>Fiction

“There is no second best.” — Michael nostr:nprofile1qqs2xs05tluhtr6hpgsmqqxp04898gayjlyrjlexcrndv8j6el784xqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduq3wamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwvd6hyun9de6zuenedye390z3 Two friends. One chose #Bitcoin. The other chose #Ethereum. Only one kept their wealth. Both lost their friendship. What’s worth more — being right about Bitcoin, or holding onto the people you love? New story drop #nostr🎤 —— Different Roads, Same Moon Luke Scott tapped the pier rail with his beer bottle, watching the harbor lights flicker like distant stars. “Remember when we used to come here with our bikes?” Marco Ruiz grinned, settling beside his oldest friend. “And you’d time how long it took the tide to cover that rock. Even then you were obsessed with cycles.” “Someone had to keep track. You were too busy trying to impress Sarah Martinez.” “Hey, it worked eventually.” Marco’s laugh carried across the water. “Different approaches, man. You built spreadsheets for your crushes. I just showed up.” Luke smiled despite himself. Twenty years of friendship, and Marco still approached everything like an adventure while Luke mapped the terrain first. “Speaking of different approaches…” He pulled out his phone, showed Marco his Bitcoin wallet. “Finally convinced you to look at this seriously?” Marco’s expression shifted, playful to guarded. “I looked. But Ethereum’s got actual utility. Smart contracts, DeFi—it’s not just digital gold sitting in a vault.” “Twenty-one million coins, forever,” Luke said quietly. “That’s not a bug, it’s the feature. Ethereum’s got an infinite supply and a teenager running it.” “Vitalik’s a genius.” “Satoshi’s a ghost. Can’t be corrupted, can’t be coerced.” Luke’s voice carried the conviction of someone who’d spent years diving deep. “Marco, this isn’t some tech play. It’s sound money. It’s fixing the root problem. As Michael Saylor says ‘There is no second best.’ Marco raised his bottle. “Then I’m building the future and you’re hoarding gold. To different moons.” Their bottles clinked, but Luke noticed Marco’s smile didn’t reach his eyes anymore. Their friendship had started in third grade when Luke helped Marco with long division and Marco taught Luke how to talk to the cool kids. Through middle school science fairs where Luke built precise models and Marco created wild experiments that somehow worked. High school dates where Luke researched conversation topics and Marco just made people laugh. “You overthink everything,” Marco had said junior year, watching Luke stress about asking Jennifer to prom. “You underthink everything,” Luke shot back, but he was smiling. “That’s why we work.” College separated them—Luke to MIT for computer science, Marco to Berkeley for business. But summers brought them back to the pier, sharing stories about girls who broke their hearts and dreams that kept changing shape. Luke talked about elegant code; Marco talked about changing the world. After graduation, they’d moved to the same city within months of each other. Luke landed at a fintech startup; Marco started a marketing consultancy. Different worlds, same friendship. Every Friday night, they’d end up somewhere, arguing about everything and agreeing about what mattered. Then Luke discovered Bitcoin. 2017 had been the year Luke fell down the rabbit hole. Not just buying Bitcoin—studying it. Austrian economics, monetary history, cryptography. He consumed every Satoshi email, every Andreas Antonopoulos talk, every Saifedean Ammous thread. The deeper he went, the more urgent it felt. Marco watched his friend’s transformation with growing unease. “You sound like you joined a cult.” “I sound like someone who figured out the game is rigged,” Luke replied, not looking up from The Bitcoin Standard. They were at their usual bar, but Luke had his kindle out instead of paying attention to the game on TV. “Fiat money is theft, man. Central banks stealing purchasing power through inflation—” “Okay, but Ethereum’s doing something about it. DeFi is rebuilding the entire financial system. Bitcoin’s just sitting there.” Luke finally looked up. “Bitcoin doesn’t need to do anything else. It’s perfect money. Store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account. Everything