The lazy will always consider the efforts of the thorough to be excessive.

Your physique is a public ledger. The results of your decisions surrounding exercise and diet are publicly displayed through your physique. Anyone you encounter, whether consciously or not, immediately audits the ledger you present. Therefore your discipline, work ethic and consistency - or lack thereof - are all a matter of public record. Your physique is a representation of the standards you hold yourself to. Bitcoin uses Proof of Work to verify transactions and secure its network. Men use it to assess one another’s threat level or the value of a partnership with them. Women use it to identify potential partners, relying on their ability to determine which men could keep them safe for survival for nearly all of human history. We’ve witnessed the digitization of much of the analog world in our lifetimes. Now the digital transformation of money is unfolding in front of us. Despite more and more of our lives taking place online, no one is impressed by a grown man’s virtual avatar. Your social media presence evaporates when compared to the physical presence you exhibit when around other people. When you enter a room, your follower count becomes irrelevant. In the physical world, a man with a powerful build that no one knows commands more respect and admiration than a weak and frail man with a massive online following. Wealth has always been considered an equalizer in this arena. Smaller, weaker men can leapfrog their larger, stronger counterparts by measure of social status by accumulating vast sums of money. However, their power is abstract and for them to maintain it relies on stronger, more violent men cooperating with and adhering to social norms. What’s even more important than the respect a powerful physique garners from others is the self-respect it fosters in the man who built it. Attention from women is nice, but it pales in comparison to walking around in a body you’ve constructed with your own effort and will. While the results of your work draw parallels to a public blockchain, the details of it lie only within your mind. Only you know the full extent of the work that went into your physique. Whether you’re proud of yourself or not, you live with the understanding that you’re responsible for what you look like. Bitcoiners experience a level of sovereignty that fiat maxis will never have access to. Non-holders are barred from the freedom derived from immutable money. But sovereign money doesn’t equate to freedom across the board. You can be a wealthy Bitcoiner and still feel like a slave to an unhealthy lifestyle. You can create financial freedom for yourself and still feel miserable in your own body. You can be disciplined in your spending habits, but not have the strength to complete a single pull up. Even if your desire for materialism and luxury has softened along your Bitcoin journey, you can still be plagued by the softness of a mediocre body. Wealth doesn’t fix gluttony. It doesn’t fix laziness. It doesn’t repair a damaged relationship with food or an aversion to training hard. But it does give you the freedom to improve yourself. For many of us, Bitcoin demonstrates how a singularly focused man can create immense value for himself when deploying a deliberate, impassioned plan. It proves that diversification is for those who lack conviction in their strategy. Once we reach a BTC target, the energy we used to do so can be applied towards building a physique we are truly proud to reside in. There is no sovereignty without discipline and sacrifice. There is no freedom without self-control.

Exercise science degrees and personal training certifications are proof of stake. Looking like a brick shit house and benching 3 plates for reps is proof of work. Nobody cares about your degree if you keep your shirt on in the pool.

The politics the public sees is akin to pro wrestling. Everyone involved already knows who’s going to win and what moves they’re going to use to do so. It’s just a matter of putting on a good show for the people watching. The drama the public feels in waiting for the results to play out is all manufactured. They need you to feel it in order to maintain the illusion that any of it is real.

Sunrise at Port Newark, NJ.

Can the only piece of property I truly own be non-tangible? The concept of digital tangibility has not been established yet, but feels like it’s in its nascent stages for me, personally. When the bulk of human interaction and experience exists online, will we still consider it non-tangible? Bitcoin feels more real than nearly anything else in my life at the moment.

GM, Nostr.

There is no greater hubris in Bitcoin as attempting to speak for Satoshi. This seems to occur much more frequently on forks rather than Bitcoin itself, unsurprisingly. Satoshi’s work speaks for itself.

This year I’ve learned that if people unknowingly invest in a company that builds tools to enslave humanity, they would rather find a way to justify their position than to stop supporting them.

Looking forward to seeing a MAHA seal of approval on my groceries soon.

Proof of Work. Little tour of the yard.

Just deactivated Instagram. I had no posts on there and used it primarily as a way to receive and respond to memes and reels my girlfriend sends me. Not the first time I’ve deactivated it and can’t guarantee I won’t revisit it, but after spending just a bit of time on Nostr, Instagram felt like pure intellectual poison. Digitally social heroin. Sometimes we don’t know how bad something makes us feel until we encounter a moment of relief from it. Once the clarity of that moment sets in, we can’t unsee it.

Bitcoin is a decentralized, open-sourced, fairly-distributed, censorship-resistant, highly-secured, energy-born, immutable, borderless, trustless, permissionless, and unprecedented monetary system intentionally designed and engineered to be immune to debasement.

After decades of almost exclusively writing fiction, my first year of non-fiction work has revealed the distinction between the two. Since my first or second novel, I have always kept the words FUCK THE READER within clear view of my work station. This cue has been my primary compass for well over a decade. What began as a simple reminder to trust my own intuition as a writer and not worry myself about how my words are interpreted by others has evolved into my own literary philosophy. My philosophy of FUCK THE READER will likely get its own post now that I have introduced it here, but for the sake of this post’s intention I’ll round it off by saying that it also reminds me to assume my readers are intelligent and intuitive enough to pick up on all the unsaid parts that compose a well written story. I also subscribe to Hemingway’s Iceberg Philosophy which claims what makes a book good is like the underwater part of an iceberg - the reader doesn’t know for certain what lies beneath, but rather senses there is more than what’s being said. My favorite stories are the ones that provide this underlying sense of “more” throughout the book and, in the end, ascertain the reader’s intuition in a hyper-realistic manner. All that being said, FUCK THE READER is about *trusting* the reader to experience this instead of spoon feeding them as if they are too stupid to tap into the underwater parts of the story. What I have noticed after spending the last couple years writing mostly about Bitcoin and the subjects its understanding necessitates is that I deeply care about my reader in a way that defies my philosophy around fiction. The function of non-fiction is to teach readers. While writing, I find myself desperate to explain and even spoon-feed my reader, seeking any way I can to ensure the words are being understood. Metaphor after metaphor, I attempt to distill what feels like a storm of knowledge in my mind into concise paragraphs that readers will not only follow, but be interested in. And every time I finish, I feel I have either failed to adequately convey my thoughts or that I’ve written beyond the scope of each point I’m trying to make and anyone who reads it will feel lost and ultimately give up, slam the book closed, throw it in a firing barrel, douse it in lighter fluid and ignite it while laughing maniacally in youthful academic defiance at my attempt to teach them something. Which tells me, as a writer, that I’m probably doing pretty well overall. So. Now that I’ve made the distinction, it’s likely time to consider if I’m totally wrong about it and FUCK THE READER applies to non-fiction as well. I imagine, as with most things, a nice blend of both is the solution. Caring, but not caring too much. Playing it cool - the exact opposite of how the situation makes me feel. Will consider.

Good morning, Nostr. Did I do it right?

My first day on Nostr feels similar to my last day on X. Admittedly, I didn’t have many followers there so censorship never felt like an issue for me. I’m not exactly sure why I’m here now. Or why I chose today to migrate. I’ve heard about Nostr for long enough to develop a sense of manifest destiny about it. I’m always thinking about how to improve my sovereignty. Carving out a very small, but sovereign part of the internet for myself to make a home for my prose seemed like a good idea.

Ironically, Trump’s shitcoin has much more in common with the US dollar than it does with Bitcoin.