Have you had this experience? (or is it bulls***) \ stacker news ~tech

Have you had this experience? (or is it bulls***)

4490 sats \ 37 comments \ @birdeye21 27 Aug 2023 tech

233 sats \ 2 replies \ @grayruby 27 Aug 2023

Somewhat. I am certainly less tied to any political ideology or spectrum because of Bitcoin and see the world less as their team vs our team from a political lens and more as all politics is a grift and bullshit. That being said I still have my biases.

20 sats \ 1 reply \ @siggy47 27 Aug 2023

Seriously, I have had a similar experience. I guess I'm floating untethered if I'm being honest.

41 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 27 Aug 2023

I like to say Bitcoin breaks everyone's brain and changes them in some way. For some it is for the better and for others not so much.

71 sats \ 2 replies \ @carlosfandango 27 Aug 2023

Lol. I sometimes come back down to shout a bit and then pause, reflect and float back up again.

40 sats \ 0 replies \ @birdeye21 OP 27 Aug 2023

i think we all can relate there haha

31 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 27 Aug 2023

Hard not to.

42 sats \ 7 replies \ @siggy47 27 Aug 2023

At times, but then I usually float back down into my quadrant

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @geisterde 27 Aug 2023

Lol, I'm a paper airplane that is launched from ancapistan, circles around libleft and authright, then and lands back in ancapistan.

20 sats \ 5 replies \ @birdeye21 OP 27 Aug 2023

interesting, the opposite of @carlosfandango 's response

31 sats \ 4 replies \ @siggy47 27 Aug 2023

He is further along the path than me.

32 sats \ 3 replies \ @carlosfandango 27 Aug 2023

Not sure about that! My only insight is the realisation best summed up by Mark Twain;

‘Never ever argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience’

51 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 27 Aug 2023

Haha that's a great quote.

37 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 27 Aug 2023

deleted by author

42 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 27 Aug 2023

Battle of wits with an unarmed man?

31 sats \ 0 replies \ @sahil 27 Aug 2023

Indeed! I have experienced it. Knowing about Bitcoin gives you wings!

38 sats \ 0 replies \ @orthwyrm 27 Aug 2023

I have no idea how to organize a society.

But I think if you give individuals the power to move themselves and their capital, then they will inevitably flock to the jurisdictions that treat them best.

Bitcoin is one tool among many that allows this sort of natural selection to play out.

32 sats \ 3 replies \ @SpaceHodler 27 Aug 2023

Orthogonal to the political plane, yes.

Still, I'd say Bitcoin is libertarian, but not in the political sense, but rather aiming to empower the individual through apolitical means.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @birdeye21 OP 27 Aug 2023

Bitcoin isn't libertarian, though it's a set of ideas that libertarians happen to enjoy

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @SpaceHodler 27 Aug 2023

I'm not sure if our disagreement is about something fundamental or something more trivial like semantics. Also, everything is relative and is interpreted in a context. You posted a meme to illustrate a point, so it makes sense to defend it. But in another context, I've heard it said that "Bitcoin is libertarian, AI is statist" and many would agree with that too, because it's about the juxtaposition / contrast, not any absolutes.

Bitcoin is just a tech, it doesn't have an agenda of its own, so in that sense it's not libertarian. But due to the intrinsic properties of this tech - decentralization, censorship resistance, unseizability (strong property rights!) - it decentralizes power and empowers the individual, which is what libertarianism at its core (not necessarily in its politically co-opted version) is about. It does incentivize everyone (who understands it anyway) to 'invest in it', because everybody wants to be wealthy, including authoritarians, and it may be a tool for other goals, like political popularity. Which may be what's happening in El Salvador. But at the end of the day, I believe the greatest beneficiary will be individual sovereignty.

15 sats \ 0 replies \ @AllCatsAreEvil 27 Aug 2023

The vast bulk of early Bitcoiners were anti authoritarian which would put them very far away from the centre of that map

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @AllCatsAreEvil 27 Aug 2023

I'm inclined to disagree with it.

I'm not a centrist. I have my views and this would put me far too close to too many authoritarians.

21 sats \ 6 replies \ @k00b 27 Aug 2023

Yes.

This vector is the direction vector of apolitical technology imo. Bitcoin just scales this vector in a really significant way.

The internet also scales this vector. You can imagine most tech contributing to this vector: energy, markets, computers, internet, bitcoin.

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @birdeye21 OP 27 Aug 2023

Fully agree, although i do also think in some way the internet has led to more polarization and people digging their heels into respective parties

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b 27 Aug 2023

I’m not sure increased polarization is the result of the internet or just correlated with its rise.

1000 sats \ 0 replies \ @nemo 27 Aug 2023

deleted by author

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @birdeye21 OP 27 Aug 2023

maybe correlation, more so social media that's a cause i guess

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 27 Aug 2023

You're right - at least I'm pretty certain social media contributes to polarization.

It's probably the algorithms, which use activity and interest to determine what's worth elevating and crazy novel shit excites us.

1000 sats \ 0 replies \ @birdeye21 OP 27 Aug 2023

yes, and we're 1000x more exposed to all the strife in the world than previous generations. Humans care about lots of things, and the exposure makes it so easy to care and latch onto opposing ideas, losing ourselves along the way -- thus polarizing and making us feel much more different than we really are

Used to be me with politics, then bitcoin saved me from that. I'm a lot more self aware now than i was, but still always gotta keep myself from letting ideas like bitcoin do the same thing. Novelty really really excites me lol.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullama 27 Aug 2023

∞/21M

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @john_doe 28 Aug 2023

I would say kind of. E.g., last time I was doing a research on the new president of Argentina I felt weird when I saw rightist or far-right to qualify him (I ended up adding all these websites to my list of blocked websites on Kagi, the search engine I use, which allows me to get rid of all the "left/right/we're all going to die/no, it's okay" spamy news). Maybe thanks to Bitcoin, I don't know, but now I begin to see the news more in terms of books rather than small biaised attention-hogging articles and distantiate myself from narratives in general.

25 sats \ 0 replies \ @CoSatoshi 27 Aug 2023

For me personally, it was more that I had discovered libertarianism, and Austrian economics which then led me to abandon the traditional political models and ultimately discover Bitcoin. I was also mining shitcoins around this same time, so that sort of prebuilt an 'on ramp' to understanding Bitcoin a bit more rapidly.

At the same time, COVID also had a lot to do with my disillusionment, showing me on full display who the real tyrants/authoritarians are, and it ain't Trump (as I had been programmed to believe). So, multiple factors converging really is what did it for me.

PS: I'm not saying Trump is good

10 sats \ 5 replies \ @birdeye21 OP 27 Aug 2023

picked the wrong sub for this

31 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 27 Aug 2023