else is noise.” Marco ordered another beer. His best friend was disappearing into orange-pilled orthodoxy, and he didn’t know how to get him back. By 2020, Luke had started the podcast. “Stacking Sats with Luke Scott” began as weekend hobby but grew into something bigger. His calm, methodical explanations attracted listeners who wanted Bitcoin education without the Twitter toxicity. Sponsors came calling. Speaking engagements followed. Marco, meanwhile, had discovered Ethereum at $300. Not just the price action—the ecosystem. He started a newsletter called “Building Tomorrow,” tracking DeFi protocols, NFT projects, Layer 2 solutions. His subscriber count grew alongside his ETH stack. They still texted, but conversations felt strained. Luke would send Marco clips from Bitcoin maximalists. Marco would counter with threads about Ethereum’s roadmap. Their group chats with college friends became uncomfortable as others picked sides or asked them to stop arguing. “We’re like those couples who can’t talk about politics anymore,” Marco joked, but neither of them laughed. Sophie entered Luke’s life through the podcast. She managed communications for a Bitcoin venture fund and appreciated Luke’s thoughtful approach. She also noticed how his friendships had narrowed to people who spoke his new language. “You miss Marco,” she observed after Luke mentioned him for the third time that week. “He’s free to join us anytime. Just has to admit he’s been gambling instead of investing.” Sophie said nothing, but her silence spoke volumes. The crash came in May 2028. An exploit of the Ethereum had it come crashing down 95% from its highs, and the protocols Marco championed bled users like punctured balloons. Bugs became rampant and drained billions. Fees hit absurdity. News tickers ran red. Luke called him that first night, genuinely worried. “You okay?” “I’m fine.” Marco’s voice sounded hollow. “Down a lot, but I’m fine.” “Listen man, sell what you can, buy Bitcoin. It’s not about the price—it’s about the philosophy. This is what Austrian economics predicted. Malinvestment, boom-bust cycles—” “Don’t start this now.” “Marco, I’m trying to help. This is your chance to learn from—” The line went dead. Luke stared at his phone, torn between vindication and grief. He’d been right about everything, but being right felt lonelier than he’d expected. About a year later, Marco began his quiet journey back to humility. The crash had shattered more than his portfolio—it had broken his confidence in his own judgment. He sold his remaining altcoins at brutal losses and started dollar-cost averaging into Bitcoin, buying $200 worth every week regardless of price. He couldn’t bring himself to call Luke. His friend had become @StackingSatsLuke, with 150k followers and a premium course on Austrian economics. Marco was just another casualty of the altcoin graveyard, too proud to admit defeat and too broke to matter. Instead, he studied alone. He read The Bitcoin Standard cover to cover, then Layered Money and The Fiat Standard. He joined local meetups where nobody knew him, listened to other people tell their stories of discovery and loss. Slowly, he began to understand what Luke had been trying to tell him. Bitcoin wasn’t just superior technology. It was a return to sound money principles, a check on government overreach, a tool for human flourishing. The network’s simplicity wasn’t a bug—it was the feature that made everything else possible. By 2032, Marco had accumulated 1.8 Bitcoin through disciplined DCA and freelance work. It had taken him three years to understand what Luke had grasped immediately: Bitcoin was patience made manifest, delayed gratification encoded in mathematics. He wrote texts over the years to Luke that he never sent, apologies that felt too small and too late. His old friend had become a celebrity in their small world, hosting conferences and advising institutions. What could Marco offer except admission of failure? The fatal accident happened on a Tuesday morning. Marco was cycling to his new job at a credit union—when a robotic delivery truck glitched and ran a red light-an obscenely rare occurrence. Marco had been cycling for years with self-driving vehicles and never saw