I watched the sun rise over San Salvador Volcano today I'm so excited. #BitcoinWeek is here! Huge gratitude to @Adopting Bitcoin. They are are the OG conference in El Salvador and a cornerstone of turning El Salvador into #BitcoinCountry. So many builders that have moved to El Salvador have tested the waters with this annual conference They are also an anchor event that others can build around. For example, this is a HUGE week for @My First Bitcoin We are community-funded with significant budget restrictions, add in visa restrictions and much of our staff do not get the opportunity to travel. But this week the world comes to us and we are taking advantage to show off our proof-of-work TODAY: we have a Bitcoin Diploma graduation with 150 students where YOU can verify their knowledge; in the evening we have a bitcoin board game night (and also classes in a nearby cafe) TOMORROW: we are hosting a Bitcoin Educators Unconference FRIDAY: @Adopting Bitcoin begins, where we will have 9 different people from the team presenting & teaching, some of them various times This is Bitcoin Week in Bitcoin Country LFG!

Bitcoin doesn't have a president and neither do I (this is always true and doesn't change with election results)

this system can not be reformed, it must be replaced and it won't replace itself, we need to build something better everything else is a distraction

THE PROBLEM WITH VOTING Or, How to cede your power in one easy step ---- There is tremendous energy wasted on electoral politics. At best it is a distraction, at worst it serves to suffocate any alternative. To clarify, this isn’t an attack on voting per se, it’s an attack on what large scale political elections in the United States have become. We are beaten over the head our entire life with the notion that change begins at the ballot box. That’s false. The reality of change is that it’s uncomfortable. Voting will never yield substantive change because it is designed to prohibit the very discomfort which is a necessary prerequisite to substantive change. In the civil rights movement blacks that sat at segregated lunch counters did not wait for an election to create change — and that’s exactly why they were successful. When we look back, we think of those sit-ins as righteous and assume they were popular. They weren’t. Forcing change never will be. Lunch counter sit-ins were effective because they disrupted business as usual and forced people to look at what many would have preferred to avoid. Change happens when the discomfort of its success is less than the discomfort of the present. That means that the push to create a better future will almost always be unpopular in the present. The great tragedy of voting is that it tricks us into believing we can have progress and comfort. ‘Voting is the most important thing you can do,’ they say. Another lie. That attitude encourages us to neglect our real power, which is our everyday life. When we are told that voting is most important, by default that means all else is less so. It sends an unconscious message that we can neglect other avenues of change and minimizes their appeal. Voting takes away the burden of responsibility. You did your part, it tells you, you voted for someone to make decisions on your behalf. It allows us to see injustice in the world and think it’s not our role to change it; or worse it allows us to become blind to it completely. We have arrived at the present because of voting. If we want to stay on this path, then voting will keep us here. If we want to make a substantive divergence, then voting will never take us there. When you vote you are doing so twice, once for the candidate on your ballot and again for the system that placed them there. We tend to think of elections in negative terms. We vote against people and causes as much as we vote for them. We are always trying to avoid pain and bad consequences. But it cannot just be about slowing the bad, it has to be about speeding the good. Our power is not which politician you vote for, it’s what you do every day. It’s how you treat people, it’s where you spend your money, it’s what you do for work, it’s what you eat; it’s who you are. The root of the problem is the concentration of power. Voting for president represents an entrenchment of that imbalance. The system encourages behavior that makes it more likely for certain traits to emerge. For example, the candidate that raises the most money is overwhelmingly likely to win and the candidate with the most money most often is the one that large monied interests prefer. At each rung up the ladder of political power these systemic biases that favor certain behaviors over others become stronger. Still, there are always exceptions and it is possible to elect a candidate that doesn’t fit this broad mold, but once in office they would be an island and have to choose between acquiescing to the dominant system in which they exist or being ineffective. Voting isn’t necessarily bad. We can delegate others to take charge in areas they understand better than us. We should listen to expert advice. In the ideal, the experts would inform rather than dictate and we would be capable of using that information to make our best individual choices. This would require critical thinking skills, the ability to recognize our own shortfalls where we most need to default to experts and empathy for others to avoid a tragedy of the commons. In our current state we are not capable of this — but strengthening the status quo by voting makes us even less so. Political parties act as tribes which make us less able to recognize our shortfalls, less open to admit mistakes and has tarnished the neutrality of experts. It also makes us less capable of critical thought as we don’t use that muscle much in a system which tells us to let others decide on our behalf. Power will always exist, but it doesn’t have to be so concentrated. Our present system is top-down, it could be bottom-up. This is an ideal and one that won’t come tomorrow. But the longer we hold onto the notion that a better world will ever come from the ballot box the farther away that future becomes. The goal isn’t to burn down this system, it’s to make it irrelevant.

