“It has to have some value,” Theo explained. “Otherwise, you could just print millions of dollars.”

**You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier**

Reading Jaron Lanier’s 2010 *You Are Not A Gadget* in 2023 is an interesting experience—equal parts withering, prophetic, and heretical clarion call warning from a high priest of the Technocracy and rambling, musing, cognitive jam session from a technofied musician-philosopher. 

Yet, in ways that I think the author would be simultaneously pleased, amused, saddened, and disturbed by, the 13 yeas since the book’s publishing have, in places, proven him right with stunning foresight and precision, and in others, made his ideas appear laughable, bizarre, even naive. The book is written in five parts, yet I would suggest viewing it as two discrete elements—Part One (around the first half of the book) and…*everything else*. 

For context, Lanier, is a computer scientist and early technologist from the area of Jobs, Wozniak, and Gates, and is considered to be a founding father of virtual reality. He is also a consummate contrarian, a player of rare and obscure musical instruments, a deep interdisciplinary thinker…and a white man with dreadlocks named Jaron.


## **PART ONE**

Part One of the book “What is a Person?” reads like a scathing and clear-eye manifesto—where Lanier is batting 1000, merciless in his rightness. Were one to pull a passage that speaks to the soul of this portion of the book, it might be the following: ***“The net does not design itself. We design it.”*** 

Lanier terms the prevailing technocratic ideology—the particular winning tech-nerd subculture that has now come to capture our society—as “the cybernetic totalist” or “digital Maoists.” Essentially a materialist and stealth collectivist movement in new-age technocratic dress, that through its successes, and now excesses, represents much the same of religion that it’s founders would have claimed to be “evolving past.” 

Lanier points out that in this, we are simply trading the pursuit of finding God in spirituality or the afterlife, for a notion of digital immortality—seeking, or, if possible, becoming, God in the cloud. He aptly identifies that this worldview requires that society, and all human interactions really, be savagely bent into adherence to this new religion of aggregation that demands deification of data, gross diminishment of the individual, and belief in some objective (but never defined) "meaning" that exists beyond and apart from the human observer. 

With skill and simple wit, he raises strong, rational counterpoint to the digital Maoists’ obsession with quantity, data in aggregate and at-scale, as the prime societal directive “A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity […] turns into quality at some extreme scale […] I disagree. A trope in the early days or computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.”

Lanier is able to envision the digital cages that likes of Facebook, Youtube, social-media dating apps would become for the internet native generations. Of whom he writes “The most effective young Facebook users […] are the ones who create successful online fictions about themselves,” and “If you start out by being fake, you’ll eventually have to put in twice the effort to undo the illusion if anything good is to come of it.”

Lanier’s 2010 criticism of Wikipedia-ism is now double or triply apropos in our current hype cycle of “AI magic” and Everything-GPT, “Wikipedia, for instance, works on what I can the Oracle Illusion, in which knowledge of human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text superhuman validity. Traditional holy books work in precisely the same way and present many of the same problems.” This same deep truth now sits at the heart of every “new” creation churned out by the flavor-of-the-week, plagiarism-at-scale, generative AI tool.

More darkly, he is also able to foresee the spectre of a return to collectivism lurking both at the core and on the margins of our new digital age—“The recipe that led to social catastrophe in the past was economic humiliation combined with collectivist ideology. We already have the ideology in its new digital packaging, and it’s entirely possible we could face dangerously traumatic economic shock in the coming decades.”—*“No Shit” said everyone who lived through 2020-2022…*

This brings us, eerily, to the world of today. Where aggregate insights are upheld as more valuable than discrete insights. Where crowds are are assumed to have more wisdom than individuals. Where truth is twisted into a might-is-right numbers game. A world ruled by the idea that if we can just centralize enough information and sufficiently pulverize authorship, the result will, necessarily, be something super-intelligent, "alive," and perhaps even *divine*. 

**In short, the cybernetic totalists and digital Maoists, having killed reason, now sit on its corpse like a thrown, smearing its blood on the walls and calling it art, reading its entrails for prophecy.**

If I were to infer some ideological takeaway from Part One of the book, it might be that Lanier seems to axiomatically reject any affirmative implication of the Turning Test. Simply put, he believes that bits are not and cannot ever be alive independent of the human-as-oracle. Further, there is no objective meaning beyond the human observer—in fact, that observer fundamentally *creates* any meaning there is to be had. This is best illustrated by one of the most powerful passages in the book:


> “But the Turning Test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standard of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?”


**Ponder this well, Anon.**


## **EVERYTHING ELSE**

With all of the great stuff above out of the way, we must turn to…the rest of the book. Parts Two through Five breakdown into something more like a stream of consciousness. And while there are certainly many nuggets to insight and beauty to be found, the book becomes largely dis-coherent and very difficult to read. That said, the remainder of the book does contain three particularly compelling threads that I find to be worth pulling on. 

**Internet Attribution**
First, are Lanier’s musing about money and attribution in our authorless “information wants to be free” world. He laments the infinite elevation of advertising and offers harsh critique to the concept of attention as the new currency—as  this tends to overwhelmingly reward the aggregator and a piddling few soulless super-influencers at the expense of all other users and creators. 

Interestingly, under the guise of “what could have been” he imagines a world where attribution is  tracked across the web (though how this achieved is left unanswered) and royalty payments can flow back to the author seamlessly over the internet. I find his vision to be intriguing because in 2010, we lacked the technology to either track attribution across the web or facilitate seamless micropayment royalties based on access / usage. 

While we still don't have the ability to achieve the type of fully-tracked, always-on attribution Lanier imagines, we **do** now have the ability to stream payments across the internet with bitcoin and the lightning network. While Lanier can be excused for not mentioning the then uber-nascent bitcoin in 2010, bitcoin’s development since only goes to  underscore the prescience of Lanier’s imagination. 

The bigger question that now remains, especially in the face of the advent of “AI,” is whether such a system to manage and therefore *enforce* attribution globally on the internet would even be a good thing. Where obscured attribution enables mashed-up plagiarism-at-scale, centrally enforced attribution can just as easily enable idea, content, discovery, and innovation suppression-at-scale.

**Music in the New Age**
Second, much of the book, particularly in the second half, is filtered through the lens and language of music. Music is essential to Lanier’s inner life and it is clear that he views music as an emergent mystery force attributable to something unknowable, if not divine, and entirely unique to the human experience. 

He bemoans the music of the 2000s as lacking in any distinct chronological era sound—everything is either a rehashed mashup or digitally lofi-ed emulation of sounds from previous begone eras—it is music that is impossible to place. To him, it is as though musical evolution stopped right around the time of the advent of the internet…and then folded back in on itself, creating an endless kaleidoscoping of what came before but rarely, if ever, the creation anything truly new.

In response, Lanier goes so far as to imagine the ridiculous (my take, not his) world of “Songles”—songs on dongles—essentially physical music NFTs. In Songleland, listening to the hottest tracks at a party hinges on the guy or gal with the dankest songles swinging through and plugging them into the Songle player. And songles, being scarce, even become speculative investments. On this, Lanier manages to be both right and wrong in only the most absurd of ways. 

What Lanier really laments though is the passing of popular music as a shared cultural experience at national or even global scale. During Lanier’s coming of age through the 1960-80s—with only a few consolidated channels for music distribution, it was truly impossible to escape the sounds and influence of the Beatles or Prince or Micheal Jackson—everyone heard it and even the deaf still felt it.

In the end, Lanier could image Songles but he couldn’t envision what Spotify would become—a conduit to shatter music distribution into myriad tiny longtails—providing infinitely fragmented and individually fine-tuned music experiences rather than large and cohesive cultural moments. However, even in this miss, Lanier is largely able to project what Spotify-ed music would resolve to—music designed as much or more to please the self-referential selection algorithm than any real, *human* listeners. 

**Digital Neoteny**
The final thread to pull is that of "digital neoteny," *the retention of juvenile behaviors in adult form*, in this case, a neoteny of the mind if you will. Lanier sees the internet as specifically primed to propagate three kinds of neoteny in digital-native humans— a blissful and curious Bachelardian neoteny (as in Gaston Bachelard’s *Poetics of Reverie*); a cruel and mob-like Goldingesque neoteny (as in William Golding’s *Lord of the Flies*); and a general and deeply pervasive, infantile neoteny. 

Neoteny of the Bachelardian variety, which Lanier likens to “the sense of wonder and weirdness that a teen can find in the unfolding world,” is what he feels the internet has provided in a few brief and magical moments generally aligned with the “early days” of successive internet technologies, movements, and companies—through this generally degrades into Goldingesque neoteny as novelty gives way to ossification. 

Lanier’s missives on Bachelardian neoteny feel especially pertinent to the present state of [Nostr](https://nostr.how/en/what-is-nostr) (where I am publishing this writing). Nostr is in a moment where winner-take all dynamics and corporatization has yet to take hold. Child-like revelry abounds with each new discovery or novel Nostr client development so much so that the likes of Jack Dorsey compare it to the excitement of the early internet.

But with time, if and as the Nostr protocol wins, to what extent will technical lock-in take hold here? To what extent will calcification of seemingly trivial or even comical decisions being made by client devs today have dramatic implications on the feasibility of other development in the future? And will we early Nostr users, at some point put down welcoming inclusivesness for insular tribalism—and in what ways might we be doing this already? 

Finally, to the third kind of neoteny, Infantile neoteny—which perhaps incapsulates the internet even more so than either of the other two types—Lanier sees the net driving an evermore prolonged deferral of maturity, resulting ultimately in some centrally-managed permanent arresting of society in a stupefied and juvenile mental state:


> “Some of the greatest speculative investments in human history continue to converge on Silicon Valley schemes that seemed to have been named by Dr. Seuss. On any given day, one might hear of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to a start-up company named Ublibudly or MeTickly. These are names I just made up, but they would make great venture capital bait if they existed. At these companies one finds rooms full of MIT PhD engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks. At the end of the road of the pursuit of technological sophistication appears to lie a playhouse in which humankind regresses to nursery school.”


The popular culture of the early 2020s—with it’s NFT Monke JPEGs, silent and masked TikTok dancing in the drab aisles of crumbling department stores, and rampant peer-pressured social-media virtue-signaling and paternalism—could scarcely be described in any more stark and specific detail. That such could be seen so vividly in 2010 is as masterful as it is disheartening and dark. 


## **CONCLUSION**

*You Are Not A Gadget* is a special thing, a strange beast—as lucid in its first half as it is jumbled, meandering, and even nonsensical in its second half. And while the discerning reader might judge the book harshly for these structural failings, I doubt the author would care, he might even welcome it. 
Lanier’s apparent purpose in writing is to share his mind rather than please the reader in any regard. The sufficiently curious reader, one who is willing to engage with the book’s content, for whatever the book’s faults may be, finds a king’s randoms of wisdom, insight, and uncanny foresight. 

In closing, it seems fitting to recall one Lanier’s earliest warnings in the book,  “Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will […] then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic.” 13 years on, this feels more pressing and urgent and true than ever. (**Rating: 4/5**🐙)

[You Are Not A Gadget](https://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307269647/ref=asc_df_0307269647/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=343251570619&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=3445637978183613468&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9009901&hvtargid=pla-584937637612&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=67797266623&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=343251570619&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=3445637978183613468&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9009901&hvtargid=pla-584937637612)

Find a dingy, nondescript alley in a suspiciously quiet corner of Bangkok’s Chinatown. Walk down it. Pass a small prayer shrine and approach an old wooden door. You were told that there is a bar here, yet nothing suggests that this is so…
https://i.nostrimg.com/94cbbbef15ab5f1cfd53962793fd9cc3bde48f486f80bb302bcd52f89549be42/file.jpeg

Wait! Closer inspection reveals a simple bronze plaque, out of place for its polish and newness, “cocktails 3rd floor.” Up the stairs then! The landing on 3 presents a white sign with the Chinese character for bitter, ku/苦, and a red arrow pointing right.
https://i.nostrimg.com/4ae9276b6cffc7f3e740ce8d1d5a8ba1d819d76ad09b7b909dfa6d00652143ca/file.jpeg 
https://i.nostrimg.com/83175d0d4ac5b60dccdfca9deb6f50ccb0fd15f81d97e0fec2c1b4fc4ce5eea0/file.jpeg 

Pass through the threshold, enter a new space. To your right, a large expanse of barren concrete, an empty “room.” Tripods for…some kind of filming? A man-sized, locked container. Yet, you did not come here to ask questions, such things are none of your business!
￼
https://i.nostrimg.com/91ef2a61393e12a27449f4a534692b871ed4992119789a1346a42a203a28faeb/file.jpeg

And to your left, you find the golden door. Approach. Enter. Be greeted. You have done well! You have found it. 苦 Bar. You are among friends now. Inside exudes weirdness - in the etymological sense - the bending of destinies, control of the fates. For the patrons, a quiet and sacred space. 
https://i.nostrimg.com/8629915bdc152a90f11dc961cfa78897e1aac91bc13f7f766e464b2576277da2/file.jpeg
https://i.nostrimg.com/a44f1169408e9a5c15290436df9ae6dad8282b800f55780bd9dfe8fb3752bd35/file.jpeg

But, Taste! Taste is the order of the day! Bizarre, Obscure, Arcane - you find a most unique use of flavors, flavors beyond name. Buddha’s hand, burnt cedar charcoal, ylang ylang, strawberry, wild roots brought in by friendly travelers, and many other things. But, Taste! The drinks here are not so much to be liked or disliked, but rather, experienced without judgment. 
https://i.nostrimg.com/7b2d02d576b59a2ad729855fb9d5584fbf0dc11c5ebb6db1a010dd206db09981/file.jpeg

In the inner room, you may find another set of stairs, down this time, leading to the second place -  KANGKAO. A natural wine bar. Cozy, botanical, industrial, enclosed. The kind of private setting where you might overhear “State Department” and “UN” types chatting with their Chinese counterparts. But don’t look or listen too hard! Surely, there’s no reason to be rude… Remember, you are among friends now. 
https://i.nostrimg.com/7120c11a37654b9515e4cb46bbd93d3520664e21845a14a6fb8c06957aa13b4e/file.jpeg 

苦 Bar.
Bangkok.
Thailand. 