it coming. Luke learned about it from Maria, Marco’s sister, who’d found his contact information in a folder labeled “Important People.” “He talked about you all the time,” she said at the funeral. “Said you were the smartest person he knew, even when you two weren’t speaking.” Luke wanted to explain their fight, the years of stubborn silence, the opportunities they’d both let slip away. Instead, he listened as Maria shared stories he’d never heard: Marco volunteering at the community center, teaching kids about money and patience. Marco keeping a photo of them from college on his desk she gave to him. Luke’s chest collapsed. He pressed the photo to his face, choking out a sound of true pain he hadn’t made since childhood. Years of pride, silence, wasted seconds—gone. Maria held his hand and let him weep. Marco said he hoped to reconnect when his pride stopped hurting so much. “There’s something else,” Maria said, handing Luke a folder. “His will mentions you specifically.” Inside was a hardware wallet—a BitBox02—and a letter in Marco’s careful handwriting: *Luke— If you’re reading this, I’m probably dead, which means I never got the chance to call you like I should have. Coward’s way out, I guess. You were right about everything. Took me years and most of my net worth to figure that out, but here we are. I’ve got 1.8 Bitcoin on this wallet, earned the hard way through DCA and discipline. I kept learning from you too just from afar this time. The seed phrase is in my safety deposit box at First National, split between two bank envelopes labeled “For Luke” and “From Marco.” I know you don’t need the money, but I hope you’ll accept it anyway. Not as an investment—as an apology. You tried to save me from myself, and I was too proud to listen. By the time I understood, you’d become famous and I was embarrassed. How do you apologize to someone who became a legend by being right about everything you got wrong? I learned something these past few years: Bitcoin isn’t just about the technology or the economics. It’s about community. About teaching people patience and delayed gratification. About showing them there’s a better way. You built that community first. I hope you’ll remember that friendship matters more than being right. Thanks for trying to save me. I wish I’d listened sooner. Your friend always, Marco P.S. - Check the wallet label. I couldn’t resist one last joke.* Inside the wallet: a hardware device. Its label made him laugh through tears: Seed Phrase Karaoke. He plugged it in. 1.8 Bitcoin sat there, each purchase annotated in Marco’s clumsy notes: “Payday DCA,” “Sold the condo furniture,” “Kids’ coding bootcamp donation.” The final note: Different Roads, Same Moon. Luke closed his laptop and walked to the pier where their friendship had started and ended so many times. The harbor lights reflected off the water like scattered satoshis, each one precious and irreplaceable. He pulled out his phone and recorded a voice memo, something personal he’d never shared publicly: “This is Luke, and I want to talk about something more important than Bitcoin. I want to talk about friendship, and patience, and the difference between being right and being kind…” He posted it that night with a simple caption: “In memory of Marco Ruiz, who taught me that the best HODLers are the ones who hold onto people, not just coins.” The response overwhelmed him. Hundreds of stories about lost friendships, about pride and reconciliation, about the human cost of being right. Marco would have loved the conversation it started. Luke kept the BitBox02 on his desk next to their old photo from the pier. 1.8 Bitcoin that represented more than money—it was proof that people could change, learn, grow back toward each other even when pride built walls between them. Sometimes the best inheritance isn’t what someone leaves you, but what they teach you about what matters most. Marco’s final gift wasn’t the Bitcoin—it was the reminder that no amount of perfect money could buy back the time they’d lost to stubborn silence. The pier still creaked in the evening tide. But now Luke heard it differently—not as a countdown to some distant moon, but as a rhythm that connected all the moments when friendship mattered more than being right.

