Has any1 noticed that people were always skeptical about technological progress. And to be fair, many of the inventions of the last 50 years or so came to strangle peoples freedoms, while simultaneously making their life more complex.

I'd argue that there is almost like an instinct for many people to dismiss new technological breakthroughs and to await the worst of what it might hold (there are already some voices claiming that machine learning might destroy our planet because of what they saw was possible with LLMs like ChatGPT). And we can not even blame them, since they have been let down many times by shiny promises of the past and their actual outcomes impacting the individual and society as a whole.

I had this realization when I was watching a chef on TV talking about going back to the roots and becoming one with nature again. I felt that has idea seemed pure and I could somehow connect to his approach of cooking by being in nature and dismissing all the tools and technologies that were once invented. It had some sort of romanticism to it but I also felt his sincere wish to be more in touch with nature (or probably himself).

I mention this because I realized that I was once very much like that and adored the idea of natures purity or even virginity. And for most of my life I have been skeptical of the future or even fearful of what was to come.

Until one phenomenal discovery flipped my worldview upside down.

Introducing: bitcoin - a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

Not just this new kind of superior money and its technological implications but also the culture surrounding it blew my mind. It took me more than a year after acquiring my first satoshis of starting to understand what this whole thing was all about. It was not just a new technology that would improve our world and elevate our civilization to the next level. It was a new way of life. A way of life full of optimism and hope. A way of life that emphasized that technology, if created by the people and not by multinational monopolists, can become one of the most beautiful and inspiring things in life.

I mean is it not inspiring to observe the development of the lightning network and nostr in real time?

Technology has been humanities ball and chain for far too long and funnily enough it was the time-chain of bitcoin which would unchain humanity and set us free from the shackles we had in our mind. At least that is how I interpreted these things.