"A lot of bitcoiners seem to have the first mindset. Perhaps this has been built into the Bitcoin community from the beginning."
I actually wish the Bitcoin community adopted this mindset more. Maybe it's a knee-jerk reaction to FTX and those type of characters, but there's this weird culture of, "selfishness is good and philanthropy is objectively bad," among maximalists. Like you said, I don't get that sense from Satoshi and I definitely don't get it from the old-school Austrian economists.
When you look at the heroes that any history book celebrates, you always find a good percentage of non-problem solvers. Isaac Newton didn't have a patron for calculus. Fredrick Douglas was a free man when he wrote about slavery. Despite what it says in The Bitcoin Standard, Bach* actually never made any hard money (or even soft money!) from Brandenburg Concertos. He had an idea, built a product, and his intended audience did not pay him (hire him for paid work in the case of the Brandenburgs). Nevertheless, they have provided massive value to subsequent generations.
All this to say, while I think the latter attitude probably leads to an easier life, there's so much value in the former and I think there is a certain type of person that is just wired to operate that way. Let's not throw out the Nicolai Teslas with the Sam-Bankman Fried water.
*As an aside, another thing that book really gets wrong about Bach was his sense of being misunderstood as an artist. He's actually the king of the "long diatribes" that Ammous equates with modern artists, spilling TONS of ink to justify his music to people that thought it was too esoteric and pretentious.
It still blows my mind that all the value that bitcoin created started with a person who just posted some code on the internet that anyone could download for free.
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I know, right!?
Satoshi: V4FREE
many bitcoiners: V4V (or else you're a scammer LARPing as an altruist)
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