GM

Our next story to drop, The Halving inspired by nostr:nprofile1qqsxu35yyt0mwjjh8pcz4zprhxegz69t4wr9t74vk6zne58wzh0waycprfmhxue69uhhq7tjv9kkjepwve5kzar2v9nzucm0d5hszxthwden5te0d4shgunf0qhxgetjva5kw6fwvdhk6tcjwqsls Bitcoin as time writings and a window into Ethan’s future at block 1,260,000. —— The dollar didn’t die in a bang but in a thousand polite euphemisms. “Forward guidance.” “Targeted liquidity.” “Temporary repricing.” Holographic tickers slid across Ethan Greene’s wall in 2032, looping promises over graphs that only went one way. His mortgage reindexed between espresso shots. Eggs hit sixty-eight a dozen. The US federal wallet—“e-dollar”—pushed a nudge: spend your expiring stipend by Friday. The wellness app, linked to the same wallet, recommended “optimizing household resources” by euthanizing the dog. Murphy lifted his gray muzzle and thumped his tail once. Ethan closed the notification and watched a smiling anchor call it “the strongest recovery in history.” The side banner said fuel rations tighten; high-carbon purchases require approval. He had stayed through it all. Friends left for “citadels.” People whispered that counting life in blocks might be saner than counting it in inflating paychecks. He stayed because it was New York, because quitting felt like admitting the world had changed and he hadn’t. That afternoon the algorithm that used to be his boss scheduled a “performance calibration.” A cheerful avatar informed him his role had been “absorbed by emergent AI efficiencies.” The severance was a loyalty coupon, redeemable only in the company’s metaverse store and only before its expiry date. He tried to laugh; it came out as air. He opened an old, encrypted folder: Ava. They hadn’t really spoken in years. Drift, friction, drift. The night they broke for good he’d sneered at her “monk phase,” the week she sold her furniture and put her savings—small as it was—into a cold wallet the size of gum. Back when studios in Brooklyn still could be bought. Back when he could afford the joke. “You’re being paranoid,” he’d said, rain picking at the window. “Money is what we agree it is.” “Exactly.” She’d wrapped her grandmother’s necklace and labeled the postage for sale. “I’m done agreeing to be robbed.” A few months later she left for a place called Bitcoin Beach. “Somewhere building something different,” she’d texted, plus a pin and a block height he rolled his eyes at. Bitcoiners and their blocks instead of clocks he thought begrudgingly. Now he scrolled through the dust of that thread. He typed: I’m sorry. You were right. I want to get out. Can you help? Her reply arrived by voice in the morning—low, steady, ocean in the background. “I’m here. And I’m not a confessional. If you’re serious, slow down. Most of the damage comes from moving too fast.” He sent another message. She asked questions and left space for him to think. What did he want from money, really? Why had he mistaken convenience for safety? How much of his time was his? What did wealth with e-cash mean if it evaporated between Tuesday and Thursday? She sent him names of the Bitcoin pioneers- nostr:nprofile1qqsqyredyxhqn0e4ln0mvh0v79rchpr0taeg4vcvt64te4kssx5pc0spr3mhxue69uhkummnw3ez6un9d3shjtnhd3m8xtnnwpskxegpz3mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wc7qx6h9, nostr:nprofile1qqsg86qcm7lve6jkkr64z4mt8lfe57jsu8vpty6r2qpk37sgtnxevjcpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejszxthwden5te0wpuhyctdd9jzuenfv96x5ctx9e3k7mge28ng3, nostr:nprofile1qqsw4v882mfjhq9u63j08kzyhqzqxqc8tgf740p4nxnk9jdv02u37ncpz3mhxue69uhkummnw3e8xct5wesjumn9wsq3gamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwv3sk6atn9e5k7r93njk and a programmer-philosopher called nostr:nprofile1qqsxu35yyt0mwjjh8pcz4zprhxegz69t4wr9t74vk6zne58wzh0waycprfmhxue69uhhq7tjv9kkjepwve5kzar2v9nzucm0d5hszxthwden5te0d4shgunf0qhxgetjva5kw6fwvdhk6tcjwqsls who wrote that fiat steals your time quietly while Bitcoin forces you to count it again. He read furiously changing his understanding about the reality he was in and more than ever wanting out. “List what you own that serves you,” she said. “And what you own that owns you.” He started selling. It wasn’t heroic. It was embarrassing. He listed the watch he’d financed because his boss had one, watching bids climb in a currency that sagged by dinner. He cancelled ten subscriptions and stared at a white wall where his entertainment systems used to be. He kept little- Murphy’s bed, his books and a cast-iron pan. He converted what he could into sats and memorized his seed phrase like a prayer, preparing for his escape. He still had 0.42 BTC he’d bought as a joke in 2020 with Ava—beer money turned lifeboat. He stopped watching price and started watching block height. The halving was on the horizon again. A notch in the metronome: 1,260,000 was nearing. For months they spoke like that—voice notes and late-night texts while he learned how to be bored without panicking. She didn’t invite