In the summer of 2012 I went to buy some beers, with just 20 bucks in my pocket.

At the entrance of the grocery shop I met an old old friend that didn't saw him for long time. And this old wise friend of mine (is older than me and literally like ObiWan), he told me:

And he show me how he mine Bitcoin and what is Bitcoin.

He literally told me:

That phrase struck me like a lightning, instantly. Was my "eureka" moment, about how to fuck the banks and the govs.

Went home, without beers but with my first BTC in my wallet (I still have it). That made me think and study deeply into Bitcoin and that's how DarthCoin was born.

And I never let Bitcoin from my hands, I never stopped learning. And never used or bought anything else than Bitcoin. And for more I learned about Bitcoin, more toxic I became.

Based on this experience, I try to orange pill others, friends and family, nearby merchants. And I wrote guides, Bitcoin and Lightning guides, about how to use Bitcoin.

Met a colleague from long ago at a Physics conference. He's not from the US but has been living in the US for years.

Similar to most people in academia, he's mostly liberal (using the US political framework). He hence got infected by that awful thing in the US that makes every topic to be a partisan thing: If you are liberal/conservative, you must hate this and love that. So even though he never much looked into Bitcoin, he had a negative opinion by default.

He's a very good scientist though, so he's very open to reason and discussion. So as we got to talk about potential future plans post-academic career, I mentioned I am quite interested in the LN technology. We then got to talk about Bitcoin, and all the typical arguments against Bitcoin he had heard came up, and I simply but clearly explained why most of them are based on ignorance of reality and the mistakes of lumping bitcoin with the rest of crypto, the fact of thinking of Bitcoin in terms of Dollar price, speculation, not being aware of the actual utility Bitcoin provides, etc. The fact he's originally from a S-American country with a broken government also helped to go into the discussion talking about what a world would look like when countries stop depending on US Dollar.

He came out of this hour-long discussion (at most) saying: wow, you know your stuff. This thing might actually have potential. Not sure I orange-pilled him per se, but at least, some prejudices got cleared up.

Other than that, my wife had the typical get-rich-quick thinking mentality when thinking of our Bitcoin holdings, but recently felt much better after suffering a lot mentally during her first bear market and realizing Bitcoin is not just a dollar number but has other qualities. She still thinks of "cashing out", one day... so i still got some work to do there ;) We're in South Korea, so this get-rich-quick mentality is strong here.

My dad is typical old boomer. Very good with the old fiat system, but after I spent (one time) couple of hours telling about running a LN node, he casually mentioned: oh maybe I should put some money in Bitcoin too. Don't think he followed up with that one, so not sure he was orange-pilled. But circumstances make I don't see him often, so I prefer not to talk only about Bitcoin when I meet him, so he might only come around later.

Recently, while visiting NYC, I took my friends to PubKey and paid for our drinks and dinner with bitcoin. The look of astonishment on their faces was priceless as they witnessed the speed of me paying with QR codes and ⚡️, faster than someone swiping a credit card.

I encouraged them to download a wallet and sent each of them 10k sats. Leading by example, I showed them the power of a currency accepted freely by the market, independent of government decrees or military enforcement. It felt great to see them eager to learn more about Bitcoin. Helping & encouraging others to learn is 🔑

I attended a Bitcoin Twitter Space in August 2022 and by the end the host told the attendee to DM him their Bitcoin lightning address. I first copied my Bitcoin Address on Binance (being the shitcoiner I was) and submitted it. He told me that's not it, so I went and copied my Bitcoin Segwit address, which was still not it. He later suggest GetAlby which I did and it has been one heck of a journey so far - stacking sats.

I talked to my brother-in-law about it. He's a genuinely curious guy and likes to learn about new things, so it wasn't a really hard sell. In the beginning, I pretty much used Satoshi's reasoning and told him that "it might make sense just to get some in case it catches on." I told him if he only put 1%-5% of his net worth into this thing, he doesn't really have much to lose. Basically trying to bait him into getting some with number go up.

Then the trucker protest happened. We met for dinner and we were talking about the freezing of bank accounts. That gave me a perfect real life example to explain how the fiat banking system is cucked. I proceeded to explained to him everything he thought he owned could be taken from him on a whim by the authoritarians with violence, including his money, his car, his house, and all his physical belonging. Bitcoin is the only thing that he truly owns and is probably the only thing he can bring with him when fleeing a border. I think he had increased his bitcoin allocation ever since the talk...

I sold something on craigslist for Bitcoin and convinced him to get into Bitcoin for it.

But to be fair he seemed to have already been interested in Bitcoin but didn't have time to research into it before. Unfortunately he also bought on a custodial exchange and withdrew to custodial Bluewallet (iirc) at the time. But still a nice orangepilling success.

I got into Bitcoin from reading a blog, about how to send money from country to country and not paying bank fees. The blog was from an american guy living in China and with a setp by step guide about all the process, from the buying BTC in China to the sell part in the US.

I tryed myself and made some small profits on the move...Then, I miss the selling step and become a hodler.

I orange pilled my nephews, I give about $30 in a BTC paper wallet. This gift trigger the curiosity for BTC, the value of money and the importance of long term.

Took my grandma from "Bitcoin is fake money" to "wow, Bitcoin is really something" in less than an hour by just telling her the origin story. Her eyes lit up when we got to 'no one can make more unless they mine it, and it will cap out at 21 million.' She understood in that moment the hardness of Bitcoin.

Was interested in politics and hopeful-ish around the Obama presidency. But saw the excesses of banking and outside finance all the wiretapping & war industry... no one really willing to fix it. "Occupy Wall St." getting obviously maligned like a psy-op while we do another decade of bailouts and QE.

Realized there is no one out there actually controlling the bus and figured, "why not hold a little bitcoin?" I also was interested in economics early on in school, but moved away from it because I intuitively understood there was something off about the equations and Keynes and endless BRRRR. Eventually found Austrian economics and some of the more fringe histories of the Fed and WWI, and that was actually more orange/gold pilling than any Bitcoin media.