I like The Social Singularity by Max Borders

Very well said, "marketing department" is exactly how I view Saylor and Microstrategy. I think that in the long term, their attempts to dollarize bitcoin will be foiled when people start moving away from fiat

I see him as a Bitcoin educator and nothing more. I don't pay much attention to what he says anymore, his analogies seem to be getting more bizarre and I'm rather wary of his statism. His podcast musings are decent for newcomers but I prefer Saifedean and Matt Kratter since they discuss the properties of money more straightforwardly and they aren't statists.

In any case (like any large institution in the space), if Microstrategy allocates their bitcoin properly, that's good for Bitcoin. If they fumble their stack and get liquidated, that's good for Bitcoin

Besides, we still measure Bitcoin's market cap in dying, depreciating currencies

Wrong Warren, but funnily enough that changes nothing lolol

It really is FUD. Stealing bitcoin is much harder than even some bitcoiners make it out to be. Bitcoin's public ledger is something that the Monero community has been using as a cudgel against bitcoiners for a while and more I've read their musings about privacy, the less convinced they seem to be about fiat becoming obsolete. A lot of the fervor around privacy stems from dodging the stifling KYC/AMLs in place, and on some level it assumes that they'll be around forever. Bitcoin replaces those arbitrary levies and checkpoints, and unlocking this efficiency eats fiat's lunch. If the government wants bitcoin, they have to mine it themselves, like Satoshi did. The mere act of holding Bitcoin is telling the government to fuck off. People ought to commit to the bit

Yeah the OG character reminds me of American HODL and Junseth lol

-Bitcoin, not shitcoin. Shitcoins either have weak properties or are scams spun up by greedy VCs. Satoshi Nakamoto mined their bitcoin, just like everyone else.

-Not your keys, not your coins. Check out the Breez or Phoenix wallets and play with them a little bit

-Go to bitcoin meetups and meet others in the space who are building the circular economy. They'd be happy to teach you more. Navigating the space is much easier with friends. Also, go to Nostr and see bitcoin in action

-Learn why bitcoin is important to people. Check out Bitcoin University on YouTube

-Learn what fractional reserve banking is so you'll run for the hills whenever you see it

Swan is a "media" company first, which I'm pretty leery about. Doesn't help that I find their content to be really basic, either. Funny how nowadays Microstrategy is doing more for the space than Swan, which only seems to be drumming up hype to prop influencers. I don't mind Cory too much, though. At the end of the day I tell people to use Bisq and Robosats instead, far less risky

Yep, and I have no regrets. I'm glad that I know how shitcoins work so I can warn everyone. With "bitcoin eyes," all shitcoiners look like desperate beggars and panhandlers to me

I've heard about Bitcoin in 2011 from piracy sites, thought the government was gonna shut it down, then ignored it. I returned in 2017 due to mentions from a nocoiner buddy and the bull run hype, scalped some sats for dollars, then dumped it again.

My financial awakening was during the COVID lockdowns. The stimulus checks had me thinking about how to get involved in trading stocks. All the while, I've lamented the blatant overreaches of the government and thought everybody was doomed to get crushed beneath the despotic system we live in with no way out. I was a COVID doomer.

In January 2021, I found out about Melvin Capital's short squeeze. Though I wasn't involved, I cheered for the GameStoppers. Then, brokerages prohibited people from buying GME. After a few arguments with people who used the same exact line of thinking used to justify COVID mandates, I threw up my hands and said "Fuck this, I'm going full cryptard!"

I learned a little bit about Bitcoin and said, "That's cool and all, but I want more ways to make money," then I began to trade a bunch of shitcoins in search of dollar gains. As I went on, I found it odd that there were 10,000 cryptocurrencies (now 20,000!!) Ethereum's gas fees seemed to only get higher from gas wars during shitcoin minting, reaching the point of unusability. People kept telling me that Bitcoin is obsolete because the blocks were too small and it isn't capable of smart contracts. Oh, and I lost a hefty shitcoin airdrop in a yield farm from impermanent loss (basically the devs rugged). I found out that shitcoiners only profit from information asymmetry, whether they personally know the project team or hopped in the right Telegram chat in the right time, and that sounded like too much work. I was weary of the cynicism, usury and greed surrounding shitcoins, but I thought it was cool that there was a way to profit outside of fiat.

A few months of this and then I finally found some signal. Some anon posted a link to Michael Maloney's Hidden Secrets of Money. Learning the history of money cast a different light on all of the doodoo tokens I was trading--there wasn't any real reason for them to exist other than to make exit liquidity out of others. He touched upon how politics and culture run downstream from economics, which essentially is the exchange of information. That planted the seed of the idea that bad money can lead to the multitudinous fuckeries I've witnessed my entire life (Iraq War, Great Financial Crisis, the IMF, World Bank, and BCEAO plundering countries overseas, bread-and-circus media dialect catalyzing the culture war). More importantly, his series taught me how fiat works. Fiat is a Ponzi scheme, an unsustainable linear economy, as I partially realized during 2020. Too bad Maloney is an HBAR bull, yuck! (The Bitcoin Standard is a higher signal version to Maloney's series, anyway.) Shortly after, I discovered Trader University (now Bitcoin University), where Matt Kratter explained the fundamentals of Bitcoin and why it is important to people. His militant, unrelenting fudbusting got my gears turning and had me questioning what I had known at the time about Bitcoin and "crypto." Most of all, the final deathblow to my shitcoinery was Samson Mow's tweet about value transacted per second, displaying how the oBsOLeTe Bitcoin blows every fuck out of the newer tokens: https://twitter.com/Excellion/status/1333966283876954113 The shitcoins were either trying to catch up to bitcoin or scam people. As soon as I saw that tweet, I traded every alt for bitcoin and never looked back. After that, I took an interest in macro, learned what I needed to know, then decided to focus on what people are building on Bitcoin and how people are using it. Today, I'm at Stacker News.

What I've learned is that these parallel systems being created testify to the tenacity of the human spirit and that Bitcoin isn't really about getting rich, it's a reclamation of dignity. My doomerism turned into hope as I saw that a life free of tyranny is possible. Turns out that computers can help free us all, so long as we don't fall in the traps of censorship-prone middleware we've been inundated with. There will be no SkyNet. I give a big and hearty thanks to everyone who is hijacking the infrastructure to create a better life

I usually say that I'm a bitcoiner, or that I'm exclusive to bitcoin. "Maxi" is a short hand I use from time to time since it's familiar to most people, especially when I mention the days I've shitcoined. Knowing its origins, "maxi" is kinda pejorative, like saying "mumble rap." I find it amusing that bitcoiners have taken that term back, though

I think they were at least sponsored by FTX, but I'm not sure

Bitcoin is more like TCP/IP rather than a Western Union that should be supplanted by a Venmo or whatever. At this point I think the only thing that could "kill" Bitcoin is ignoring it. I find it very telling that the most convincing bear scenarios are from bitcoiners. In any case, I'm aligned with the principles within Bitcoin, and if we're wrong, at least we tried to change the money. That's more than what most other people can say for themselves who instead choose to succumb to fatalism

They are feds, end of story. These pricks putting bitcoin user data in dragnets fuck outta here