him. He didn’t ask. When he wrote about the state’s wellness app’s suggestion to kill Murphy, she responded, “There’s a difference between efficiency and dignity. Pick.” He picked. He packed a backpack. He paid the penalty to break the lease. He bought two coach tickets—one for him, one for Murphy—and left the algorithm a final message: Unsubscribe me from your future. The plane descended through heat into a sky that always looks like morning. People had once nicknamed the place Bitcoin Beach; locals just called it a town. Solar shingles flashed on low roofs. Mesh masts webbed the hills. A shipping container wore a hand-painted sign: Proof-of-Work Café — Value for Value. People paid by zapping tiny streams of sats, like passing a glass of water. Ava waited where stone pebbles became sand. Same person after a long storm: lines deeper, gaze lighter, still as beautiful as ever. She crouched to greet Murphy first, scratching the place behind his ear that made him lean into whoever loved him. Then she stood and looked at Ethan. “You came,” she said. “I kept not coming,” he said. “Then I realized that counted as a decision.” They walked without touching. No scene to play, no rush to stitch time together. She showed him the bakery that accepted Lightning and the battery co-op where surplus power from sun and a few quiet miners was pooled and shared. She showed him the notice board with block height written at the top like a date, births beneath, and a line of flat stones to remember the dead. “Don’t romanticize,” she warned when he seemed about to. “There’s bureaucracy here and pettiness. We just try to make it expensive to lie and cheap to tell the truth.” They gave him work, not charity. He had coached corporate people to present to other corporate people; now he taught kids to read block explorers and the difference between keys you hold and keys someone promises to hold for you. He helped an old man move a multisig off a compromised phone and onto steel. He heard of a woman pay a midwife directly, over the air, with no bank middleman in between. Every time he tried to sprint to prove he belonged, Ava stopped him with one word: “Consistency.” “Proof of work?” he joked. “Proof of time,” she said. “Anyone can sprint. We keep score in blocks.” On block 1,259,840—two hundred blocks to the halving—they stood on a ridge and watched nodes blink on at dusk. “I feel wealthier,” he said, surprising himself. “But I own less.” “You have more,” she said, “because less owns you. Low time preference isn’t asceticism. It’s remembering your future self exists and you’ll have to live with him.” They ate mangoes with appreciation for each bite, not rushing, but becoming more alive and in touch with being human. He learned to surf badly and laugh at falling because it meant he was still trying. He learned that “value for value” wasn’t a sign on a wall but a way to stop keeping secret ledgers in his head. The settlement prepared for the halving the way towns prepare for the first day of school—quietly, with care. Teens rigged an open-air screen for the mempool. Someone painted a spiral galaxy seeded with tiny orange dots. The battery co-op argued cheerfully about who would shoulder more downtime if rewards dropped. There were no fireworks stands. There were extra chairs. On the night block height turned 1,260,000, the beach looked like a low constellation. Lanterns pooled light on sand. The generator was off; the music came from a guitar and a drum. The old man Ethan had helped told the kids about the first halving he’d “lived through” back in 2012, when nobody cared and that had been perfect in its own way. Ethan stood apart, watching waves take the moon’s measure. Ava stood next to him without announcing it. “You stayed,” she said. “I was waiting to be told I’d earned it.” He exhaled and something left him that had been there for years. “That’s just fiat in a different hat.” She smiled, unguarded now. “What block did it change for you?” “When I stopped measuring time in appointments and started measuring it in how many people I could disappoint by leaving a thing undone.” “Gigi says Bitcoin is a mirror,” she said, not as a quote to impress but as a fact she lived. “It reflects the cost of your actions back at you. People think that’s about price. It’s about time.” “I don’t deserve a second chance,” he said. “I’d be an idiot not to ask for one.” “You quit your fiat life,” she said. “I quit a story about being important. I kept the part about being useful.” “Show me,” she said. “I’ve been trying.” “Then stop trying.” She stepped closer. “Keep doing.” The block flickered green. A cheer rose—relief, like the sound people make when a child finally sleeps. Emission cut in half; the world got a little harder to debase. He didn’t cry. Ava slid her hand into his and something inside him finally matched its age. They kissed passionately because there wasn’t a reason not to, and because there finally was. Their