There are secrets to be found. Go there. 

#Travel #Photography #Art #Story #Bangkok #Thailand #Bitcoin #Nostr #Plebchain #Coffeechain


# Oppenheimer
 
***This is a story about annihilation.*** 

This is also a story about atomic physics as a metaphor for the triumphs, flaws, and vicissitudes of the human condition. 

In *Oppenheimer*, director Christopher Nolan, uses the urgent and high-stakes historical contexts of World War II, the Cold War, and the precarious positions of the world's foremost physicists therein (many of whom were Jewish) as a wire frame upon which he expertly dresses a beautiful, complex, and deeply felt human story.

The long arc of the film is the interplay between layers of competing, parallel forces, all threatening obliteration. Many of these forces—Capitalism, Communism, McCarthyism—are bigger than any one individual, and yet still, some individuals—Oppenheimer, for one—are forces unto themselves. And wherever any such forces should meet, there are produced shockwaves and tectonic shifts that leave nothing undisturbed. 


### Physics: God at the Dice Table

Starting from the top, at the highest level of the film’s thematic layers, there is the grand mystery of atomic physics. Of course, the film is framed around the Promethean accomplishment of harnessing nuclear energy. On one hand, marshaling enough power for humanity to free itself from toil, and on the other, delivering more than enough of the same in the hands of weak men for humanity to drown in its own meanness, stupidity, and pride.

It is through this lens of physics that we are introduced the spectres of force, attraction, collision, critical mass, annihilation—themes, that while very much presented in their academic context, are also then mirrored and repeated in kaleidoscoping fashion across their social, political, and interpersonal meanings throughout the film. 

In the scientific context here, the theme of annihilation is quite literal but largely esoteric. It is considered in terms of chance, odds, and unfeeling mathematics. This is perfectly summed up by the Manhattan Project’s galaxy-brains at Los Alamos taking bets on whether the test of the atom bomb would start, in that moment, an immediate chain reaction that would ignite the atmosphere and engulf the entire world in flames—something that they had concluded that ***any*** use of an atomic weapon had a non-zero chance of achieving. *Annihilation.*


### Politics: The King’s Disease 


Beneath the treatment of pure physics, the next conceptual layer is that of the byzantine and clandestine political dramas of Cold War. Here, the antagonistic parallels of Truman-McCarthy Capitalism and Soviet Communism, engage in an endless, brinkman's duel with atomic Mutually Assured Destruction—annihilation clothed in the Great Game of the modern nation state power. 

America and the USSR, Capitalism and Communism, McCarthyism and Popular Activism these are the opposing strong forces that define this subtext of the film. In this regard, annihilation takes social and political meaning. The US and USSR are aptly likened to jousting scorpions each with the power to kill the other but only at the cost of its own life. While Oppenheimer (and many of his colleagues) seem inexplicably bent on remaining politically unaligned – a dangerous and naïve play when straddling two hegemonic systems that both equally view insufficient blind devotion as tantamount to betrayal. 

Underscoring this, the few exceptions to this rule—like Benny Safdie's Edward Teller and Christopher Denham's Klaus Fuchs—are portrayed as the film’s more villainous types. The former, regarded as the father of the hydrogen bomb is subtly depicted as a self-serving McCarthy jingoist as well as an unassuming madman seeking to create weapons for which "there are no targets large enough..." While the latter, is revealed to be a traitorous Soviet spy, and the audience understands, therefore fully deserving of condemnation as well. 

As an aside, here I will mention that it is this Cold war thread of the film that blesses us with Casey Affleck's US Intelligence Officer Boris Pash - his 5 minutes of screen time is, hands down, the best acting in the entire 3 hours-long and impeccably well-acted and well-cast film. 

https://cdn.nostr.build/i/61d883342e811b0404b608c8b173529feebcab5ce7b8977efdbc9f7890b8cdbe.jpg

Providing an interesting parallel to the scientists' wager on wether the atomic test would be, literally, the end of the world—the theme of annihilation in the political context is slower and more diffuse but also much more real in the human sense. It is an ever-present, creeping thing that, in the film, plagues Oppenheimer with visions of the global nuclear holocaust that would befall us should ever the "better angels" of our political systems fail. 

So in this way, the question of the Los Alamos bet remains unresolved, even to this day. While the world does not (and has not) ended from use and successive testing atomic weapons, how can we know for sure that we are not just in the opening acts of an unstoppable chain reaction that ends with death from above—everywhere. Our civilization washed away in the warm glow of so many other suns. *Annihilation.* 

### People: Bodies in Motion


Finally, at the bottom, or perhaps "foundational," subtextual layer of the film, we find the central characters of the film themselves—the two most prominent of these being our "protagonist," Cillian Murphy's Robert Oppenheimer and his nemesis, RDJ's Lewis Strauss. These two men are shown as singular and opposing strong forces in their own rights—albeit, forces that are twisted into a collaborative antagonism under the auspices of the US atomic program. (Cold) War makes strange bedfellows indeed. 

Strauss is a stand in for America's Cold War bureaucratic chauvinism. His character provides a window through which the viewer may catch a fleeting glimpse of the occult inner workings of Washington's infinite machine circa 1955. Moreover, he is a petty, cynical, and vindictive puppet-master, walking in shadows and pulling strings across industry, military, and state, all in a cruel and deluded personal crusade to discredit and humiliate Oppenheimer over various slights and disagreements, some real and many imagined. 

https://cdn.nostr.build/i/6fdaf8036fcd5fa5f8843d05529d41a8031f69b66728a050cdd7b69b2d7c3542.jpg

Oppenheimer on the other hand, represents a certain scientific naïveté—that of untethered genius pursuing the dream that scientific rationalism might illuminate the path to a better, freer, safer, and more just world. And yet, even in this, Oppenheimer himself is a contradiction, and certainly not without his own deep flaws and inner darkness. 

He attempts to poison his Cambridge professor for drawing attention to his mediocre lab work (the [real story](https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-08-02/did-oppenheimer-really-try-to-poison-his-teacher.html) of which is even more bizarre than the movie depiction). He is a pathological womanizer, moving like a free radical, tearing through social spaces carrying on affairs, some secret and others less so, with several of the wives and girlfriends of other scientists in his orbit.

He plays as equal parts wild-eyed egomaniac and sad, piteous martyr/victim—at once leading the world into the era atomic weapons, relishing in his spotlight as "Father of the Bomb" but simultaneously passive-aggressively demanding that the world, or at least those around him, pity and coddle him for ~~the grotesque and needless suffering he indirectly unleashed upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki~~ the personal sacrifices he had to make in the pursuit of science... 

https://cdn.nostr.build/i/34eff2643e4ee571ca1163bbc56134c1d8fdf93cabf72a27b7b78464ef7ec147.jpg

And in the end, these two men—Strauss and Oppenheimer—manage to cancel each other out in sorts. Strauss, with much back-handedness and double-dealing, successfully maneuvers to have Oppenheimer's security clearance revoked during the height of Red-Scare McCarthyism, destroying his reputation, consigning him to academic exile, and definitively ending his career in the sciences. However, just a few years later, the chickens come home to roost for Strauss as well and Oppenheimer, it seems, has the last laugh. It is the public revelation of his petty jihad against Oppenheimer that ultimately ends Strauss’ political career (making him the only presidential cabinet nominee to fail to win confirmation between 1925 and 1989). Though not covered in the film, both men go on to die in relative obscurity, estranged from their respective life's work—but then again, one of these men is the namesake of the film and other, well, would be all but forgotten if not for the film. *Annihilation.* 


### Conclusion: Dark Knight Physics

Some have asked, perhaps rightly, why Nolan—best known for the mind-bending action thrillers and the acclaimed Dark Knight franchise—would choose to focus on the mundane lives of the scientists, military functionaries, and bureaucratic careerists found crawling around the institution of the atomic bomb, barnacles clinging to its awe-inspiring and terrifying largess. 

However, I see this point quite differently. In fact, Oppenheimer watches very much like a Dark Knight film in that the hero and his many adversaries (though Oppenheimer has "counterparts" more that adversaries) are separated only by the thinnest degrees—where the excesses of the latter serve to draw out and amplify the flaws of the former until they are barely distinguishable at all.  

Strauss is a mind not entirely unlike Oppenheimer's but maxing for power and politics rather than science and discovery. Matt Damon's Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves presentation as a pudgy militarist belies an MIT engineering background and a technical mind. Edward Teller's villainous "grand evil" is simply wanting to develop a *bigger* bomb than Oppenheimer though necessary. Similarly, Klaus Fuchs' only real difference from Oppenheimer is that he allows his political sympathies to become a traitorous compromise. 

It is for these reasons and the many more explored further above, that I find *Oppenheimer*, to be a fascinating watch. *Oppenheimer* is The Dark Knight meets PhD physics and bureaucratic sprawl—that Nolan could draw out such a captivating and enjoyable story from such unlikely material is a masterful achievement and a testament to his cinematic talents, were one ever needed. If you haven't yet—go see it. If you have, consider watching it again. Its that kind of good. 

**Is this a “Bitcoiner Movie”:** Yes – history, science, technology, statism, paradigm shifts

**Most “Bitcoinery” Quote or Moment:** “This isn’t just a new weapon, *it’s a new world…*”

**Verdict: 4.9/5**☢️


*"Most people say they want their kids to be their own genetic offspring—but such a desire is in conflict with other evolving values around parenting and family."*

This is the stunning opening sub-header of [*Preferring Biological Children is Immoral*](https://archive.ph/q0M4G#selection-539.0-539.159) by Leo Kim, a "think piece" published under the Ideas section of *WIRED* Magazine's *Next Normal* series which covers the "future of morality and how our ethical beliefs may change in the years to come." 

The article itself appears to be written from the intention of genuinely and well-meaning high-minded techno-humanist enlightenment, yet fails entirely in being anything of the sort. In actuality, it is a neo-Malthusian, anti-natalist, anti-human, culturally ignorant tour-de-force of logical fallacy, false equivalence, and overwhelming nonsense. Let us count the ways...


### Clickbait Outrage-Farming

First, we can point our that the article's title smacks of obvious clickbait and outrage-farming which I am certain the editors knew and wanted that way—fine, I guess, this is just how the internet works. However, I would have expected the editors at a publication such as *WIRED* to also question whether the premise of the article itself was not objectively stupid and shockingly offensive to all readers (which it is on both counts) instead of allowing this to go to print. 


### Flawed Appeal to Cultural Relativism

"For most of Western history, it was a given that a parent would want their children to be their direct progeny..." starts the second paragraph—an absurdist opening salvo which dually implies that parental preference towards their biological children (or "biologism, as the author terms it) was *ever* in question at some point in the Western past (it was not) and/or that non-Western cultures do not exhibit the same bias towards their own biological children (lol, they ALL do...). As such, this framing is beyond silly. However, I believe this is done deliberately in a bid to establish a foundation of culture relativism by axiom, which the reader is simply expected to take for granted. 

This is evidenced by the author presenting the case of the *Na* (more accurately, [Nakhi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakhi_people), and perhaps [Mosuo](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/01/the-kingdom-of-women-the-tibetan-tribe-where-a-man-is-never-the-boss)) people of China (total population ~325,000)—matrilineal Himalayan tribespeople that due to the acceptance of polyamory (for both women and men) do not, necessarily, have the same concept of biological fatherhood—as a case-in-point against biologism.

