I've heard about Bitcoin in 2011 from piracy sites, thought the government was gonna shut it down, then ignored it. I returned in 2017 due to mentions from a nocoiner buddy and the bull run hype, scalped some sats for dollars, then dumped it again.

My financial awakening was during the COVID lockdowns. The stimulus checks had me thinking about how to get involved in trading stocks. All the while, I've lamented the blatant overreaches of the government and thought everybody was doomed to get crushed beneath the despotic system we live in with no way out. I was a COVID doomer.

In January 2021, I found out about Melvin Capital's short squeeze. Though I wasn't involved, I cheered for the GameStoppers. Then, brokerages prohibited people from buying GME. After a few arguments with people who used the same exact line of thinking used to justify COVID mandates, I threw up my hands and said "Fuck this, I'm going full cryptard!"

I learned a little bit about Bitcoin and said, "That's cool and all, but I want more ways to make money," then I began to trade a bunch of shitcoins in search of dollar gains. As I went on, I found it odd that there were 10,000 cryptocurrencies (now 20,000!!) Ethereum's gas fees seemed to only get higher from gas wars during shitcoin minting, reaching the point of unusability. People kept telling me that Bitcoin is obsolete because the blocks were too small and it isn't capable of smart contracts. Oh, and I lost a hefty shitcoin airdrop in a yield farm from impermanent loss (basically the devs rugged). I found out that shitcoiners only profit from information asymmetry, whether they personally know the project team or hopped in the right Telegram chat in the right time, and that sounded like too much work. I was weary of the cynicism, usury and greed surrounding shitcoins, but I thought it was cool that there was a way to profit outside of fiat.

A few months of this and then I finally found some signal. Some anon posted a link to Michael Maloney's Hidden Secrets of Money. Learning the history of money cast a different light on all of the doodoo tokens I was trading--there wasn't any real reason for them to exist other than to make exit liquidity out of others. He touched upon how politics and culture run downstream from economics, which essentially is the exchange of information. That planted the seed of the idea that bad money can lead to the multitudinous fuckeries I've witnessed my entire life (Iraq War, Great Financial Crisis, the IMF, World Bank, and BCEAO plundering countries overseas, bread-and-circus media dialect catalyzing the culture war). More importantly, his series taught me how fiat works. Fiat is a Ponzi scheme, an unsustainable linear economy, as I partially realized during 2020. Too bad Maloney is an HBAR bull, yuck! (The Bitcoin Standard is a higher signal version to Maloney's series, anyway.) Shortly after, I discovered Trader University (now Bitcoin University), where Matt Kratter explained the fundamentals of Bitcoin and why it is important to people. His militant, unrelenting fudbusting got my gears turning and had me questioning what I had known at the time about Bitcoin and "crypto." Most of all, the final deathblow to my shitcoinery was Samson Mow's tweet about value transacted per second, displaying how the oBsOLeTe Bitcoin blows every fuck out of the newer tokens: https://twitter.com/Excellion/status/1333966283876954113 The shitcoins were either trying to catch up to bitcoin or scam people. As soon as I saw that tweet, I traded every alt for bitcoin and never looked back. After that, I took an interest in macro, learned what I needed to know, then decided to focus on what people are building on Bitcoin and how people are using it. Today, I'm at Stacker News.

What I've learned is that these parallel systems being created testify to the tenacity of the human spirit and that Bitcoin isn't really about getting rich, it's a reclamation of dignity. My doomerism turned into hope as I saw that a life free of tyranny is possible. Turns out that computers can help free us all, so long as we don't fall in the traps of censorship-prone middleware we've been inundated with. There will be no SkyNet. I give a big and hearty thanks to everyone who is hijacking the infrastructure to create a better life