The Slate article/conf-recap-months-overdue (#1578233) with a heavy emphasis on (young, lost) men made me wonder...
Would that be so bad?
I remember Jordan Peterson making a similar remark to the accusation (well, "accusation") that his books and lectures disproportionately appeal to young, lost, white men... yeah, you mean the demographic that every other place of modern life has abandoned? Would it be bad if I improved/did good for this ostracized and generally ridiculed crowd?
I dunno, man, it's a weird mental framework to use that as a gotcha.
And if all bitcoin ever did was make a lot of disillusioned and lost (young) men find a way and a purpose and work diligently toward that and/or becoming better people because of it... (I guess the question answers itself): would that be so bad?!
In case you missed it, from the article:
As I looked around at the hopeful, orange-clad men filling the convention hall, eager to give their dollars to Saylor, it seemed that Strategy’s real asset was not its crypto holdings but the faith of these men.
It was odd enough that most people in the crowd were wearing fluorescent orange, but stranger still was this rarity: the sight of a group of diverse men full of hope.
The cryptocurrency has become a sort of emotional tether for a specific type of lost boy.
Indeed, if there was a central conviction animating the convention’s diverse crowd, it was that the powerful people in charge of America’s different systems—healthcare, agriculture, government, you name it—had already proved that they were not to be trusted
...and the funniest one which the entire article built up to:
It's Slate. These people want to kill us and eat our pets. The purpose of a university education in the West is to groom people for violence by dehumanizing their political opposition.
The Bitcoin community confuses them becuse it is less white than their own circles in do-nothing academia, but the ideas and values are heavily influenced by English conceptions of liberty.
It causes a lot of cognitive dissonance to be jailing a non-white person for promoting enlightenment-era values, but they will find a way. They have to. Peaceful capitalist individualism is the antithesis of their ideal society (destruction, chaos, and a pre-industrial dark age).
It wouldn't just be "bad", it would be a disaster.
If Bitcoin fails, the economic impact of the misplaced hope would cause a reverse baby boom for the worldwide libertarian/freedom fighting population. Our savings and careers would be wiped out, and it would create a generational loss.
Bitcoin is the final battle. Everything is at stake. You have to fight as if it were a suicide mission.
How optimistic. Can you be even a little more sour, sir??
I'm actually very confident Bitcoin will win, but the probability of victory doesn't take away from the risks of failure. Fiat currencies are dead men walking, and Bitcoiners will only grow in number.
What figure would you estimate the number of Bitcoiners globally be? I'd say a rough guess 100 to 150 million
But I'd guess the number of shitcoiners to be 750m to 1B worldwide
So if the shitcoin casino collapses like we say it will, won't it create your disaster scenario even if Bitcoin wins
Obviously it all depends if individuals have gone balls deep or followed their IFAs advice on a 2% allocation lol
Probably too difficult to predict with dormant wallets, lost keys etc
And the many variable effects like shitcoiners seeing too late that Bitcoin is the one and jumping tracks, or the so called laggards following the future majority, just purely out of utility opposed to ngu
If you have to be "given" hope, or you put your hope in other people/things/companies, then at this point, you're too far gone... companies will hound you for all you're worth. You're their perfect customer and your emotional dependance (disguised as hope) is a weakness - not a strength.
Your most valuable asset is always the time you have left (health) and the skills, relationships, and knowledge you have cultivated with your time so far.
If BTC fails to hold value, then be stronger because of it! You are not the sum of your investments! Invest in yourself.
We all started this life with zero sats. Going back to zero isn't the end... its an opportunity to show yourself that your investment in health, skills, relationships, and knowledge pays off.
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The core message wasn't about men with hope but to portray them as immature and lost.
Obviously the African priest had to be exempt from that, as they wouldn't fit the lost-boy (presumably western) demographic the author is trying to belittle.
There's no attempt at understanding. It's all about padding the author's portfolio to be part of the club.
As such, the article serves to signal to the author's preferred peer group that he gets it.
The wise, non-western, foreign cleric words of wisdom (probably isolated from context) is a rhetorical flourish so the peers he wants to associate with can recognize him as an ally. Too bad the priest was male, but sometimes you gotta work with what you got.
I once was lost,
but now am found:
Was blind, but now
I have laser eyes.
I mean, faith should ideally be grounded in something real. Faith grounded in a falsehood can still do good for an individual, but it's probably not sustainable at large
I was thinking about this too. I think I'm more optimistic about the future than I would be if I wasn't aware of Bitcoin. But if Bitcoin fails to deliver freedom -- money that governments can't stop me from using, I will be quite frustrated, but it wouldn't undo all the good of hoping.
It's like if I was a mathematician and energized by working on cryptography because I believed government control of speech was bad, but then it turns out that all the things I was working on had some serious flaw. I think I'd take a hit emotionally, but I also don't think it would be game over. The pattern of hoping that there is some possible way to resist the trend I see toward a 1984 hellscape has been created. I can use the pattern again.
And so even if Bitcoin fails to deliver, the pattern of hoping there is some way to build systems outside of government control is there.
Wall street and traditional finance (ie the Bloomberg people) still hate bitcoin. They still can't stand it.
Bloomberg never under any circumstances mentions lightning, the technical fundamentals of bitcoin, bitcoin as a medium of exchange, bitcoin's design tradeoffs, its role as capital absolutely nothing.
To hear the way they they explain it it's just this amorphous ponzi-like thing, nobody knows why it exists, how it works, none of its fundamentals or why people even need to use it.
Inflation? Dollar debasement? Debanking? Never heard of it. Bitcoin is just a speculative thing for the speculators... No 'underlying value' to anyone but "the criminals".
Capital has outpaced wages and currencies have ceased to be tied to anything 'material' but its bitcoin that's 'at fault.' Just for the 'lost boys', sure.
Bloomberg never afraid to tell you how flawed how some politicians are "like trump" (however flawed he may be) but no no you should buy this "safe" wall-street-approved ETF that will keep you 'safe,'
Don't put on your thinking cap - morons.
For a second I thought you were comparing Bitcoin to Viagra haha
Obviously. Also' it's been done