For reasons large and small, this is utter nonsense coupled with a heavy dose of distortion, misrepresentation, and cultural mal-appropriation (for instance, Nakhi mothers undoubtedly preference their own biological children). As [one other critique](https://unherd.com/thepost/preferring-biological-children-isnt-immoral/) of the article aptly points out, drawing such a sweeping conclusion for the Nakhi example is "about as rational as rejecting clocks and calendars because the Amazonian Amondawa tribe has no abstract concept of time." 


### Flawed Appeal to Scientism

The author cities advances in reproductive science—specifically gestational surrogacy, whereby maximally 3 individuals could claim some biological provenance over a child—as proof that biologism is now "obsolete" proclaiming, "when contextualized amongst our other modern ethical norms, this preference can feel downright ancient—a vestigial remnant of a different epoch, a fossil no longer animated by the same moral intuitions that gave it gravity in the past." Which "modern ethical norms" give credence to the author's ideas here are never explained. Of course, it is also conveniently left out that a typical case of gestational surrogacy would involve a couple with the intention that at least one, if not both partners, contribute their DNA—the very definition of biologism itself.

### Flawed Appeal to Parental Unconditional Love

Next, we receive a warped moral argument that "using things like biological similarity to ground a parent-child relationship deconstructs the notion that parents should love their children unconditionally." Huh? It most certainly does not. The only way this argument would make any sense is to suggest that there is a moral conflict between an adult loving *their* children (either through genetics or adoption) unconditionally and that adult loving *all* children unconditionally. This is little more than Communist though applied to parentage and completely ignores that adults always face a very real limitation of resources—financial, material, temporal—to commit to the endeavor of child-rearing. We can only assume that in a dimly light subterranean lair somewhere far, far away Klaus Schwab strokes a Persian cat in silent, brooding agreement on this one...

### Flawed Appeal to Social Justice

In an act of faux-moralizing and conflict-farming so naked and brazen that it should be universally offensive to all, the author attempts to equate biologism with homophobia. "Moreover, the argument that this genetic tie has unique intrinsic value because it is “natural” [is] precisely th[e] argument that has been used for decades to discredit same-sex couples as unfit to be parents." While this flawed and reprehensible argument has absolutely been used in this way, that has everything to do with bigotry and all of nothing to do with biologism preference.

But the author is not content to stop here—no, he proceeds to wholly contradict his argument in order to frame up a sexual orientation-based double standard. "That’s not to say that anti-biologism doesn’t come with attendant risks. It too, can be easily misapplied and weaponized against marginalized populations, like same-sex couples who want to pursue assisted reproductive technologies [...] the deeply embedded social practices that sustain and support biologism in *different‐sex couples* ought to shoulder the brunt of the critique.” The apparent takeaway here is that the moral wrongness of biologism is actually far more dependent on the author's own attitudes and prejudgements regarding one's sexual orientation or membership in groups that the author considers to be marginalized. 


### Flawed Appeal to Racial Justice

Having attacked biologism from so many other angles, it is the author's attempt to tie biologism to White supremacy—"Genetic provenance has long been used as a tool to construct and uphold white hegemony"—that marks the article's crescendo of absurdity and grotesque offense. Not only is biologism framed as the root of "the biological essentialism built into white supremacy," but we can know this is true because, "sharing genetic traits seems less critical to Black identity than to white identity." Excuse me—BRUH, WHAT???

This line of logic is particularly disgusting and off base. What the author interprets as Black cultural identity placing "less importance" on sharing genetic traits is simply the author's own gross misunderstanding. The communitarian elements of Black American culture that the author twists into a statement against biologism are better understood as a broadly distributed socio-cultural (re: racial) survival mechanism that casts a much wider net for the application of quasi-familial ties and behaviors, centered around the particular shared genetic trait of darker skin and African genetic origin, irrespective of direct blood relation. 

In the American context, where Black Americans find themselves judged far more by the bad actions of the few in our group rather than by the good or normative acts of the many, Black Americans understand that to the extent that we can, protecting and raising up black children, even those that are not our own, *is* protecting our own children. In far too many cases, all black boys will "fit the description" when the police come around be it the valedictorian, the star athlete, or the criminal delinquent—so we take on a collective responsibility for all of them, in the hopes of diminishing the occurrence of the latter. 

Biologism is as prevalent in the Black community as it is in any human community. To suggest otherwise or to insinuate the biologism is a tool of White supremacy rather than a pillar of the universal human experience is insulting to all but the dimmest and most identity-politics indoctrinated of readers. What is put forward here is nothing more than the author's over-intellectualized attempt to ride on the back of Black pain and to distort our history to support his ill conceived, nonsense ideas. 


### Flawed Appeal to Climate Urgency 

Beyond one not wanting to be a homophobic, White supremacist who does not adequately love their children, climate change and climate anxiety are presented as additional "pragmatic, utilitarian reasons that we might be opposed to biologism." Rather than lamenting that climate anxiety is increasingly morphing into a regressive, unhealthy, and inert kind of climate defeatism, this is taken as a potential boon for the author's anti-biologism frame. The author cites a  young woman who tells researchers, “climate change is the sole factor for me in deciding not to have biological children. I don’t want to birth children into a dying world.” How anyone takes this as a measure on the morality of preferring to have biological children rather than a horrifically sad measure of First World despair is entirely beyond me. 


### Flawed Appeal to Adoption

In a way that is bizarre but not surprising once one understands the author's worldview, adoption is always treated as antagonistic with or mutually exclusive to biologism, which it obviously is not. The crux of the author's argument is that "the desire for related children undermines the likelihood that someone might adopt—taking potential resources away from an existing child in need. [...] Given this reality, we should avoid anything that actively disincentivizes this mode of parenthood." In his strange mind, the mere
existence of children who have not been adopted makes deciding to pursue biological children a universal moral wrong that should be avoided at all costs. The author is not really arguing for more adoption so much as he trying to force-feed the reader on this anti-natalist views with the appearance of moral authority on his side. 


### Final Thoughts

Preferring Biological Children is **NOT** Immoral. Anyone suggesting this has completely lost touch with what it means to be human. And, one hopes, that the forcefulness of the rejection they receive when espousing such views, might serve to wake them up to this sad fact.

The stupidity of the author's arguments belie the very real and catastrophic danger that such views pose as they slither into our mainstream of paternalistic pharma-industrial medicine or as they are taken up by members of the arrogant, self-anointed, and often self-appointed globalist managerial class—the type of unelected officials, experts, and bureaucrats that exploded to the fore during Covid and who are surely eagerly waiting in the wings for the next global crisis. But hypotheticals aren't even needed—we need only look to the grand failure of China's One Child Policy to envisage what horrors the author and his ideological ilk might attempt if ever they found the reigns of power in their hands.

Neo-Malthusianism and anti-natalism are two of the most dire ideological threats staring down civilization today. These ideologies propose that our social, political, and environmental problems are beyond solving and therefore we should all just give up and give in to a lethargic, apathetic managed decline until we are finally, and mercifully, collapse into the grave. And it is in this apathy—apathy that is always framed as a lofty moral choice or noble sacrifice—that these ideologies become unrestrained in their demand that we relinquish our agency entirely "for the greater good." The terminus of this can only be a whole-cart subversion of the human experience and a complete acquiescence—in what we are allowed to consume, in where and how we are allowed to travel, in what we are allowed to say and think, and ultimately in if and with whom we are allowed to procreate—up to "moral guardians" of this new, dismal society.  

Of course, I see a different path—the path that bitcoin suggest exists if we commit to it. A future where we unlock and harness orders of magnitude more energy than we do today. A future where restoration and reverence of Earth's precious ecology is no longer violently at odds with the expansion and flourishing of human civilization. A future where neo-Malthusianism and its attendant anti-natalism are consigned to the dust bin of history, crushed into nothingness under the weight of forward progress. 

The choice is yours Anon, which will you choose? 

~Moon







## December 2017. Shanghai. 

**It is mid-December 2017. In Shanghai. And I have just fallen victim to a crypto rug-pull scam.** 

A few days prior, I had been recruited into an “enthusiasts” WeChat group (WeChat is China’s premier social app, think FB + IG + CashApp, all in one, and then in Mandarin) for a Chinese crypto token. A friendly-faced *Laowai* (China’s half endearing, half slur for foreigners, particularly, white foreigners) had approached me at Cages Bar — a uniquely Chinese oddity of a place, a sprawling “American Sports” themed bar complex and a haunt for lost Westerners of all sorts — to share the good news. 

This new friend, managed to sell me that this token would be the ***Honest-to-God FUTURE*** of supply-chain traceability. And what luck! Through meeting him, I was to join a group of favored insiders, privy to pre-market information on this earth-shaking new technology. Even luckier was that I was joining this group mere days before the project’s “biggest announcement ever” which was sure to send prices “to the moon.” It all sounded so very exciting!

Fast forward three days. The announcement has just dropped, token prices are moving quickly and parabolically to the upside across exchanges. Except for Binance. Where all of us in the group had our tokens. Inexplicably, Binance goes down at the EXACT moment when this news is released — “Due to recent increase in user growth, Binance will be preforming a system upgrade shortly after 2017/12/18 10:00 AM (UTC). 

The upgrade will take approximately 20 minute” their message reads. Simultaneously, on another exchange, a whale (massive token holder, capable of single-handedly moving the market) liquidates several million dollars worth of tokens. By the time Binance is up and running again, the token is on a similarly parabolic price collapse. Never to recover. 

I can confidently say that it is by such magic, one may turn several thousand dollars into several tens of dollars in mere days, or perhaps even just minutes!

*Welcome to Shanghai! Welcome to Crypto!…I guess…*

---


## The School of Rug-pull Fundamentals

Here, I received a foundational lesson in the mechanism of “crypto." Specifically, rug-pull scam 101 - by which nefarious but convincing crypto marketeers target technologically ignorant retail “investors” to be the exit liquidity for the project founders and earliest backers.

The WeChat “enthusiast” group I had joined was nothing but a pump and dump shop. The group members, rather than being privileged insiders were full-on dupes - serving as both free marketing hype and the exit dumping ground for the project founders. Peer-pressure, social proof, and faux camaraderie were applied by the truckload to induce us to promote the token and to bring in others, yet when the time came, we all found ourselves locked out of the party by forces seemingly far above and well beyond our comprehension. And this is when the *real* insiders exited.

https://i.nostrimg.com/a91530006a6070b14fcc935e4c88db7640f27b92df86e5f7ad1b015978265d06/file.jpg

However, on that brisk Shanghai winter evening in 2017, I knew none of this. I was the worst, or rather the *best* kind of mark — the kind with enough broad educational and professional achievements as to be very self-assured in their own intelligence while also being completely oblivious to their area-specific ignorance and inexperience - particularly on this "new" technology, called "the blockchain."

That I was possessing of such qualifications should surprise no one who has ever worked with management consultants. At the time, I was one — bright-eyed and bushy tailed, newly minted on a full-time international assignment to China. In reality though, the depth of the information asymmetry arrayed against me in this situation was tantamount to me having *negative information* while fully believing that I was some kind of anointed insider. What fun!

*So how did I get here? Well...*

---


## Borderless

I landed in Shanghai in January of 2017, a stranger in a strange land. My arrival in Shanghai uncovered an interesting problem. A few months in, I realized that all of my money was sitting in RMB, in a Chinese bank account, yet I still had financial obligations in the United States, dominated in USD, along with a fast-dwindling USD account balance to support these obligations...

It was at this time that I discovered that the process to transfer money outside of China was ***arcane*** - requiring at least two months of planning, several trips to the Chinese tax authority, reams of paperwork, AND support from an internationally accredited employer. In short, a bureaucratic dog-and-pony show replete with unnecessary but entirely purposeful friction and obfuscation. But such is the squarely anti-free market Great Game of big-power nation capital controls.

It was this problem that spurred my first contact with bitcoin. I was searching for the best and most efficient way to transfer money to myself across borders. This eventually brought me to various articles and YouTube videos about bitcoin. From there, I got a Coinbase account (which worked in the China at the time), linked my bank account, and figured out LocalBitcoins - through which I could buy bitcoin peer-to-peer in RMB, and then transfer that bitcoin back into USD. 

> **FUN FACT:** While bitcoin had already been “banned” by the Chinese government several times by 2017, it was still legal to trade p2p. Also the largest RMB-for-bitcoin sellers on LocalBitcoins all appeared to be Africans. And I mean to the tune of thousands of bitcoin moved volumes. It would seem that perhaps large Chinese bitcoin holders may have been using Africans as plausible deniability frontmen to move in and out of large sums of bitcoin over Chinese social payment rails. The More You Know!

https://i.nostrimg.com/d97d6f67fb3db44d0fd38cc36059156c2cf7f07ea3de3fbec3902b9741c2603e/file.jpg

And just like that, I managed to Forrest Gump my way right into one of the most relevant, important, revolutionary — and in the West, overlooked — use cases for bitcoin - making money borderless, facilitating international value transfer in a way that completely obviates the rent-seeking artifice of arbitrary financial controls. But for all of that, I still couldn't see it. I was happy with what bitcoin did for me in that moment, but I failed to see any larger implications - I thought of it a novel, but certainly not anything ground-breaking. Further, my trust in the system was still too strong - believing on some deep level that the banks, both Chinese and US, truly wanted to help me but where beholden to cumbersome processes and regulations imposed on them from above. 

