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.