Once upon a time, I got sucked to the oasis through the burning stone portals, after I had been unable and too apathetic to build a well.

Which is to say, back in 2014, I tried installing a bitcoin miner on my computer. I had a rather fancy graphics card and thought it might work. I installed it, watched it, nothing much happened in three days, and I gradually forgot running it without ever making anything. This is the well I was too apathetic to build.

I understood little about it; it was just something that was internet-native, so I had a basic interest, but nothing big. Though I am a social scientist and I very much know about the practices in which official facades are kept up, and by what strategies these images - lies - reproduce, I didn't make the connection at this point. I failed early on.

Three years later, in the 2017 bull run, I installed coinbase on my phone. This is the burning stone desert. I didn't do anything with it, I opened it and looked at it a few times, but I was too chicken to put anything in at this point. And the better; this was in the middle of the parablic run and just before the 2017 crash. After the crash, I looked a few times again, but of course, the crash scared me off. I waited another six months or so, saw it not die, and then decided I'd put a little money in.

Only after that did I learm to connect what I already knew about the working of institutions with the permissionlessness and anti-bank-action of bitcoin. Then, I got a node, which isn't a well; too late for that, but I think of it as a pump that keeps everyone's life water circulating.