Even in this very first exposure to bitcoin, it addressed a real and pressing problem for me and dramatically improved freedom of access and utility of my money - allowing me to transfer money back my USD bank account on-demand. **I had a problem. Bitcoin fixed it.** And all of the villagers rejoiced! …Or they would have if that had been the end of it. But as fate would have it, my first brush with bitcoin also coincided with the breakout of the wild 2017 bitcoin & crypto bull market run.

Initially, I just bought a bit of bitcoin to solve a problem and thought little of it. But when the bitcoin price started to take off (aka Number Go Up, or “NgU” in internet parlance), I had to take another look. But this time, I would be caught in the balmy, Icarian up-currents of tech speculation and good old fashioned get-rich-quick greed. But, me — I was in it for the technology, of course...

https://i.nostrimg.com/323487be17ae780a21f52519c995569f1794df55b02c796d666fa24147f37990/file.jpg

---



## All My New Friends

And so, I began to research bitcoin and then "crypto" more deeply. In so doing, I “learned” that while bitcoin was “the father of all cryptos,” it was actually “old” technology. Bitcoin was slow, environmentally wasteful, limited in capability, and destined to be overtaken by newer, “better,” cryptocurrency technologies such as Ethereum or XRP. Knowing no better, I accepted these silly falsehoods, convincing myself that bitcoin’s core value was simply its tenure. Being more established, bitcoin was just a marginally less volatile asset in a sea of horrendously volatile, and otherwise interchangeable, crypto tokens.

But there was opportunity here too, I sensed. The *real* innovation in the space, I believed, would ultimately be led by other projects. That being the case, my incentive then was to “study the space and place calculated bets" (an MBA euphemism for wild-eyed speculation). *Why hold onto Bitcoin’s AOL, when Ethereum is clearly going to be crypto’s Google? With any new technology, the first mover is always overtaken by a more innovative copy-cat, right?? RIGHT???*

Moreover, I was desperately in need of Western friends. And knowing I’d find them in droves wherever there was speculative money to be had, I dived headlong into the Shanghai “crypto scene.” On the standard “Hero’s Journey” this is where a mysterious but benevolent, Gandalf-like mentor would have appeared to shepherd me through the peaks, valleys, and pitfalls of this new space. Obviously, **this is not what happened.** Instead, over freeium beers in the vaunted Millennial Chic common areas of so many Shanghai WeWork offices, I would meet some of the most colorful characters of my time in China...

A whip-smart but spectacularly sketchy Baltic fellow of significant, though indeterminate means who argued that any blockchain project that managed to successfully prevent supply chain malfeasance who see the project founders dismembered by some Eastern European mafia. Only half-jokingly, he suggested, at his direction.

A Middle Eastern “precious metals trader” who I later ascertained was probably more akin to a conflict minerals smuggler looking to use excitement and ignorance around “traceability on the blockchain” to wash his wares.

A South Asian “crypto-entrepreneur” who claimed to have a method, leveraging "blockchain technology," to swap large sums of physically delivered Chinese cash (think suitcases full of red bills) into infrastructure investment projects in Myanmar.

Several personally modest but obviously wealthy South American scions riding out political instability in their home countries while funneling money into ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings - crypto's answer to IPOs) with reckless abandon.

An American who shared, unsolicited, his pre-China 3LA (Three Letter Agency) background at first meeting, though I suspect he may have been telling a dangerous and stupid lie.

An obvious sex-kompromat honey-pot Chinese couple who described themselves as “crypto-observes” and who were, at a minimum, *actually* gathering intelligence for *something.* Fit and flirty in a way suggestive of some kind of open-door polyamory, and a little *too* fluent in English. Seemingly at every event and always hugged up onto any Westerner that seemed to be gaining influence in the space.

And finally the long tail of Moonboys (idiot gamblers who fashion themselves tech/investment mavens), minor conmen, “cross-border currency arbitrage” consultants, LBH (Loser Back Home) English teachers, broke college students, and an ever shifting menagerie of hypemen-simps riding the coattails of Shanghai's *laowai* crypto-influencer of the week.

It was in this fast-moving and footloose “Anything goes and we’re all gunna get rich AF!” environment that the December supply-chain token “opportunity” appeared to me. And of course, dazzled by fantasies of instant and meteoric crypto wealth, I went for it and I got burned right along with all the other Lambo-chasing chumps.

> I was the worst, or rather the best kind of mark — the kind with enough broad educational and professional achievements as to be very self-assured in their own intelligence while also being completely oblivious to their area-specific ignorance and inexperience.

But in retrospect it could have been far worse. I could have put more money into the rug-pull or it could have been a straight-up wallet draining scam. And while I still had miles to go and years of learning ahead of me before fully eschewing “shitcoining” (the act of buying non-bitcoin crypto tokens in a state of deeply degenerative and highly speculative mania), this experience did, thankfully, give me the frame of reference to avoid further, similar insider malfeasance going forward…for the most part...

https://i.nostrimg.com/4e999806bd57e4e57c710234b2970597cb8aec37c9b5afa57d175e6e5bbc0c8e/file.jpg

---

## Do Cryptos Dream of Electric Stupidity?
The silver lining here was that the speculative extremes and clearly questionable mental acuity of some of my new “crypto friends” gave me pause and cautioned me to anchor, relatively speaking anyways, to rationality and search for truth, as my consultant training so demanded. Though, I cannot in say good faith that this was intended in an entirely ethical or altruistic way at the time... After all, the fundamental role of a management consultant is to understand the truth more deeply than others so that you may choose when to best reveal or obscure it for social, political, and or economic gain — especially when you've assessed that you significantly outclass those around you intellectually.

That said, being an American (and so *legally* barred for participating in many ICOs) and a rare résumé on the scene, I came to be viewed - hilariously - as something of “the adult in the room,” to some. I would even eventually even sit down with a few founders to advise on their well-intentioned but deeply flawed and over-engineered crypto projects...

As I rode the 2017 bull-market wave up and then back down again (and where greed intervened to prevent me from selling the top, or even at a relative top), my perspective on the space matured. 

*Why couldn’t anyone articulate what actual, real-world problem their project was solving?*

*Why were so many projects’ assumptions around token usage (and therefore value) based on artificial needs that the project protocol itself created, or worse, inexplicably bizarre misunderstandings of incentive-driven human behavior?*

Even the most lucid and well-presented project I encountered was still predicated on several other paradigm shattering technologies coming to the fore. They may as well have ended their pitch with *“And as you can see here — when SkyNet, teleportation, Replicator, and Lightsaber technology all reach ubiquitous global scale (and we project this happening by Q3 2021 ± 3 mo) our protocol will be poised to capture MAXIMUM value, etc etc…”*

The entire space came to resemble an unironically earnest masterclass in absurdity. Because that is, ultimately, what it was. And so, I developed expertise in tearing crypto white papers apart over their gibbering technical Esperanto and nonsense logic, ideally, in front of as many people as possible.

I made no attempt to hide my annoyance at every new project’s “graphic salad” or “Flying Spaghetti Monster” tech stack representation, alway a meaningless clownshow of sleek-designed neon-pastel toned boxes, cylinders, arrows, and lines indicating some much *"obvious value."* 

https://i.nostrimg.com/89115440530a88c59e8358e3f8fbf95369f0e1490591455a2565da0f55d43606/file.jpg

I came to regard every crypto project as, at absolute best, a solution looking for a problem. A viewpoint that still holds to this day. No “cryptocurrency expert” I’ve spoken with, no matter how well-educated or well-meaning, has ever been able to articulate to me how a given “blockchain” solution solves any real (non-speculative, non-gambling, non-financial crimes based) problem better than existing solutions, imperfect as those may be. 

> Anything goes and we’re all gunna get rich AF!

But most of all, I was perturbed because we had very much **not** gone “to the moon.” If anything, my crypto holdings seemed to be, ***boldly***, charting a path for the Marianas Trench, perhaps an equally ambitious though categorically different feat.

This disillusionment with “crypto” though healthy in retrospect, unfortunately also spawned an apathy towards bitcoin, what would ultimately become a long pause that significantly slowed my bitcoin understanding.

If there was any mentor in this situation, it was the market itself, all cruel vagaries, malicious intent, and so many rows of glistening, blood-stained teeth. As the long 2018–2019 crypto winter set in, defeated and financially depleted, I, like so many others, assumed (rightly) that crypto was a scam and (wrongly) that bitcoin was “dead.” I resolved myself to let go of all expectations so that I might be pleasantly surprised if the bitcoin price ever, for some unfathomable reason, did recover.

How could I have known how many unfathomable things would transpire both in the world and in my own life by the time that this would actually come to pass…

比特币死了！比特币万岁！*(Bitcoin is dead! Long live Bitcoin!)*

Thanks so much for reading Part 02 of my story! I look forward to any comments or feedback, it brightens my day and inspires me to keep writing! And in case you missed it, you can read Journey Into Bitcoin 01 [here](nostr:naddr1qqxnzd3cxymngvpjxu6rvdpeqyd8wumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnsd3jkycmgv95kutn0wfnj7qgmwaehxw309aex2mrp0yhx7unpdenk2urfd3kzuer9wchszythwden5te0dehhxarj9emkjmn99uq3xamnwvaz7tm0venxx6rpd9hzuur4vghsz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ejxzmt4wvhxjme0qgs9maqn6nz72q6l75y0mxdn3vs74xs2czu7es60xvf2h2d29tw57kcrqsqqqa28u04lcs).

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## Postscript

In the spirit of inter/multi-disciplinary bitconery, here are a few top notch recommendations that to me are related to elements in this piece.

**Music:** *Can’t Con an Honest John*, The Streets; *Dip*, Young Fathers; *Everything Is Recorded*, Everything Is Recorded

Movies: *No Man’s Land* (2013), *Shang-Chi* (2021), *The Message* (2009)

**If you’re ever in Shanghai:** Sober Company (fine dining, 4 bars concepts at venue, 1 is hidden), Speak Low (Shanghai’s original speakeasy), The Odd Couple (East Meets West Pac-Man Bar)








## April 2021. Honolulu.


It is early evening now. In a few minutes, the sun will set over Ala Moana beach, a short distance west of where I am. My apartment, on the 11th floor, overlooks the Ala Wai canal at the corner of McCully — always traffic, always sound. My balcony’s sliding doors and jalousie windows are open, a salty breeze filters in as the low sun casts a golden glow over the south face of the Ko’olau Mountains in the distance and the city of Honolulu in the fore. 

But for me, in this moment...I am hunched over my laptop, intently focused on the open brokerage page in front of me. I press “Confirm,” instantly selling all of the stock in my personal investment account. When the money clears into my bank account, I convert it all into bitcoin and then move it into cold storage. 

*Today, I have become a bitcoiner.*

---


## Origins

This was my personal “Bitcoin Moment.” The moment when I realized that, even with the most conservative outlook, there is basically no other “investment” that I could make that will deliver anything close to the returns I expect from bitcoin over the next 20–30+ years. Embracing this understanding, this was my moment of stepping over the threshold, remorselessly going "all-in." Selling off assets (stock) that almost everyone — from my most educated and accomplished friends, to my mother, to the random Spring Breaker from Jacksonville stumbling down the Waikiki strip — would (and at different points, did) tell me to hold, in order to increase exposure to **bitcoin** - which they felt was unacceptably risky, if not an outright scam.

Today, my views have evolved even further from that moment. I no longer think of bitcoin as an investment, because bitcoin is *not* an investment. **Bitcoin is money. Full stop.** And therefore, the act of holding bitcoin is ***saving***. I no longer think in terms of USD returns on bitcoin, as this implies an intention to sell. Instead, I now think in terms of *value capture*, purchasing power per *satoshi* (the smallest unit of a bitcoin — as there are 100 pennies to a dollar, there are 100M satoshis to 1 bitcoin). In my present view, that dollars, or euros, or yuan — all of which are functionally infinite — can be traded for bitcoin, which is absolutely finite, is simply a lucky quirk of happenstance. The great fortunate of randomly coming into an understanding of bitcoin at time when the market misunderstanding of this new money is still so gross that anyone would willingly part with bitcoin in exchange for government currency. 

But let me not get ahead of myself. My present bullishness on bitcoin is not what's important here — my feelings about bitcoin will be examined in stride throughout the writings to come. Rather, what I am interested in here *is the journey*, “how the heck did I arrive at my 'Bitcoin Moment' in the first place?” 