kiss came to an end when a kid zapped the musician three hundred sats and yelled, “Play it again!” The musician laughed like a person paid in appreciation and proof. At dawn—block 1,260,008—Murphy’s breathing went shallow on the porch of the small casita where Ethan now slept, not alone. Ava was already up, hair tied, holding the dog before Ethan knew he had started to go. Murphy had been a good dog even during the bad years. He looked at Ethan with the calm certainty of someone who had never tried to be more than he was. Ethan whispered his love for his best friend who never cared about the human reality of fiat, he helped make him anchor to the truth. Murphy’s last breath was gentle. No drama, just the unspectacular holiness of being present. They buried him on the rise where the mesh mast throws a shadow at noon. Ethan painted a flat stone: Block 1,260,008. No date. Dates belonged to calendars that had lied about what endures. Blocks belonged to a chain anyone could verify, even after he was gone. A message from Manhattan arrived three months later. An offer dressed as a compliment: equity in a new line of “AI-verified productivity assets,” integrated with e-dollar payrolls and social-score rebates. The tone was a hand outstretched while the fine print pulled the ring off your finger. He read it with a calm that once would have scared him. He remembered how his heart used to sprint when the right people noticed, and how it almost stopped the night the app suggested mercy-killing his dog for a cleaner spreadsheet. He deleted the message and went outside. Ava was teaching a teenager how to run a Lightning node on a hand-me-down router. The kid’s grandmother braided palm fronds at her feet, humming. A man from the next town brought eggs and left with a battery charged by sunlight and a thousand miners. Someone called Ethan’s name and asked if he could patch a punctured surfboard. He could. He would. They ate with their neighbors and didn’t divide the check. Afterward they walked to the ridge where Murphy slept under a stone that said exactly enough. Below, the settlement glowed; above, the sky did its old miracle of existing without permission. “Do you miss it?” Ava asked. “The old world?” “I miss pretending I wasn’t responsible,” he said. “But I like being the person who shows up.” “Low time preference is just that,” she said. “Showing up for a future you won’t fully enjoy.” “Builders spaces instead of strip malls,” he said. “Children instead of customers,” she said. He reached for her hand and she let him. The mast blinked; the node hummed; the chain advanced. Somewhere, far away and right here, strangers cooperated because they didn’t have to trust each other to share a ledger that couldn’t be bribed. On the table by the door lay his old wallet card, seed words etched with a shaky hand. Next to it, a new one: multisig and shared—proof that some things get safer when you refuse to hold them alone. He blew out the lamp. The night didn’t end; it rolled forward, block by block, a rhythm as indifferent and dependable as tide. He dreamed of Murphy thumping his tail and of a younger man finally willing to have less so he could keep something worth keeping. In the morning—block 1,260,570—work began again. The pump needed priming. A privacy lesson had to be rewritten for kids who outpaced him by the hour. A neighbor’s roof slipped a tile. The battery co-op wanted to test a new controller. The musician needed strings. The world was large and full of small, solvable problems. Time had not loved him back when he ignored it. It didn’t love him now. But he had stopped trying to borrow it—and started storing it where neither favor nor inflation could reach. He tied his boots. Ava handed him coffee. The sun climbed exactly as fast as it always had. And the future—his, hers, theirs—kept unspooling at ten minutes a block.

Haven’t yet done a proper intro yet. I’ve been on/off Nostr for a couple years now and officially closed my social media accounts (including WhatsApp) last year. I’ve had more friends and podcasts I’ve listened to like nostr:nprofile1qqsg86qcm7lve6jkkr64z4mt8lfe57jsu8vpty6r2qpk37sgtnxevjcpr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ez6ur4vgh8wetvd3hhyer9wghxuet5qyg8wumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx25jqgv3 inspire me to spend my time where I want more people to be and that’s on freedom tech and #bitcoin I didn’t want to create a personal account as wanted to provide value from writing sci-fi short stories to make Bitcoin idea easier to digest and more memorable by the characters that live through these system changes. This is a #nostr only project that I also post on Stacker News. Would love to connect with more of you and hear what Bitcoin people, or concepts you’d like to see brought to life. #introductions

What relays are you on? #asknostr

Thanks for sharing! I’m new to nostr so can use all the help I can get

Are we ready for #ChatGPT-5?