Hey all, it's @jasonb. Big thanks to @grayruby and @ek for doxing themselves in that they think I'm interesting enough to actually follow in some capacity. For anyone that hasn't cared enough, I used to post more frequently on stacker.news...to an audience of at LEAST two followers. :) Anyway, I changed my nym a bit back because I started freaking out about someone $5 wrenching me for hours in a locked vat in the bottom of the ocean, only to find out after all of my keys were obtained through months of effort by my grieving loved ones, that my stash certainly wasn't worth months of effort, at which point I was tortured indefinitely with a wrench that the assailant thought more worthy of my fantasy bitcoin stash. The fears actually go deeper and darker, but I'll save you anything too horrible to think about.
Meanwhile, I was planning on spending some extended time in Africa...with my wife and three kids. In fact, we've now been here for a month! ...and, of course, every American that goes to Africa gets kidnapped and tortured regardless of being a bitcoiner, right? You hopefully are rolling your eyes, but the US state department goes to great lengths to convince Americans that are making foreign plans of this fiction. And no doubt, much of the country I'm currently in (South Africa) struggles with serious crime. Yet, this region seems to be doing much better in that regard. There are, however, other very serious challenges here and I'm happy to say Bitcoin is an active part of addressing a few of them.
Well, let's talk about the real world for a moment, eh? I'm currently volunteering at Bitcoin Ekasi in Mossel Bay. It's been awesome...except for the fact that I got a place in a gated community far from the action. It's been horrible for our social life and horrible for getting around. Well, we've finally fixed that and I'm moving into town this week. Also, I've been using a lot of discretion in discussing this venture. As I'll post tomorrow (and what really inspired me to rage-resume stacker.news today), this has made the project I'm most excited about here WAY harder. More on this tomorrow. Anyway, the point being, I had already decided to do something radical, but there's no quicker way to get cut off at the knees than to try something radical without staring down your fears and counting the cost.
Jump here if you're tired of the self-indulgent nature of the first half of this post!
"Yeah seriously, why am I reading this?"
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Well, there's a renewed fear-mongering about normal bitcoiners getting kidnapped, tortured, tickled, or Manchurian Candidated. Maybe it's not the place to point out that every post I've read anywhere about this type of thing is linked to some company that trains you to deal with those things, although that would be true in 100% of the articles I've read. In fact, the tide started to turn for me when I looked into one such "training" course, only to see it involved flying to Europe and taking off work for more than a week! That might not sound all too credible from a guy that took off months of work and flew his family across two hemispheres. But the difference being, my journey isn't about me protecting my savings. Using a huge amount of my net worth for the purpose of any goal that isn't protecting my net worth isn't the same as using a huge amount of my net worth to protect my net worth. Its kind of like the difference between eating cake because you like cake versus eating cake to get fit. I'm just musing here. I don't know anything about any of the people that run these companies, and I'm sure many or even all are working very hard to do good. It does seem like an area in which misaligned incentives could get kind of scary though...so I'm just kind of throwing that out there for the sake of discussion.
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Also, I know there's more and more of this fear-mongering directed at normal bitcoiners, but dude, it's not just the long climb, it's the short slide. I finally realized that even if some criminal was smart enough to have a plan and patient enough to get a real bitcoiner's bitcoin, they're smart enough to make sure you have more bitcoin than the amount of work they'd have to put in to getting it.
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In all seriousness, it seems that a few people here were actually following me, and I just wanted to give a heads up on what happened. In fact, the only thing that keeps me protecting the little opsec I've always had here is really so people can't reverse find me. I still work in a field that is now currently almost entirely anti-bitcoin. :(
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Mossel Bay is gorgeous. The people are absolutely as friendly as anywhere I've ever been. The bitcoin culture here is STRONG. You should check it out if you can. I'll do my best to balance caution and responsibility with idealism and living free and pray you can figure that out as well.