This is the question that has captured my mind and now inspires me to write, to examine my own long and meandering path to "becoming a bitcoiner." For instance, I mark my bitcoiner awakening as April 2021 — but then again, maybe that’s not entirely right — did I actually *become* a bitcoiner in that moment, or had I already been one in many core ways (perhaps even in ways that I did not realize) and I just came to the discovery of this pre-existing personal truth? Was it an act of *becoming* OR, rather an act of committing to *being* a bitcoiner? And then what does it even mean, *to be a bitcoiner*? Is this even an appropriate question to ask?

> I no longer think of bitcoin as an investment, I think of it as savings

Attempting to answer, or at a minimum, engage with, these questions has kicked off an experiment of deep introspection, an exercise of peeling back the onion, and untangling the thread of my own life up to this point. It has required self-reflection on foundational lessons from childhood, deconstruction of habits of mind from my education and upbringing, examinations of professional experiences and group associations, questions of identity, specifically being an African American in a global world, insights from far-flung travel both abroad and here at home (the US), and rumination on so many near misses — when I could have “gotten” bitcoin much earlier had it existed then or had my views on things been *juuust* so slightly different.

---

## Clubhouse Bitcoining

While not the starting point of my engagement with bitcoin, I can say unequivocally that catching ‘The Clubhouse Moment” from Jan 2021 onward, was a particularly formative experience.

> For future reader's Clubhouse is/was a VoIP group chat mobile app. A literal chat room, seemingly bringing the entire internet full circle from text-only chat rooms of the dial-up AOL days. Clubhouse launched in the deepest point of the US COVID pandemic/hysteria an scaled an break-neck speed, filling the wailing void of lost human interaction in everyone's totally collapsed and locked-down social lives.

Through Clubhouse, I was able to first observe, then engage with, and finally join one of the most varied, talented, resourceful, deeply interesting, and utterly strange groups of people I’ve ever had the great fortune to associate with — bitcoiners. Intelligent to the point of wild arrogance, studied to the point of oddness, traveled to the point of weird suspicion, insightful to the point of deep disquiet, convicted to the point of cultish religiosity, accomplished to the point of well-warranted disbelief, honest to the point of seeming bizarre, *edge to the point of being fringe*.

I do not mean any of the above as harsh criticism or insult, in fact quite the opposite. On the 9-box Alignment System chart, bitcoiners are the Chaotic Column...and usually the “Chaotic Good”. If there were a Bitcoiner’s Mantra, it would be something like **“Do no harm…unless they deserve it.”** With bitcoiners you find a paradoxical union of unique, even freakish individual strangeness, with equally strange (as compared to “normal society” or "normieland" as we say), yet broadly shared positive ethical standards that makes distributed, and even anonymous, trust possible between counterparties — both economically and, increasingly, socially. In all, I’d assess that everyone I’ve encountered who really “gets” bitcoin is 3–5 standard deviations out from the norm on some characteristic or another…again, *usually*, in a good way.

---


## Oh, What a Time to Be Alive

To me, this is a pattern that is simply too fascinating to ignore. To have *any* real understanding of bitcoin today, even as bitcoin is already more than 14 years old, is incredibly strange in its own right. That so many who have acquired this still extremely niche understanding should also be so abnormal as to be outstanding suggests to me that the two may be connected in some way. I truly believe that future society will look back and deem that to have gained clear-headed understanding of bitcoin pre-mass adoption (or “hyperbitcoinization”), is to be deserving of study. I certainly believe this — right now, today. That said, having neither the means nor the general inclination to travel into the Escheresque mouth of madness that would be required of a broad psychographic study of present day bitcoiners, what I can contribute, however, is an open examination of my own story. **My Journey into Bitcoin.**

Every bitcoiner, like Batman or The Joker, has an “origin story.” It is such a common trope in the community that many bitcoin conferences will have a panel dedicated entirely to 4 or 5 people sharing their origin stories while simultaneously riffing new insights off of each other in real time. If you are a bitcoiner already, consider yourself very, very lucky. It doesn’t matter if you became a bitcoiner in 2010, 2017, 2021, or 10 minutes ago. We are incredibly early, and it takes an almost magical, borderline metaphysical series of events in life to have come to a grounded understanding of bitcoin where we are today. If you understand bitcoin today, you’ve been through a giant plinko game where everything had to go *exactly right*, to place you out on the extreme tail. This is why it is not totally unreasonable and not *entirely* unhinged when many bitcoiners say “bitcoin found me, not the other way around.” I, for one, absolutely feel this way.

> That so many who have acquired this still extremely niche understanding should also be so abnormal as to be outstanding suggests to me that the two may be connected in some way

Bitcoiners constantly say that the most important thing one must do over the next 10–20 years is simply “hodling” (i.e. acquiring bitcoin, holding in secure self custody, and not selling). However, I believe its must more than that. If we intend to hold our bitcoin successfully over the long-term, it becomes critically important to understand how and why we each, individually, got here to be in this conversation now. Self-discovery, self-awareness, self-confidence, and the resulting self-actualization are essential input to self-sovereignty. And individual self-sovereignty is the foundation for the sovereign families and sovereign communities that we must set about creating if we want bitcoin, and far more pressingly, the very concept to individual rights and freedoms to mean anything against the very real threat of an ever-more atomized and digitally-enclosed future.

**How can we build if we don’t understand, and when necessary, repair and strengthen, our own foundations?**

So now, inspired but the likes of Cryptograffti and Brekkie von Bitcoin, artists who share the process of their art with BT (Bitcoin Twitter), I hope to make my exercise of writing an open experience. I look forward to comments and feedback from other bitcoiners or anyone interested enough to read and engage, bitcoiner or not. Most of all, I hope the examination of my story may inspire others to share their stories and to engage with their own self-discovery more deeply through the lens of how bitcoin, and the bitcoin community, has impacted their lives.

Thank you for making it this far, I am truly humbled. This is only the beginning. More to come soon!

---

## Postscript
 
In the spirit of inter/multi-disciplinary bitconery, here a few top notch recommendations that are on my mind. Would love to hear some of yours!

Music: *Plantasy*, Resavior; *Esc(Holding Back)*, Model Man; *Darling*, Esbe

Books: *The 7th Property*, Eric Yakes; *The Paper Menagerie*, Ken Liu; *The Alchemist*, Coelho

If you’re ever in Honolulu: Ho’omaluhia Botanical Garden, Valley of the Temples, Tane Vegan Izakaya, The Blind Ox, Lanikai Beach


## When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson


*“This is, I believe, a moral tale. It goes far to prove the revolutionary axiom that if you wish to destroy a nation you must first corrupt its currency. Thus much sound money be the first bastion of a society’s defence.”*

https://i.nostrimg.com/e4ee21863b3e14ead8121ff056820b87793e39705a02a7649cbec2eb45c0fdd8/file.jpeg

*When Money Dies* chronicles the the acute hyper-inflationary period that wracked Germany (an also Austria and Hungary) between 1921 and 1924. It is cautionary history about the predictable, deleterious effects of currency collapse on all facets of human behavior, from the individual up to the society as a whole.

Core to the book is a critical examination of the dark absurdity that unfolds when a currency charts a parabolic path towards 0 on unit value — “At the end of 1923, it would have been possible to exchange a shilling or franc or lira for up to 1,000,000,000,000 marks […] The marks was dead, on million-millionth of its former self.”  

One of the book’s key points is that the range of numbers involved during hyper-inflation so defy human comprehension that they are meaningful only in the scope and scale of their meaninglessness. While at the same time, people grossly misunderstand what is happening to their money. Rather, as Fergusson aptly points out,  most “assume not so much that their money was falling in value as that the goods which it brought were becoming more expensive.” 

And this can have nasty, even catastrophic outcomes as people lash out to assign blame, often violently, everywhere except where it is truly due - that being, at the feet of the nation’s central bankers and captured politicians, who, seeking to avoid austerity or “revolution,” unleash something far, far worse. A run-away money printing that inevitably still defaults into economic austerity and revolutionary political headwinds — but making them orders of magnitude more extreme than they might have been otherwise.

https://i.nostrimg.com/e2750def0d74d29fb6c745edf7da1145a726d146d9dd815d38ea635fd8ab98a4/file.jpeg

Here’s how is goes:

When people finally realize that their currency has completely lost its store of value, it ceases even to be a medium of exchange and then, all hell breaks loose…

The exceptionally shrewd may sense what’s broken, well before it is evident, and benefit by way of defensive capital flight, financial arbitrage, and / or outright profiteering. 

The monied members of the professional and rentier class pursues the “smart decision” of chasing after asset speculation (like stocks and real estate) - completely misunderstanding that even with these assets they will ultimately loose in real terms. In essence, confusing the slowest sinking vessel for one of pristine seaworthiness.

The asset-less salaried middle class, with static pay, find themselves among the earliest to be completely overtake by inflation, wiping them out in short order, and swelling the ranks of the political extremes with educated but dejected, a easy hallmark of particularly dangerous and effective radicals.  

The hourly wage workers, at first gloating and oversure as they confuse nominal wage increases for real purchasing power gains only to lapse into destitution when the factories inevitably shutter. 

The agrarians, content to rest on a fat harvest, withhold output or profiteer against urbanites until something breaks and the urbanites come to the countryside themselves to kill and eat. 

And the captive rich, those who do not or cannot leave, finding themselves over-flush with declining paper, must rush to spend it — feeding the industries of gluttony, hedonism, speculation and vice — that is until one revolution or another sweeps in and puts all their backs against the wall. 

https://i.nostrimg.com/73dec2b611448202b9c9faa9859694a6379220c4a31ffd9317135e39bbb96d2f/file.jpeg

In many ways the book is very simple and could stand to be much shorter. Iin documenting the history, the book’s same points are made over and over and over and over again - but perhaps that’s also the point… *Inflation sucks, hyper-inflation kills*, and the incentives of politicians, especially in democratic systems, will all but assure that they can only make the situation worse and worse, and finally, worse still. **The road to Hell is paved with literal bricks of debased currencies.**

https://i.nostrimg.com/0fd72623f2a4ea594209346704f9b51c1bb4a8520888417addff6160c062fd32/file.jpeg

---

As a bitcoiner and a reader who sees more than a few parallels between today’s global money system and the economic conditions at play in 1920s Germany, it is easy to come away with a dreary and pessimistic outlook for our present timeline, yet I see something different — in fact, I see profound reason for hope. 

History does not repeat, but it often rhymes — but with today’s dramatic advances in technology, the rhyme stands to be very different this time. The problem in 1920s Germany was that the overwhelming majority of people holding marks did not have any viable way to get off the ride as it spun faster and faster and ever-more precariously out of control. Today, this is simply not the case. We have bitcoin - an unstoppable, permissionless, debasement-proof currency that is accessible to everyone, globally. 

https://i.nostrimg.com/961741db73ea5f39c5cd97feb7f93ca1745a7f33c32961edd846eabd459b064d/file.jpeg

For the first time in history, everyday people will have an unblockable exit to use when the present spread of government currencies inevitably falter and collapse. This, I believe, will provide significant cushioning against some of the most extreme excesses seen in 1920 Europe (or worse, 1930-40s Europe) and other more recent currency debasement crises. 

And while surely there will be those who, out of fear, envy, and political manipulation turn to blame the crisis on the solution — as though it was the lifeboats that sunk the Titanic or the parachutes that downed the plane — the fact that the escape route is accessible to all should dampen this (potentially very dangerous) reactionary movement. Simply put, this time, the calamity needn’t be shouldered by everyone, or if we’re honest about it, by much of anyone…and this is reason for great hope.

https://i.nostrimg.com/5c6fa21909711c94119e1e0e92f21fb817e91477f63a1ab81ff76fa0e479f2d8/file.jpeg

Turning now to final thoughts about the book. It is an extremely detailed and elucidating chronicle of the long tail of human miseries let loose upon society when a currency collapses — but it is also frustrating to read and poorly written in many ways. 

Like some Byzantine space opera, the book should begin with a cast list of key players, but instead the never ending merry-go-round of financial and political actors are introduced as though the reader already knows who they are. But then again, I think the author would argue that “who they are” does not much matter. 

Another strange quirk that I could not ignore is that while the author takes pains to demonize anti-semitism — and scapegoating in general — as regressive and dangerous, he also seems to go out of his way to repeatedly underscore the Jewishness of the few of the book’s political / financial villains that do happen to be Jewish themselves. 

In all, *When Money Dies* is several hundred pages book that probably should have just been an essay. It is full of interesting, illuminating, and lucid historical tidbits and pointed financial and ideological analysis of era, but it plods and meanders and, maddeningly, jumps around with dates in a way that makes a mockery of linear time. As such, It is not hard for the reader to come away more than a bit stupefied at what they just read — but perhaps this an unavoidable side effect of an earnest treatment of the topic — art imitating life, and a little unrequested taste of the times for the reader. 

