After nearly four years of studying Bitcoin I can say this honestly: nothing in my life — no book, no movement, no ideology — has challenged my intelligence and worldview as relentlessly as Bitcoin. Just when I think I’ve grasped the shape of it, the system reveals another seam: a new debate, a new protocol nuance, a new set of questions that push me back into research and into the long, patient work of understanding. What hooked me was simple and domestic. I was talking with my mother about gold — how for centuries people dug it out of the earth with shovels and picks, then built ever more complex machines to do it better. I asked her: in a world full of distributed computers, of global networks and proof-based work, isn’t it logical that we’d build machines to “dig” a new kind of gold? Her answer was immediate and clear: yes. We shouldn’t be digging in the ground anymore. That moment — a small, ordinary exchange — opened the door. Bitcoin began as an idea that made sense at a single glance, then unfolded into a rabbit hole of surprising depth. Consensus stopped being an abstract political word and became a question of what reality we choose to enforce. Relay policies, tolerance of minorities, the mechanics of difficulty adjustment, the fragile discipline of running your own node — all of these are not mere technicalities; they are living arguments about trust, power, and independence. Self-custody turned from a slogan into practice: cold wallets, hot wallets, BIP39 seed phrases, passphrases — each a ritual that forces you to confront responsibility. The more I learn, the more the system asks of me: to verify rather than to accept, to read rather than to repeat, to engage rather than to spectate. Bitcoin is an intellectual ecosystem that refuses simplification. It sharpens the mind because it demands humility and constant learning. It makes you suspicious of easy narratives and encourages the habit of testing claims against observable reality. And it changes the way you look at everything else — money, institutions, history, and even ordinary conversations at the kitchen table. I’m still early in this journey, and that’s the point. The learning never ends. Every new problem is an invitation: to read, to question, to argue, and — if you want to call it that — to be reborn, a little bit, by what you discover.

REFUSE AND RESIST.

Trustless Systems vs. Top-Down Control What makes Bitcoin so powerful is exactly what our current political systems are missing: a trustless, self-regulating environment. Bitcoin doesn’t need gatekeepers to decide what’s good or bad, what has value or doesn’t. It runs on clear, simple rules — enforced by consensus and the fee market. If a transaction follows the rules and pays the fee, it belongs. No moral judgment. No authority filtering it. No exceptions. That’s a huge contrast to the world we live in — where governments get involved in everything, telling us what’s “safe,” what’s “true,” and what we’re allowed to say or do. They claim it’s for our own protection. But what they’re really doing is trying to control the flow of truth, ideas, and behavior. They treat us like children: “You can’t be trusted to self-regulate. Let us decide for you.” But here’s the reality: What they call “hate speech” only becomes a real crisis when they amplify it — through their media, their platforms, their algorithms. If left alone, most of it dies out on its own. Society already knows how to filter what it doesn’t accept. We do it every day — on the street, in our families, in our communities. We don’t need a “Ministry of Speech” telling us what words are too dangerous to hear. Bitcoin was built on the same idea: Open systems work best when they’re free to self-regulate. Not when they’re ruled by fear or filtered by someone else’s standards. So when developers or node operators start acting like authorities — labeling valid transactions as “spam,” deciding what “belongs” on the network, trying to draw moral lines around Bitcoin — they’re not protecting the protocol. They’re importing the exact same top-down thinking Bitcoin was designed to escape. Bitcoin isn’t a moral playground. It’s a neutral, trustless protocol. It lets everyone in, even the ones you don’t agree with. That’s the whole point.

This reminds me of Knots Four Horsemen CP Fear Propaganda. Actually it is exactly the same : 1:1 View quoted note →

The ability to create your own curated algo by adding your favorite user's feeds on NOSTR is super power!