A real bitcoiner ™️
You might not characterize the community of bitcoiners as a welcoming group of folks. Market forces have caused some of the most vocal among us to have developed a certain “toxicity”. And this is a rational mechanism of defense against all the nonsense scams, schemes and fraudsters orbiting bitcoin (and boy are there a lot of them!).
However, I have a more welcoming idea to share. You can be a “real bitcoiner™️” without subscribing to all the angry toxicity. I’d suggest all it takes is understanding what makes bitcoin special. I have been accused of not being a “real bitcoiner™️” at times. But, I don’t really care. I’ve been on a continual journey of educating myself and my friends about this technology. You can begin to climb the educational ladder as soon as you begin to become curious. Understand what bitcoin uniquely adds to the world: digital scarcity.
A partially ordered list of the stages you might go through:
+ buy some bitcoin via an ETF
+ buy some bitcoin and hold it on an exchange
+ understand what makes bitcoin special
+ withdraw some bitcoin to a non-custodial wallet
+ withdraw some bitcoin to cold storage run a bitcoin full node
+ explore privacy preserving technologies like TOR and CoinJoin
+ buy some non-KYC’d bitcoin
+ convert all your personal assets to bitcoin
+ run a bitcoin miner
+ exclusively hold all your wealth in cold storage
+ exclusively use bitcoin to pay for all your monetary needs
+ move to El Salvador or another bitcoin-centric community/region
+ only participate in circular economies on the bitcoin standard
The beauty of bitcoin is that it’s a voluntary system that nobody controls. So don’t let anyone shame you into living up to their expectations of what it means to be a “real bitcoiner™️”. I’m somewhere in the middle of this list personally. The further I get down the list, the more curious I become about items a bit further down. I don’t expect I’ll be moving to El Salvador, but I’m a “real bitcoiner™️” and you can be, too.
A real nostrich ™️
Say gm every morning.
bitcoin, the world of 1 million acronyms. 😵💫
don’t ask what it means…just go learn…thumbhow…or thumbthing.
that’s mostly what I’ve heard since ‘20. Go learn, go buy this book.
I just bought The Bitcoin Standard and when I’m finished reading it, and if I’ve retained even just one sentence of information on bitcoin I’m going to share it freely, shout it out to the rooftops, give away all of your meangirl acronyms…and there’s nothing y’all bitcoin knowitalls can do about it.
I appreciate you posting this. It both made me feel better about my path in this bitcoin journey as well as having patience and compassion for others in their journey. I sometimes get anxious when I get comfortable with my setup and then find that there is more to consider like UTXO consolidation. I also have found myself pushing back on people interested in the ETFs. I recently had to remind myself that something having risks doesn't mean it can't be a net positive for some people. Everyone's values, priorities, use-cases, and threat models are different so I'm trying to be more intentional about matching advice with the unique needs of the person I'm talking to.
Have you managed to buy non KYC BTC ? How do you do it ? I feel we might have a window of opportunity here but that it could close once CBDCs enter the stage.
Oddbean new post about login | logout