**Rating: 2/5** 💸  

*This opinion piece was first published in [BTC Magazine](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/get-non-kyc-bitcoin-before-you-need-it) on Feb 20, 2023*

Just in case we needed a reminder, banks are showing us that they can and will gatekeep their customers’ money to prevent them from engaging with bitcoin. This should be a call to action for Bitcoiners or anyone else who wants to maintain control over their finances to move toward more proactive use of permissionless bitcoin tools and practices.

Since January of 2023, when Jamie Dimon decried Bitcoin as a “hyped-up fraud” and “a pet rock,” [on CNBC](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdIooHrQeK8), I've found myself unable to purchase bitcoin using my Chase debit card on Cash App. And I'm not the only one — if you have been following Bitcoin Twitter, you might have also seen [Alana Joy](https://twitter.com/alanajoy) tweet about her experience with the same.

https://i.nostrimg.com/5b23f2f1430cccce41fea00421d6003ffdb86feb3ef4c4de3029ea423819cc92/file.png

In both of our cases, it is the bank preventing bitcoin purchases and blocking inbound fiat transfers to Cash App for customers that it has associated with Bitcoin, all under the guise of “fraud protection,” of course.

No, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense — Chase still allows ACH bitcoin purchases and fiat on Cash App can be used for investing in stocks, saving or using Cash App’s own debit card, not just bitcoin — but yes, it is happening. Also, no one seems to know exactly when this became Chase’s policy. The fraud representative I spoke with wasn’t sure and couldn’t point to any documentation, but reasoned that the rule has been in place since early last year. Yet murkier still, loose chatter can be found on Reddit about this issue going back to at least [April 2021](https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/mm70ov/does_chase_bank_not_allow_crypto_purchases/).

However, given that I and so many others were definitely buying bitcoin via Chase debit throughout 2021 and 2022, I’d wager that this policy, up to now, has only been exercised haphazardly, selectively, *arbitrarily*, even. Dark patterns abound, but for now, it seems like I just happen to be one of the unlucky ones…

That said, there is nothing preventing this type of policy from being enforced broadly and in earnest by one or many banks. If and as banks feel threatened by Bitcoin, we will surely see more of these kinds of opaque practices.


## **It’s Time To Get Proactive**

Instead, we should expect it and prepare for it. So, rather than railing against banks, I want to use this as a learning experience to reflect on the importance of permissionless, non-KYC Bitcoining, and the practical actions we can take to advance the cause.

**Bank with backups and remember local options.** 
Banking is a service, not servitude. Treat it as such. Maintaining accounts at multiple banks may provide some limited fault tolerance against banks that take a hostile stance toward Bitcoin, assuming it does not become the industry norm. Further, smaller, local and regional banks may be more willing to work with Bitcoiner customers, as individual accounts can be far more meaningful to them than they are to larger national banks — though this certainly should not be taken for granted.

**If you must use KYC’d Bitcoin services, do so thoughtfully.**
For Cash App (and services like it), consider first loading in fiat and making buys out of the app’s native cash balance instead of purchasing directly through a linked bank account/debit card where information is shared with the bank that allows it to flag the transaction for being related to bitcoin. Taking this small step may help to avoid gatekeeping and can provide some minor privacy, from the bank at least.

**Get comfortable with non-KYC bitcoin exchanges.**
Just as many precoiners drag their feet before making their first bitcoin buys, so too do many Bitcoiners drag their feet in using permissionless channels to buy and sell bitcoin. [Robosats](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW_wzRz_BDI), [Bisq](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LyEKA5Iq9I), [Hodl Hodl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmyYxrZM3Ms)— you can use the tools. For anyone just getting started, BTC Sessions has excellent video tutorial content on all three, which are linked.

If you don’t yet know how to use these services, it’s better to pick up this knowledge now through calm, self-directed learning rather than during the panic of an emergency or under pressure of more Bitcoin-hostile conditions later. And for those of us who already know, we can actively support these services. For instance, more of us taking action to maintain recurring orders on such platforms could significantly improve their volumes and liquidity, helping to bootstrap and accelerate their network effects.

**Be flexible and creative with peer-to-peer payment methods.** 
Cash App, Zelle, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Cash, Revolut, etc. — the services that most users seem to be transacting with on no-KYC exchanges — they would all become willing, if not eager and active agents of financial gatekeeping in any truly antagonistic, anti-privacy environment, even when used in a “peer-to-peer” fashion.

Always remember that there are other payment options — such as gift cards, the original digital-bearer items — that do not necessarily carry such concerns. Perhaps, an enterprising soul might even use Fold to earn bitcoin rewards on the backend for the gift cards used on the exchange…

**Find your local Bitcoin community!** 
In the steadily-advancing shadow war on all things permissionless, private, and peer-to-peer, this is our best defense. Don’t just wait until you need other Bitcoiners to get to know other Bitcoiners — to paraphrase Texas Slim, “Shake your local Bitcoiner’s hand.” Get to know people and never underestimate the power of simply asking around. There could be real, live Bitcoiners near you looking to sell some corn and happy to see it go to another HODLer rather than to a bunch of lettuce-handed fiat speculators on some faceless, centralized, Ponzi casino exchange. What’s more, let folks know your skills, talents and expertise — you might be surprised to find an interested market that pays in BTC!

In closing, I believe we should think of permissionless Bitcoining as an essential and necessary core competency, just like we do with Self-Custody. And we should push it with similar urgency and intensity. But as we do this, we should also remember that it is a spectrum and a progression and that there are no perfect solutions, only tradeoffs. Realization of the importance of non-KYC practices will not be instant or obvious to near-normie newcoiners, coin-curious fence-sitters or even many minted Bitcoiners. My own experience is certainly a testament to this.

As we promote the active practice of non-KYC Bitcoining, we can anchor to empathy, patience and humility — always being mindful of the tremendous amount of *unlearning* most have to go through to get there. So, even if someone doesn’t get it the first time, or the *nth* time, that they hear it from us, if it helps them get to it faster at all, then it’s well worth it.

**~Moon**







Have you been to Harbor Island? Go in summer, of course. Take Jefferson Avenue way out east until you hit Alter Rd, the city’s edge…but still the city, don’t forget that. A right on Alter, follow the road down until in meets the river and bends around to a seemingly abandoned boathouse and pier.

The Fisherman’s Marina. An ironic marquee sign still stands proudly, both tragically and comically boasting of “Beer-Wine-Food!,” “Boat Hoist-Wells-Fuel Dock!,” and “Live Bait-Tackle!” next to a sizable structure, now dilapidated and slowly disintegrating, that by all appearance, no longer hosts any such things. 

https://i.nostrimg.com/e1a3e282bbe1552e667dfbfe53ed2c7c267155ce7d4b8352458c64608b036d2d/file.jpg

The lone 1970s Buick (a boat itself, haha!) and the graffitied shell of some old dinghy, marooned in the parking lot in front of the building, call out to better days and present questions perhaps best left unanswered. But as is often true in this city - looks can, and do, deceive…

Around the side of the boathouse, you will find the most interesting of affairs - especially for this place - a river sports launch! Introduce yourself, talk with the wiry woman with open-carry confidence and lean biceps from years on the water. Kayaks go for $20 an hour. 

https://i.nostrimg.com/8bc8c21b8695b0e4e9aa9b3f8b84df56ed82780ab305accfd9ee3aba65002500/file.jpg

Hop in a kayak, time to get out on the water – there is so much to explore! Before you paddle off, your host may toss you a beer. Accept it and don’t ask too many questions. Ho hah hehee! What a treasure to find, friend!

https://i.nostrimg.com/a40f342dbb08d4fc7f7bd8f1f3685717b1127b51e31f1008c2509882f8a120e5/file.jpg

But rather than the river, we advise you focus on is the neighborhood itself - Harbor Island. An unexpected and beautiful oasis of waterside living - a community carved out of old industrial canals on the river’s edge, a strange and wondrous world unto its own. 

https://i.nostrimg.com/34bbd1a72e069daea7ad76c5d9dd1ae6d6c30e00a0a565af66cc40a36c595b11/file.jpg

Chaotic, jumbled, and richly charactered. Unique. Each home and structure is different - no clear income class or racial demographic seems to hold the place – a good thing. Rather, what defines the neighborhood is its boats. Boats new and old. Boats anchored by all the houses. Boats lifted up into the yards like classic cars. 

https://i.nostrimg.com/9d6b5796a56d65f1c698aa8b8a38d55d8daf6c0395735fbca70fe84065aca364/file.jpg

https://i.nostrimg.com/b2ee86cd8109c97c9464ac1e956cb330bf2ede27914af32f0082b210644eaf3e/file.jpg

Maybe a man peers out at you as he brings in his tugboat, “Titan.” While perhaps another pilots his skiff out for a bright and early jaunt. The family with a gorgeous vintage wooden speedboat “Loup Garu,” the Werewolf, may wave at you as you float by. Even the “Admiralty,” what can only be described as a small pirate ship, might be found, moored regally, aside one of the grander homes.

https://i.nostrimg.com/9a930a7fbbbd2b235d83eaf2575333c25540c23253ec9c1c98f9024a0e58d54d/file.jpg

https://i.nostrimg.com/4b402c9a07981de5072c7993f16f4026e6d745d5850c6e98b323462ad5432641/file.jpg

https://i.nostrimg.com/d0b4f909fef741767daee902cb47a3e4edb5ca378132b7fee20fabfd1b20c64d/file.jpg

https://i.nostrimg.com/469c250f8272e047c64eea1290d95f6c2bff940c65cf3958c16168c4d3fcee69/file.jpg

Ah, you would be excused for placing yourself at some old, towny seaside community in Maine or on some bayou inlet along the Gulf Coast. But no friend! This would be Harbor Island, a little know place tucked away at the land’s end of Detroit’s post-urban sprawl. A true hidden gem. A place to drift. 

https://i.nostrimg.com/5d2192ffd5b92c284d4c7ebf2dff1d5c441cc24a93c27fcaa73f2b635b763470/file.jpg

Harbor Island.
Detroit.
Michigan, USA.

There are secrets to be found. Go there.

𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗨𝗻𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝗹 𝗟𝗮𝘄𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗟𝗶𝗳𝗲, 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗗𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗵 𝗶𝗻 𝗢𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗺𝘀, 𝗖𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗯𝘆 𝗚𝗲𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗿𝗲𝘆 𝗪𝗲𝘀𝘁

This book is a wonderfully cross-disciplinary exercise in fractal discovery and insight onto our world - initially the result of the author's pondering mortality which led to a study of longevity across organisms, and then expanded to social structures like cities and companies.

In the book, “scale" itself, conceptually, is defined as "How systems respond to changes in size." Does doubling an animal's dimensions increase its relative strength? Does doubling a city's size double it's relative rate of crime?These 2 questions introduce the key distinctions of 𝙨𝙪𝙗𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙖𝙧 scaling (the larger the thing, the relatively less of some characteristic it has) and 𝙨𝙪𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙖𝙧 scaling (the larger the thing, the relatively more of some characteristic it has), respectively.

Organisms, we discover, scale sublinearally - larger animals are more efficient requiring less energy per unit of weight, but similarly they become, relatively, structurally weaker as size increases - this is why Godzilla cannot exist, he would collapse under his own weight! Further, biological metabolic rate scale sublinearlly to size, so as the organism grows, energy demands of cellular maintenance outstrips supply leading to cessation of growth and eventual death (we also find companies face a similar fate, with "costs" replacing cellular maintenance).

Cities, however, are more interesting. In terms of infrastructure they scale like organisms (sublinearlly), but in terms of emergent human outputs, they scale superlinearlly - the larger the city, the relatively more patents, companies, GDP, crime, and disease it will host. For cities, superlinear scaling of those emergent human properties, or "social metabolism" results in the creation of social capital increasingly outpacing the demands of maintenance (those being largely infrastructural) suggesting accelerating, unbounded, open-ended growth.

With regard to growth, superlinearity results in exponential growth, which the authors approaches as something of a revelation of dark mathematical honor. He illustrates this with what I found to be one the book's most illuminating vignettes…

𝗦𝗖𝗘𝗡𝗔𝗥𝗜𝗢: It is 11:00. A petri dish 🧫 contains a single bacteria🦠 cell. This bacteria will double every minute. The petri dish will be completely full in 1 hour. At what time is the petri dish 🧫 50% full?

If you said anything other than 11:59, you've missed the key implication of exponential growth. Exponential growth is 𝙨𝙡𝙤𝙬𝙡𝙮, 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙖𝙩 𝙤𝙣𝙘𝙚. But let’s double down on this to really underscore that point - at what time does the petri dish in the aforementioned scenarios become just 1% full? The answer is somewhere between 11:53 and 11:54. Reflect on that. 

