty years and more he outlived her

To all of the victims of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which killed many of China's leading cultural lights - may their souls and legacies find peace

Bitcoin is the only real protest movement against central banking’s empowerment of war.

Honestly, Bitcoiners have much bigger enemies than ourselves

I always chuckle a bit at the thought of a goldbug leaving a war zone with 3 duffel bags of gold in like a farmer's carry

Sue me, I'm human