Anything we touch, anything we experience, all of the world we normally interact with is impermanent and far from perfect.

This is something I spent quite a while contemplating ages ago, especially after getting into Buddhism in the nineties, and later on Taoism and traditional medicine, doing a degree on this.

To me it seems that there is a gap between what is normiethink about the world and how things really are, we are more or less programmed by consumerism to believe that there is perfection in shiny objects, that there will be new technology that will constitute a future that "fixes" impermanence.

I remember writing about this as a photographer, in the darkroom I had no problem doing good prints, I had no problem doing exhibitions and also shielding my negatives & positives as one should, but there was always a mismatch between the perceived image which pointed to an abstract slice of time and the actual presentation, always a tiny scratch, always a chance that it will get bent or whatever...

Then of course my medium went digital. I was in on it early, with a far from perfect scanner and printer around 1996. More frustration, more imperfection sold as something else, even with professional scans of medium format, yes it was way easier to work with, but still the same problems persisted.

These days of course screens are close to perfect until they break, and the printer I have is better than any huge, expensive lab with several workers that a photographer doing an exhibition might turn to in the eighties or nineties.

Yet even I now have a relation to an image as if it is perfect by now, I can examine the file pixel by pixel, I know it will print flawlessly, and that most end users will get a somewhat correct rendering on their device.

But of course in reality its impermanent, regardless of how good my routines for backups might be, the end user might lose it, and once it enters the physical realm as any good photograph should then of course it will change, slowly or rapidly.

I think I must have heard about Bitcoin from Max Keiser the first time around 2014, or rather in some coder context a bit earlier, but if so merely as a mention.

When the blockwars got going is when I started studying it for real. The distributed and resilient nature had a parallel for me going even back into the eighties: I was a specialist in the signal corp, we were running a node-based, fully resilient phone network over radio, directional radio and parabolic transceivers combined.

I guess the easiest way of describing it is that if a phone conversation was running through our station while we happened to be obliterated by Soviets, well the end users might not even know... Yes, it was the end of the Cold War!

The acyclical graph was something to behold too. Right now I can't even recall all of the basics that I got into, but the conclusion is always there: this is different, and yes this is totally unstoppable. Of course glancing over the mempool and difficulty adjustment more or less daily reaffirms these things.

How do we relate to something that you can't kill or render less perfect short of global, nuclear annihilation?

This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of it all, something that I know has changed much of my thinking and psychology on a fundamental level. Since it is distributed mathematics it is the perfect, close to permanent idea that changes everything!

Although I try not to fully seal myself into the maximalist echo chamber I do understand that, I do relate to Bitcoin the same way, and I do see the same things. The reason that I won't go full hog is mainly that through decades of resisting all the toxic fiat fuckery and bullshit I do know that tying everything to one option is not resilient. But I do agree 100% that Bitcoin is pivotal in our fight for freedom, even if fiat forces manage to "fence it in" later down the line.

I've written on my idea of Bridging the Freedom Gap as my first post here, the short version is that I'm aiming for building up a revenue stream that can pay my lifestyle as a peasant ASAP, so that I have a fully uncensorable future, and of course Bitcoin is then by far the most important tool I have in that fight.

But how will Bitcoin take over everything? Based on how tech adoption happens I do believe in this, but also from a practical standpoint I need to watch it closely, especially since there are alternatives right now that from a practical standpoint work, where the actual micropayments are worth the effort.

SN, Nostr and paywalls on Bitcoin Lightning is of course a great thing and a great leap forward, but how do we scale this? How do we grow what we have while also taking over the actual network of users that are posting good content for shitcoins? Yes that is a real thing, and these people are a lot of productive, resilient users spread across the globe who should get sats instead...

Is it possible to shape a distributed, open source style marketing plan towards these? How can power users with experience both from marketing, organizational work and applied tech aid devs in things like evangelizing for SN?

Also I need to see Bitcoin provide another thing that should have an upgrade: direct storage of image files and larger even video. Ordinals won't work, I get that, so what will the ecosystem come up with? I've been super close to just doing some ordinals, as a long time photographer its hard to express how much of a game changer this is, to get perfect, close to permanent storage is a big deal!

There are so many other things that Bitcoin is driving as well, so many topics around resiliency, preparedness, right living, personal development and even woo matters seem to get an extra boost when coupled with Bitcoin, this has been a fascinating thing to observe on its own.

Where is my writing going on this? Well its Bitcoin, so it will do its thing even within what I write, pointing to further discovery of course!

I guess I have to conclude with this: for me who is used to being extremely skeptical about any claims to perfection, and especially permanence, Bitcoin totally is different. Whenever I work on any other topic or aspect of reality it kinda is there, smack in the middle of the analysis, or lurking somewhere in the background ;-)

But, in an imperfect, ever changing world I'm also watching closely how it behaves, how and if it might be able to take over it all, especially since I plan to make a living through this, so that I can protect the stack I already have!

That's it for now!