What might this kind of acceleration in growth mean for technological advancement, for population, for resource consumption and for how they all relate to each other? Thankfully, the book rejects Malthusianism, while still raising legitimate questions about the math of exponentially expanding earthbound civilization sustainability, and calls to an imperative to harness nuclear and solar energy at-scale as our best hopes.

Finally, the examination of exponentiality brings us to the deepest conundrum identified in the book - the 𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚 𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙪𝙡𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 - where unbounded growth cannot sustain without either (1) infinite energy or (2) paradigm shift "reset" staving off collapse. But wait! There's more! The mathematics of superlinearity suggest that, in absence of infinite energy, the absolution of paradigm shift resets are themselves required to happen at faster and faster pace, or shorter and shorter intervals.

So, if we are confined to earth's closed system, the need for continuous, stacked, paradigm shift innovations at ever-shorter intervals eventually manifests a meta-finite time singularity, the 𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙖𝙡 𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙪𝙡𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 which is perhaps, inescapable. The core insight to be extrapolated here is that if we are to overcome the singularity trap, we must drive real, constant step-function innovation and that this innovation must, almost necessarily, allow us to progressively harness orders of magnitude more energy than today - think Dyson Spheres and interstellar travel.

𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗖𝗟𝗨𝗦𝗜𝗢𝗡: Dense yet whimsical, lengthy yet fun. Questing and questioning cover to cover. Great for anyone interested in inter-disciplinarianism and fractal thinking (the long practice of which I find lends to heightened levels of predictive intuition) (4/5☢️)

https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Growth-Organisms-Companies/dp/014311090X

#Bitcoin #Plebchain #Coffeechain #Books #Bookstr #Nostr

Wake in the Blue Hour of morning and walk Luluku Road. It is cool now. The air is fresh and new. The night’s rain recedes to a vast, blue cloudlessness. To the east, the day’s first light cracks over the ocean horizon while high above the waning glimmer of the more stubborn stars still cling to the cerulean sky.

https://i.nostrimg.com/22fc25b691fa5139948caf7d7bb71b28778914cf52d7c10fb1dfb04866cacfb6/file.jpeg 

A singular time. A threshold. That noiseless place where night once more slips through the fingers of the ever-pursuing daylight. Luluku Road is stillness. No dog-walkers, no joggers, no running men. The birds are yet still silent. The humming night insects now quiet, hiding from the approaching light.

https://i.nostrimg.com/c6877a8ba8ae9c47ec12a9b1fb759fe937c88c1229f6445156fc80224cbedff2/file.jpeg 

https://i.nostrimg.com/2eac0c15ccd0cc8f32af51d4dc4ba0d392f7bad385209e26275adebe1b5058ff/file.jpeg 

But do they see you, all the sleeping people? Will they feel the traces of your presence?  Will they sense that you’ve been there, shuffling past the houses in the shadow of the dawn? O, Morning Ghost, if you linger long enough, would you become them also, living in their clothes and skin? Not so much homeless, but still never at home…

https://i.nostrimg.com/9d48fe1ff66a68c31f569a579ce8d7d230c97ae3eb88bea23c5ff93de5a2bff2/file.jpeg 

Just now, someone on their morning drive, it would seem, off to some unknown somewhere. Taking the curves, lazy and wide, coasting, almost floating until they reach the crossing where you are. No longer alone - with a quick flash of their lights - you see and are seen. Acknowledged by the new day.

https://i.nostrimg.com/92136030b185f21a92520fac5c331b81e57b7fb7554fd45b04ef05515bd982fc/file.jpeg

Ahead, just beyond the neighborhood, the Ko’olau rise. The Windward. Jutting up, straight skyward. Sheer things, less like a mountain range than some massive cresting wave. Looming over, all awe and terror and serenity, making thatch huts of the grand homes, dwarfing the little things we have made.

https://i.nostrimg.com/222696fab2bf783d2302771190b5dc7c72318370d2813a237bc73b3fa06eadf0/file.jpeg

https://i.nostrimg.com/973bd0972e16c2d98c449d0fdb0fa38d6f4e98a1fd84f08cb091999593db5908/file.jpeg

The sun is almost up now. It is time to leave. Time to be someone else, somewhere different from here. Doing things from other people, and not yourself…living in the day. But still thinking of the mountains, wondering at them, all the sleeping people, all the people you might have been. 

https://i.nostrimg.com/7fdf731886ff9ba395075ab9c74d5f03313521438dd743840a6797a9d9c987c1/file.jpeg

Luluku Road.
Oahu, Hawaii.

There are secrets to be found. Go there.

On Jan 19th, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, the largest consumer bank in the US, shared his views on bitcoin with CNBC’s Squawk Box. And phew, let me tell ya, it’s a veritable tour de force of status quo FUD (Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.) and logical fallacy. So, gather round frens! Let’s deconstruct the highlights of Mr. Dimon’s take on bitcoin to examine why it is all *completely wrong*.

[Tweet](https://twitter.com/SquawkCNBC/status/1616039056961323008?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1616039056961323008%7Ctwgr%5Ecdff5ef1b08ba1a37f516f722f555506a10cc6a3%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.embedly.com%2Fwidgets%2Fmedia.html%3Ftype%3Dtext2Fhtmlkey%3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07schema%3Dtwitterurl%3Dhttps3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FSquawkCNBC%2Fstatus%2F16160390569613230083Fref_src3Dtwsrc255Etfw257Ctwcamp255Etweetembed257Ctwterm255E1616039056961323008257Ctwgr255Ef5233f3cc9ebcc0783efbd351bdb278236fe0408257Ctwcon255Es1_c1026ref_url3Dhttps253A252F252Fpublish.twitter.com252F253Fquery253Dhttps3A2F2Ftwitter.com2FSquawkCNBC2Fstatus2F1616039056961323008widget253DTweetimage%3Dhttps3A%2F%2Fi.embed.ly%2F1%2Fimage3Furl3Dhttps253A252F252Fabs.twimg.com252Ferrors252Flogo46x38.png26key3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07)







## **Bitcoin is a hyped-up fraud, a pet rock!**

For the opening salvo, we get a nice 1980s spin on the age-old “Bitcoin is a fad” / Tulip Mania mantra. This is the gold standard (pun intended) of ***a priori*** arguments against bitcoin. If one decides, axiomatically and in their own mind, that bitcoin is a fad, then no amount of empirical evidence to the contrary may sway them.

Along with a priori reasonings, this argument generally works best in tandem with **deep appeal to both authority and incredulity.** Mr. Dimon, being one whom society is told not only understands but *controls* money, wields the former expertly and implicitly with his every statement — given his position, this would be the case even if he did not want or intend for it to be so. He’s Jamie Dimon, a name synonymous with money, America’s friendly-faced rich uncle — **he should know best, right?** To the latter, dismissing bitcoin as a fad brings soothing conform to the minds of those irreconcilably bound to the status quo. For such a person it is easy to believe that bitcoin is too exotic, too transformational, too disruptive to be successful because it is also *extremely convenient* to believe the same. It denies that anything transformational is happening, and therefore absolves them of having to grapple with, make, or accept changes that they would prefer not to — a dangerous magical thinking in the face of rapidly accelerating monetary and technological evolution.

So, in making this argument, Mr. Dimon willfully ignores the large and clear body of observational evidence that bitcoin is *not* a fad. Examination of bitcoin’s hashrate (compute power directed towards the bitcoin protocol at significant cost of money, time, effort, and management) and number of bitcoin holders shows a steady and strong upward trend over the past 14 years despite extreme fluctuations in bitcoin’s USD price, exchange hacks and crashes, and roiling global regulatory animus. Rather, observation would suggest a continuously and growing number of people, the world over, find both real and enduring value in bitcoin — the opposite of a fad if there ever was one.





## **Blockchain, not Bitcoin!**

For his second trick, Mr. Dimon presents “Blockchain, not bitcoin!” When host, Andrew Sorkin, raises that firms like BlackRock are investing in bitcoin infrastructure as a counterpoint, Mr. Dimon wastes no time to aggressively reframe the conversation around blockchain, “No, that’s different — blockchain is a technology ledger system that we use to move information […] That’s a technology ledger type of thing that we think will be deployable. But remember, we’ve been talking about that for twelve years too, and very little has been done.”

What a pivot! It is hard to believe that Mr. Dimon’s changing the subject to “blockchain technology” is accidental. It certainly could not have been lost on him that just days prior BlackRock had added bitcoin eligibility to its 15B USD [Global Allocation Fund](https://financefeeds.com/blackrock-makes-bitcoin-eligible-investment-to-15b-fund/) while also committing a new 17M USD loan to bitcoin miner [Core Scientific](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/12/30/blackrock-gives-bankrupt-bitcoin-miner-core-scientific-a-new-17m-loan/). Hence, the question was about bitcoin, but Mr. Dimon’s answer was about “Blockchain.” Which is to say, it was a purposeful and evasive non-answer.

Further, by Mr. Dimon’s own admission, the bank’s 12-years long engagement with “blockchain” has yielded scarcely little fruit. Conversely, what has bitcoin achieved over the past 12 years? Well, since Jan 19th, 2011 bitcoin has monetized from 0.32 USD to some 23,000 USD on the day of this interview, weathering eight 50%+ price corrections and an ATH of nearly 69,000 USD in between. It is on the balance sheet of Fortune 500 companies. It is legal tender in El Salvador. And it is estimated to be held by at least 100M people, globally. “Blockchain” or distributed ledger is simply a single component element, along with proof of work, decentralization, equitable supply and issuance rules, and first mover advantage which have enabled bitcoin to be the emergent, revolutionary monetary phenomenon that it is. In short, it should be clear to anyone seeking the truth of the matter that bitcoin, not blockchain, is the key innovation here.


## **How do you know its gunna stop at 21 million!**

Next, Mr. Dimon hits a crescendos by rejecting that bitcoin’s supply is fixed at 21 million coins, “Well maybe its gunna get to 21 million and Satoshi’s picture is going to come up and laugh at you all — and by then satoshi will have taken out billions of dollars!” Lets be clear here, this is not some technical or economic argument based on evidence or logical reasoning, this is purely ***argumentum ad ignorantiam***, appeal to ignorance. The premise here is that as we can neither time-travel into the 2140s (when the last bitcoin is mined) nor prove *with absolute certainty* that there **is not** some heretofore undiscovered corruption in the Bitcoin Core code that will one day, someway, somehow, result in violation of the 21 million supply cap — therefore, Mr. Dimon’s assertion that bitcoin’s supply is not fixed ***must*** be taken as correct.

**This is, of course, absurd.** But it is subtle, pernicious and, sadly, can be quite convincing FUD to the many people attenuated to the new theology of accepting all things digital as *majik*, unbounded from fundamental mathematics or the laws of physics. Believing that “anything is possible” through technology can also be used as false refutation if something, say, the corruption of bitcoin’s supply cap, is presented as not possible. Yet, bitcoin’s supply cap of 21 million is defined in the protocol source code — a code that is downloaded and run independently on each bitcoin node. As the code is open source and constantly audited, in actuality, we are left with overwhelming evidence that bitcoin’s supply is fixed to 21 million, and no evidence that it is not. And in the realm of empirical reasoning, where we all should be operating - Jamie Dimon most of all - this is as good as it gets.


## **FTX was a “Decentralized Ponzi Scheme”**

Ok, so in no uncertain terms, FTX was a **centralized** Ponzi scheme. There was never, for a single moment, *anything* decentralized about FTX, Alameda, or any of their “crypto projects.” Host Joe Kernen, before he is cut off by Mr. Dimon, aptly points out that conflating FTX’s criminality with bitcoin would be like conflating Bernie Madoff’s criminality with the very concept of banking itself — an overreach, and one that Mr. Dimon certainly would not agree with himself (JP Morgan having been Madoff's primary banker and all, under Mr. Dimon's tenure no less...). All of this is important to remember because what Mr. Dimon does here is a sly and savvy heuristic attack on the very idea of decentralization. Giving that decentralization is the organizing framework that underpins bitcoin’s security and network resilience, this can and should be viewed as an attack on bitcoin, albeit an indirect one. So, Mr Dimon, even when disparaging the crypto criminals at FTX, seems unable to help himself from doing so in a way that falsely misdirects ire at the bitcoin ethos.


## **Conclusion**

**Jamie Dimon is wrong about bitcoin.** His arguments are dismissive, dare I say lazy, ignore empirical evidence, and rely overwhelmingly on logical fallacy and topic/conclusion misdirection. It can be tempting for established bitcoiners to simply disregard Mr. Dimon as an “enemy of bitcoin,” yet his positions — no matter not shallow, simplistic, or wrong — represent the thinking of Boomer money holders and their Gen X corporate manager allies writ-large. While Bitcoin itself requires no change to prove these people wrong and obsolete their worldviews, we bitcoiners likely do ourselves a service in being able to deconstruct (its important to understand which fallacies are being employed) and rationally refute these type of “Blue Chip” attempts to obscure the truth and slander bitcoin.

