This post is just a transcription of a post I made on my personal substack

Or how I went from waiter to Bitcoiner

It's been what feels like a long time since the last time I posted in this blog, between me getting a new job and many things that have been going in my life I haven’t had the time I would like to have to dedicate exclusive to Bitcoin, but here I am again. A few months back I made my first ever presentation about Bitcoin and Lightning, nothing fancy, just a small presentation on how to run a Bitcoin and Lightning node and since you’re already using a whole computer only for those tasks, making it into a home server, all with the help of Start9’s own StartOS and Umbrel.

After the presentation was made public I decided to post it on my own social media with a long ass text under it (not Twitter and Nostr tho, I didn’t had the energy to do it at the moment), the original text I wrote for it was too long to post on Instagram so I had to shorten it, I’ve been looking up to posting it somewhere and now that I finally find the time to do so, here it is:

Me cutting a pizza in the restaurant I used to work at (April 2019) /// Me giving a talk about Bitcoin, Lightning, and homemade servers (September 2023).

Now, you're probably wondering, "How does someone go from being a waiter to giving Bitcoin talks? What's the catch? Did this person become a crypto trader who peddles scams as if it were a revolution?" The truth is, there is no catch. And if you want to believe there is, well, go ahead. In summary, I studied computer science, but I didn't graduate, and when I arrived in Spain from Venezuela, I could only find work in the hospitality industry. For some reason or another, I ended up liking it, and I spent a few years working in that field. However, during the pandemic, something changed. I began looking for a place to invest my money, and that's when I re-encountered Bitcoin, which I had first heard of in 2012. Back then, I dismissed it, saying, "This is useless" when I saw it drop by 50% in a day. After rediscovering it I speculated a lot with Bitcoin and its imitators and survived almost unscathed through one of the most spectacular bubbles ever seen (which won't be the last; the next one will be even more absurd, with pictures of monkeys on blockchains, coins named after dogs, and perpetual motion machines that work just like any other Ponzi scheme). I also witnessed the largest financial fraud since Bernie Madoff (don't worry, what's going on with Tether and USDT will be much worse than what happened with FTX, and it won't kill Bitcoin either). All of this made me want to study and understand why none of these things (and many more) killed something that supposedly only has value "because we believe it has value." To be honest, I became obsessed. The last time I felt so drawn to something was when I discovered Linux in 2007, which made me want to study computer science, about that time I remember my parentsed to scold me as a child for staying up until 8 in the morning instead of 8 at night just because I was tinkering with config files and destroying my file system and bootloader just to see what happens. Bitcoin has kept me up at night on many occasions because it fascinated me as much as Linux did back in 2007. Linux was impossible for the average person to use at the time, and I was called crazy for saying that people would use Linux in the future, even if they didn't know it. Today, you're probably viewing this post on an Android phone that uses Linux as an integral component, and you might not even realize it. If you have an iPhone, you're not far off either because iOS is also a Unix system like Linux, just not (completely) open source. With Bitcoin, I came across an open-source project that was “abandoned” by its creator over 10 years ago and that gives the `perception of advancing slowly but steadily, but each step it takes is a giant leap (Taproot and Lightning may mean nothing to you today, but they could be among the most important things you'll learn about in a few years). Adding to this it consumes a lot of energy, which isn't great for the environment which should be a reason to stop it, but it keeps consuming more and has shown that it contributes to clean energy generation. It's a very slow payment network compared to others, but today there are solutions that leave VISA and MasterCard crying. It's a supposed new technology that's nothing more than a data structure, an inelastic and unchangeable monetary policy that shouldn't be good for an economy according to conventional economic models, and a whole lot more. Logic would tell anyone that this shouldn't work, but it does, and it's not going to stop. Regardless of your opinion about Bitcoin, and even if it never becomes my main source of income (the truth is I don't think I'll become a millionaire by saving a portion of my salary in Bitcoin, although I wouldn't mind it that were to happen), and it remains a hobby that consumes a lot of my free time, it's something that reignited my passion for computer science. It played a significant role in my decision to leave the hospitality industry, re-study Linux, and it also supported me financially while I was unemployed and rediscovering what I love (yes, you can get paid in Bitcoin for freelance work, and I'm still doing it). It's one of the most fascinating things I've seen in my life, and my deep interest in it has helped me grow as a person. Today, I'm proud to be able to give a talk about Bitcoin, and I love discussing how it works, its challenges, and, above all, how to use it as money because it's truly amazing.

If you want to take a look at it, just click on the image, it will redirect you to the presentation on Google Slides:

Computación soberana: Nodo de Bitcoin, Lightning y servidor casero I really wanted to embed it here, but it seems it’s not possible, thanks Stacker :)

Be warned that the presentation is in Spanish and it was never my intention to make it in English, but I might translate it if enough people ask for it but I promise nothing.

For those who are wondering here are my sources:

The sources with the start (*) at the end have been updated since the presentation

If you like what I do, don’t hesitate to some zap me some sats on Lightning to any of these addresses: