There needs to be more wisdom, maturity, and dialogue exhibited by Core. The impression they have made on too many people is that they are dismissive of dissent and disagreement, influenced by a close-minded group, and unprofessional in their conduct. That's my take. The thing has gotten out of hand because of inflexibility and too many unanswered (or improperly answered) questions.

I think Bitcoin reframes economic battles between from battles to more a more peaceful view. America's economy has become too militarily dependent while losing self-sustaining productivity in other fields like consumer goods manufacturing, which has flowed to other nations, but China in particular. In a global free market, one nation's productivity is not a loss to another nation but a boon to all humanity. Bitcoin should uproot the weaknesses caused by fiat dependence and manipulation and on a BItcoin standard I don't think nations would view one another as challengers, but as neighbours (even if they're halfway around the world).

B. Didn't expect to be in the playoffs let alone make it to game 7 of the world series against the Dodgers.

I don't make speculations or predictions on price. My philosophy is to HODL.

Bitcoin offers a complete alternative to the current monetary standards and thus it adds a choice that wasn't before available - to invidivuals, companies, nations, etc... It is not a direct undermining or a direct challenger - it is a disruptive answer to the question of "What is money?" and as such could (and likely will) disrupt all other monetary systems present in the world - but how long that will take is very hard to estimate.. Disruptive technologies tend to be exponential and their tipping points occur very suddenly and unexpectedly.

If we are not including Satoshi Nakamoto, I think the bitcoiner that most inspired me was Gigi. His always happy attitude while discussing, discovering and exploring some of the most complicated and interesting aspects of bitcoin encouraged me to go down a similar path myself and he was very supportive during those days when he and I were both actively writing.

I think this type of thing is best described as "growing pains". Bitcoin has to be tested on essentially every possible front and this is one such test. Bitcoin will eventually emerge from it with lots of lessons learned by bitcoiners from the experience. And then it'll move on to its next crisis (which it also will survive).

Writing about bitcoin's origin story and how it inspires people got me to seeing bitcoin's higher purpose - not to make us monetarilly rich, but to allow us to discover an even greater treasure: Our pure and true selves.

I'm not exactly sure how strongly I believe it, but I think it's possible bitcoin's creation was aided by non-human entitites.

I expect we'll still feel like there's a long way to go. We'll probably have experienced a few significant unexpected leaps forward but also some setbacks along the way. Overall we will have made a lot of progress as both a store of value and medium of exchange, but we won't be satisfied until we have really tipped past a meaningful percentage of the world's savings and transactions.

I'd say the culture was very hard to connect to in the earliest days I became interested - mid 2013. It was very hard to find anyone at all who was interested back then so it was strictly an online culture. It became bigger during the blocksize war and then it was really rebellious individuals. It's become more fragmented lately - those concerned with Wall Street, those concerned with Node details, those concerned with philosophical and political considerations. As it gets bigger I expect the fragementation to continue.

I left Swan in 2024.

There's so many books coming out it's hard to keep track of what's already out there. Personally I think books describing the political and philosophical aspects of bitcoin are more needed than ones on the economic case, but that's largely because there's such good ones already covering the economic case, particularly Larry Lepard's and Lyn Alden's.

It's still being worked on by TJ Murphy. He recently released a song from it. Here it is: https://x.com/TJ_de_la_playa/status/1983680797434638521