**Remember, FUD is the mindkiller — reject it and destroy it wherever it is found.**

A dusty heat. Hot and dry, but speed turns air pulled through the tuk tuk’s open frame into a welcome breeze. We are cruising a long road heading due north from Siem Reap and Angkor Wat. Where we are going exactly, I cannot say, but I am told it will be well worth the trip. 

I have asked my tuk tuk guy (when you arrive in Siem Reap, whichever driver ferries you to your hotel becomes your “guy” for the rest of your trip, he will give you his number and it is understood that if you would like to go anywhere, you call him) to visit the some of the lesser-known or easy-to-miss sites in the area. So, where I go today is fully up to him. 

After some time, we arrive a large, shallow marshland lake with a plank wooden walkway set across a narrower edge of the waters. My guy points where the walkway turns and disappears beyond some wetland brush - a wide cigarette-yellowed smile, a missing right canine - “Follow path, good place there,” he says. 

https://i.nostrimg.com/1cd26457e0149e56e4081775b3198511050c7235bd2c93241f6cb286ad4d1693/file.jpeg 

And how right he is! Crossing the water and passing through a canopy of mangroves, the jungle clears and Banteay Srei, the Citadel of Beauty, explodes into view. A magnificent place, carved of rose sandstone - flowing hues of weathered red, pink, and orange intertwined with the verdant green of tropical foliage committed to the long task to grinding the entire places into agate-tinted soil.

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Built in the 10th century, Banteay Srei is a temple to the Hindu god, Shiva, The Destroyer. He who creates, transforms, and protects the universe, also known as The Dutifully Husband of Parvati. Father of sons Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles and Kartikeya, the God of War. 

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Compared to other more famous Khmer sites like Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, and Bayon, Banteay Srei is tiny. I am told this is owed to it being one of the only major sites on the Angkor plain not built under the name of a royal. Yet this only belies its grandeur. For whatever humility is signaled by its small area, there is a ruddy and palpable pride, almost arrogance, to the artistry and stonework, brazen in its majesty, intricacy, and endurance – this is certainly no mistake. 

https://i.nostrimg.com/242b1a6abfe758bc55826a5744c5076535310b094eb08ab17d2a0187b29ec6fb/file.jpeg 

Nearly every inch of stone here features some sort of carving, most cut in deep, stunning three-dimensional relief. The temple is filled with scenes from the Hindu epics, stories of Shiva and his rivals in the pantheon, and depictions of battles and combat between the gods. That such beauty and grace is assigned to this small, out of the way place, and somehow missed the other royal Angkor sites says more than words could about the social stature of its patron, royal or not. 

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But really, Banteay Srei a place where there is little to be said, and much to seen, walked, felt. It is a place overflowing with textured, tactile beauty for the eyes. It is truly something to behold.  

https://i.nostrimg.com/bf8fec0d78b3c3c3c810ec02269c90bbfcf59cbb19cbe56ced628a0a4eddd13e/file.jpeg 

Returning from the temple, I find my guy hanging out and chatting with a few other drivers. He waves me over and starts up the engine. I jump in and shut my eyes looking forward to resting on the long ride back into the city, but only a few minutes later we have stopped again. He taps me on the shoulder to wake me and gestures, more serious this time, at the building across the road.

Approaching, I notice that the building I’m walking up to appears to be littered with, no, decorated with, the hollowed and rusted shells of man-sized thousand-pound bombs. A teenage girl in camouflage fatigues, smiles at my arrival, finishing the last few bites of her lunch. She points to the doorway, where just beyond it a young man inside greets me, “Welcome to the Museum of Landmines!” he says with a bright smile. 

https://i.nostrimg.com/3c11daa69845a8852f83800a5e179e7ee35147e507c13f8e9ea28d75eec00f27/file.jpeg 

He gives me a tour. I learn that he and the girl both live and work at the museum as it provides shelter and care for landmine orphans and victims. I read the deeply inspiring and utterly insane story of the founding volunteers that created the museum - former Khmer Rouge child soldiers and concerned citizens taken to landmine disarmament with only the most rudimentary homemade tools - literally broomsticks and kitchen knives.

https://i.nostrimg.com/d0b389cf212411cfec035937a629d1c764c1dc548492c139aa0b7e61e802e17c/file.jpeg 

The space has several galleries detailing the story of the founders, the dark industry of landmines, and the history and human cost of landmine use in Cambodia and around the world. But in the central courtyard beyond the galleries is the museums most striking “exhibit” …

A huge pavilion filled top to bottom with hundreds of disarmed mines across a terrifying spread of makes, models, and sizes. It is surrounded by a moat, or a small pond, filled with water flowers, something like Calla Lilies - a space designed to project a certain strange tranquility, both macabre and unexpected. Perhaps an attempt to create something of beauty out of the “death” of so many landmines given ugliness they bring when they are live.  

https://i.nostrimg.com/49120720605ae64d5bb7b900ef57b35f585b82857fee6c86f046056f5bdf4e88/file.jpeg 

In all, the museum is a singular place. At once a full display of the horrors of landmines and the hideous, arbitrary, and indifferent violence they inflict, but then also a monument to the resilience of the human spirit, with the museum itself being a labor of love and deep care. Similarly, the attitude of the two attendants there was not dour or self-pitying but rather, matter of fact, jovial, and kind – people seemingly more hopeful about the future than mired in sadness from the past.  

The young man even sneaks in a bit of humor as he sees me cautiously eyeing the piles of landmine casings strewn about the place, “Don’t worry,” he says, slapping me lightly on the back, “Everything here is disarmed…well, probably anyways.” 

https://i.nostrimg.com/7090fd9c257fe79bd09b5bb3c3ee09d3583e4bad8906df08b5d4fd83a0c72844/file.jpeg 

Banteay Srei.
The Museum of Landmines.
Siem Reap.
Cambodia.

There are secrets to be found. Go there.

(Photos shot on Sony A6000)

#Cambodia #Angkor #Khmer #Travel #Photography #Art #Story #Storytelling #Bitcoin #Nostr #Zap #Zaps

The bus slowly lurches up the winding and steep embankment. We can finally start to see the craggy tops of buildings peaking out over the ridge in the foreground distance. We have almost reached it, Jerusalem, the City on the Hill. 

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Our Israeli tour guide speaks over the mic to draw our attention to the valley below us instead - “This is the the Valley of Gehenna, the Valley of the Moloch,” he says. “In ancient times, the pagans who worshiped Moloch used this place for child sacrifice by fire. Now, imagine yourself, an early Jew, sitting atop the hill, looking down in horror. This is the literal Valley of The Shadow of Death, the origin of the Abrahamic concept of Hell.” Strong open - this is going to be fun. 

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Inside the Old City, our guide - a chubby, cherub-faced intelligence type on some sort of punishment duty, deputized to babysit foreigners specifically because he reads as so dopey and disarming - points out various Judeo-Christian sites on a map, his tone subtly suggesting which places are most suggested, permitted…

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Walking, we reach Judaism’s Kotel, the West Wall - massive, grand, and ancient, whispering of the Eternal. Amongst the worshipers, we touch the warm, dry limestone and, if we like, place written prayers into the wall's smaller cracks. A solemn and yearning ghost fills the place
￼
https://i.nostrimg.com/5fdfaeab72dc91f5f98fdc169762c968cfd563268de0e35fdeadddac6e05fabf/file.jpeg

Just above the Kotel, Islam’s Dome of the Rock can be seen, its golden cap blazing in the sun. I ask our guide about visiting the dome. He cuts a heavy eyeroll in my direction - it seems I’ve outed myself as my group’s “that guy.” His face says more than words ever could, “Oy vey, there’s one in every group…”

https://i.nostrimg.com/f61084c9e2e8355361873dd5d2bb25a00af63c96eb498dd19bad59834a6839fb/file.jpeg

“Why would anyone want to go there? It is a bit intense, no?” Still, I press. “Well, it is only open to tourists on Tuesday and Thursdays…” I check, it is Tuesday. “And even then, visiting only opens from 11:30…” It is 11:20. As it becomes clear to him that I don't intend to drop this...“Fine!” he relents, with a dramatic and uniquely Israeli sigh, “Go there if you must. But remember, the bus leaves at 1PM. Good luck...” Great! Not ominous at all.

The checkpoint for the sole non-Muslim entrance leading up to the Dome is administered by several gorgeous and statuesque, assault rifle clad,  Ethiop-Israeli female soldiers. In this period of relative peace and calm, they feel lax enough to make a coy but salacious game of their “screening” the men in line…but none doth protest

Past the gun-totting Sirens, a long wooden rampart leads up to the Temple Mount, The Mount of the House of the Holy, al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf, The Noble Sanctuary, The Furthest Mosque, presently the site of the Dome of the Rock and the al-Masjid al-Asqa. 

https://i.nostrimg.com/432d920f77be77ed1b9841669b6f8d72dad385469e25d699860da6f211b1d23d/file.jpeg

On the Mount, the Dome dominates all views. To those interested in pure expressions of beauty, the Dome is, undeniably, a thing of absolute glory. I pace the grounds, snapping what pictures I can. I pause to breathe and to let the electric energy of the setting wash over me. 

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It’s 12:15 now, I decide to head back. Now, here is what they don’t tell you. The non-Muslin entrance from the West Wall side is a one-way deal. Leaving the Dome plaza dumps you out into the back alley bazaar of Old City’s Muslim district. And so it is. I am lost. 

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https://i.nostrimg.com/ea66c91fa7fd23049efe3ebe43fa926d71de54758bd8d186bfeb06b2ac7f4e2f/file.jpeg

I run through the Muslim quarter, blindly turning down alleyways that seem to be taking me in the general direction of where I need to be - glimpses afforded by the city’s uneven elevation and cracks in ancient stone walls guiding my way.

https://i.nostrimg.com/c26fd039db61624e0674c04f55c63af3e7230cb3c03ec6f67bf4d8fbd06e4c64/file.jpeg

In a final act of desperation and likely a significant breach of Israeli security protocol, I scale a low wall and flop down back on the side of things where I'm “supposed” to be. But either no one sees me or no one cares. Good luck, indeed. 

I make it back to my group - they are not hard to find, a bunch of MBAs in “business casual” travel attire and a tour guide wearing a loudly colored hat and jacket - with just enough time to still visit the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. 

https://i.nostrimg.com/f08021b3b1b2504a8630bb94f6e51b8809d4299c54a36a1a99d43be2fb481f94/file.jpeg

￼
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Inside, a chaotic and dizzying array of chapels, grand domed ceilings, and Christian relics - most notably the Stone of Anointing, commemorating where Christ’s body was prepared for burial and Tomb of Christ, where Christ is said to have laid for 3 days before Resurrection.

https://i.nostrimg.com/f1d03cb0cfb7c6e80573d3f9a67f3a1e4493801cd4db6e560ef0d6c9fb8042cb/file.jpeg

https://i.nostrimg.com/96be9de480738d3fcfdc47b00f53097195a44b59cfb91f22584a5bfbbfc8a7fa/file.jpeg

In less than an hour, one can traverse from the literal Hell, to King David’s Wall, The Tomb of Christ, and the site of Muhammad’s Ascension. The question that stays with me - What is it about this place that has caused so many to turn their heads to the heavens and cry out for God?

https://i.nostrimg.com/62dc21d8d9e2e3fbd37e0088f4f780e4e01af52c963e156fffcb5c4be7a2d286/file.jpeg

Jerusalem. 
The Old City. 
Israel. 

There are secrets to be found. Go there.

#Bitcoin #Jerusalem #Israel #Travel #Photography #Art #Story #Storytelling #Nostr #Zap #Zaps #Plebchain #Coffeechain #Bookstr #NostrArt

Normieland Dispatch: Preferring Biological Children is Immoral?

Bitcoiner at the Movies: Oppenheimer

Journey Into Bitcoin 04: Freedom. With Chinese Characteristics.

Bitcoiner Book Review 03: When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson

Test

Journey Into Bitcoin 03: Definancialization, A Love Story

Journey Into Bitcoin 02: Shitcoining in Shanghai

Bitcoiner Thought 01: Get Some Non-KYC Bitcoin Before Your Need It

Bitcoin Traveller 05: Harbor Island

Bitcoiner Book Review 02: You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier

Bitcoin Traveller 04: Luluku Road

Cantillionaire Round Up 01: Jamie Dimon is Wrong About Bitcoin

Bitcoin Traveller 03: Banteay Srei / Museum of Landmines

Journey Into Bitcoin 01: My Bitcoin Moment

Bitcoin Traveller 02: Jerusalem Old City

Bitcoiner Book Review 01: "Scale" by Geoffrey West

Bitcoin Traveller 01: 苦 Bar, Bangkok