I will not be voting for US president next month this is why: https://john-dennehy.medium.com/the-problem-with-voting-5460bd1f1fac

Independent Bitcoin education is the gateway drug to a better society

'We need to create a robust, decentralized, global network of Bitcoin educators and defend their independence at all costs' It was an honor to represent @My First Bitcoin at the 2024 Grassroots Summit in Nashville, organized by @HRF at @Bitcoin Park

I took this photo three years ago today: an anti-bitcoin mob destroyed a Bitcoin ATM downtown before setting it on fire Sept 15th is independence day in El Salvador. In 2021 this was 8 days after Bitcoin became legal tender and there was plenty of local opposition. I spent all day with a couple of thousand people--to this day the largest protest I have seen in El Salvador. They spray painted walls, blocked traffic and chanted slogans. Finally, once downtown, the crowd destroyed and burned one of the new Bitcoin ATMs I was still pretty new to the country and still trying to understand how people felt about Bitcoin to discover the best approach for @My First Bitcoin The broad conclusion was that almost no one opposed to Bitcoin actually knew anything about it I can't imagine this happening today. There is so much farther to go, but we've already come a long way

23 years ago, the world changed. My world changed. I was away starting my second year at university, but grew up in New York and just two weeks prior was at an internship close enough to the World Trade Center that I ate lunch in the plaza at its base some days. My father still worked in the neighborhood. My uncle, a police officer, was in the towers helping people evacuate that morning--though I didn't know that on Sept 11th. They were both okay, though I didn't know that on Sept 11th either. The phones networks were all down for hours after the attacks. They were overloaded and crashed, though I didn't know that reason at the time either. The only thing I did know that day, for the first time in my young life, was that there was something terribly wrong with the world. I woke up a typical, oblivious 19 year old and when I did go to sleep--the next day--I was a changed person. I was an activist. The first steps were identifying the problem--the concentration of power with too few, leaving too many to feel disenfranchised and disempowered, which is a recipe for a dark future. Within days of the attack I had, along with friends, formed an activist organization. We started to organize teach-ins and protests. I was drawn to movements that didn't ask permission, and thus started a multi-year journey of arrests and state intimidation. You're not really free, that's an illusion. You're free so long as you don't challenge the status quo--and asking for permission to protest does NOT challenge the status quo. The first arrest--of 14--was at an IMF protest a few months later. Some things have changed a lot in the 23 years since, but that same core problem still exists, nay has gotten worse: we do not control our own future. The one thing that has changed for me is I'm no longer trying to slow the bad, but rather am now trying to speed the good. Three years ago I founded @MyfirstBitcoin_ and moved to El Salvador. One year ago my first son was born. Today, I'm as confident as ever that we can create something better.

Three years ago, on Sept 7, 2021, I woke up in San Salvador. Bitcoin would become legal tender in El Salvador that day, becoming the first nation in the world to do so I was a journalist so I woke up before dawn, traveled around the city taking photos, getting quotes and filed my first story by 9:00am from a protest downtown--for Al Jazeera and soon after for BBC The law had some opposition, this was months before the gang crackdown, and heavily armed military guarded the brand new Bitcoin ATMs It would be the last time I would ever work as a journalist. I would soon be too invested in the success of Bitcoin (education) in El Salvador that I decided that I could no longer be impartial and therefore should no longer be a journalist That evening I celebrated in Bitcoin Beach I remember September 7, 2021 like it was yesterday. It's incredible to think of how much has changed since then There is a long way to go, but the progress already made is inspiring Happy birthday #BitcoinCountry! 🎉🎉🎉

I've been using Nostr more lately it's a significant upgrade from early 2023 when I first signed up, there is still some lag, but the progress is clear I'm here for two reasons: first, censorship resistance and I'm more specificly on Nostr due to social proof plenty of people whose intelect and opinions I trust are on here it's striking to me that nearly everyone I know seeking decentralized social media are going to Nostr and almost zero going anywhere else. why is that? is it mostly the later--choosing Nostr because others before you did? or is it mostly the former--chosing Nostr because it has better censorship resistance compared to other decentralized social media? Third option is just because Nostr has embraced Bitcoin more and my social circle is mostly bitcoiners. curious about how Nostr came to dominate my social circle. why did you join Nostr and not a different alternative? social proof? better censorship resistance? zaps and other cool features? other?