People say everything comes when it is meant to.
As I get older I find myself returning to that sentence more and more. It really does seem to be true. No matter how much you work on something it arrives exactly when it is supposed to.
The past year has probably been the most turbulent of my life. The student struggle in Serbia against a corrupt state and the mafia that has embedded itself within it cost 16 lives because of corruption. The students were the first to rise and I stood with them.
During that same period I was going through a transition toward living on a Bitcoin standard, which I still did not fully understand at the time. Yet everything seemed to align in a way that fighting a broken system naturally pulled me toward entering a much healthier one.
The student protests, organized through plenums and self organization, reminded me of the open source project Bitcoin where consensus is essential for development. The same principle applied to the student movement. Very quickly it became a struggle in which self organized groups across the country were doing the same thing and then the idea began to reach global proportions. It feels as if all over the world there is a real struggle of people against the state.
As someone employed at a university, very young, right after successful studies and a fast professional career with many projects in my own studio, I reached the position of assistant professor. And the struggle continues. To be clear the opponent is strong. There is selective justice. Violence on their side goes unpunished while ordinary people who raise their voice are punished, persecuted, even imprisoned.
This whole transition toward Bitcoin, although I had been accumulating it earlier but nowhere near as much as in the last year, together with learning what state money is, what Bitcoin is and what true freedom means, led me to think about a self sustainable life and a real circular economy. I keep asking myself whether I should leave my job, move somewhere outside this exhausting city, grow my own food and reduce my expenses to a minimum because in the city that is almost impossible. To start my own solar clean energy system, maybe use a miner for heating while mining real money. To work exclusively online within a decentralized system and change my life completely.
Somehow everything seems to be aligning.
These thoughts occupy my mind now. I actively work pro bono for the Bitcoin community in Serbia, trying to help others discover what Bitcoin truly is. Above all it represents freedom, independence and constant work on oneself for the sake of a better society. And perhaps most importantly it represents the preservation of generated energy that becomes more valuable over time.
You only have one life. Which path should you choose. With Bitcoin it feels like there is only one real path. In fiat there always seem to be many different roads but in the end they all lead to the same place constant debt and servitude.
If you liked this kind of text maybe I will start some form of a journal here on Stacker News. Until then feel free to check out our YouTube channel.
start some form of a journal here on Stacker News
Ako ti tako kažeš ⚡️
I'd read this. I was interested in bichalmer's adventures of pulling scrap metal out of lakes, but I tend not to be a video watcher. Much prefer text.
It could be a very nice experience.
Journal? 🙂
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If you're young and ambitious, I highly recommend staying in some kind of Tier 1 or 2 city around other young and ambitious folk. You gain things that are hard to replicate online. It's possible to replicate them online, but it's a lot harder.
This vaguely rhymes with what I recall from Luke Smith's path in the days of yore. If you don't know his stuff, it might be worthwhile to check it out.
Scattered among his many linux videos, he's also got a few opening up on his motivations for leaving academia and settling somewhere in the boondocks.
One thing to keep in mind with investing a lot more into developing your own land and costly things like energy systems, is that it makes it easier for the system to coerce you.
Depending on how much you pissed it off, or plan to do so, you may want to consider attaining a higher degree of location independence.
Or in terms of The Sovereign Individual: you may need to minimize the state's potential return on violence.
Thank you for this comment. It truly means a lot to me. Comments like this are exactly the reason I want to start writing more and putting my thoughts out there.
I absolutely agree with you. I am seriously thinking in terms of going off grid and embracing minimalism. I also agree about mobility. Without it, we become too tied down and more vulnerable than we realize.
And Bitcoin is exactly the point where we both align. It offers the possibility of reducing the power of the state over the individual and increasing personal sovereignty. That is definitely something we should be striving toward.
The best Bitcoin adopters I've known came to it through necessity rather than speculation, and that fundamentally changes how they hold through volatility. When you're accumulating because your currency is degrading or institutions are failing you, you're not thinking in terms of trading cycles — you're thinking in terms of sound money and self-sovereignty. That's the difference between someone who holds for 10 years and someone who panics in the first drawdown. Your journal idea is valuable precisely because transition stories like yours — the 'why' behind Bitcoin adoption in countries facing real institutional failure — are what actually help people understand the asset beyond price charts. After years of tracking adoption patterns, I built some analysis tools around when people statistically make their strongest Bitcoin decisions, and it's almost always during these moments of institutional doubt. Start small, DCA consistently, and document what you learn along the way. That's the path that leads to genuine conviction.