If I had the maximalist “everything sucks except for the thing that I own and use” mindset when I discovered Bitcoin I would have never touched Bitcoin.

Ideologies are great for as long as they are grounded in facts and serve an achievable goal Toxic bitcoin maximalism was mostly a reaction to the 2017 forks, to make sure that the original chain remains known as “Bitcoin” and promising tech like Lightning gets a chance to compete Almost a decade later, Bitcoin is less relevant for payments and the Lightning network is still a small-scale experiment. Other digital money networks emerged and took 40% of what used to be Bitcoin’s market. There used to be a time when everything was a reaction to Bitcoin or an attempt to improve Bitcoin’s design. Today we have projects that don’t care about Bitcoin at all and serve entirely different use cases. You can’t possibly live in complete ignorance like it’s still 2017 and a whole decade of market information doesn’t exist. Update your worldview, adapt to the new conditions. Understand that there are people who don’t give a shit about Bitcoin, but use other blockchains instead. Don’t be afraid of learning. Because if you are and you convince all your friends that ignorance is the way, that’s how Bitcoin keeps on losing market share and relevance. Adapt or die.

Zcash is private Bitcoin Litecoin is faster Bitcoin Kaspa is scalable Bitcoin Decred is governance Bitcoin Bitcoin Cash is big block Bitcoin Ethereum is smart contract Bitcoin Quantus is quantum resistant Bitcoin Monero is reactionary fungible Bitcoin “Bitcoin” is not just a ticker. “Bitcoin” is not just one network. Bitcoin is the name of a movement, the symbol of a revolution, and the ecash that actually changed the world.

I agree with “Bitcoin, not crypto” – with a twist! Crypto has historically referred to cryptology and cryptography. It should probably remain so. “Cryptocurrency” makes no sense without the existence of privacy. So instead, use “Bitcoin” to describe everything that resembles it: private Bitcoin, scalable Bitcoin, smart contract Bitcoin, proof of stake Bitcoin, quantum resistant Bitcoin. Why? Because Bitcoin is open source just like Linux. Also, Bitcoin is the only for of ecash (electronic cash) that succeeded in starting a revolution. Of course, every Bitcoin uses a different ticker and trades for a different amount of money. But the shared goal and use of blockchain-derives tech make them all Bitcoins. Of course, we could have had one Bitcoin that does everything. But the ossification culture has killed any chance of achieving the 21 million coin utopia. Instead, we have a Bitcoin for every new use case that branched out of Bitcoin due to deficient upgrading. And that’s just fine. Bitcoin. Not crypto.

It’s my 34th birthday, I’m sick in bed, haven’t been outside in 4 days, and I’ve never felt lonelier. At least my girlfriend drew this for me, but it might be the last one. I can’t even drink alcohol because I’m taking antibiotics. No cake or candles either. Good night!

Sometimes I feel like my podcast would be more successful if I didn’t post my pessimistic thoughts If I just claimed that everything is great, came up with a bullish spin to all the bad news, completely ignored the data that destroys narratives But then again, that’s not who I am 🤷🏻‍♂️ And if a bunch of people never get to listen to my awesome show because they don’t like my tweets, then so be it. This only makes my audience smarter.

The 3 bullish scenarios for Bitcoin: 1. JD Vance becomes US president and we get another 4-8 years of light regulations + building without fear of retribution from the left. 2. Gen alpha switches from collecting Fortnite skins to buying digital currency. 3. AI to AI settlements use BTC. It’s likely that the agents will choose to build their own high throughput payments network, with their own token. But in between trades, to avoid higher volatility, they will swap into BTC. Might be an issue is stablecoins get in the way.

Someone who started DCAing into bitcoin in October 2021 and never sold Hasn’t made any profits, didn’t beat inflation, wasn’t able to store any value Would be much better off DCAing into gold or the S&P500 Stop the store of value psyop. Bitcoin’s value proposition is freedom of transactions and unconfiscatable money. The price discovery is just a side effect.

For the first time ever, I am not convinced that Bitcoin will return to its previous all-time high The reason is simple: there is no bullish narrative Store of value/digital gold/reserve asset? It all imploded once institutions got cold feet because of quantum computing risks Freedom money? The project didn’t undergo any upgrades to scale better and receive better privacy. You can only get high throughput & anonymity on ruggable federations, mints & other centralized services. Unconfiscatable wealth? Not so long ago, we witnessed unironic conversations about freezing dust UTXOs. Some people also talk about freezing Satoshi’s coins in the post-quantum future. Both are dangerous precedents that threaten the network’s main value proposition. Permissionless money? There’s an ongoing debate about gatekeeping certain transaction types which an army of religious zealots describes as “spam”. Also, the BitVM builders are already frowned upon for bringing “shitcoin tech” to Bitcoin and filling the block space in unorthodox ways. One coin to rule them all? The current Bitcoin maintainers are against adding anything controversial to Bitcoin. CTV, CSFS, CAT, GSR, BIP300 will probably never happen for as long as there is one popular voice that opposes activation. Which only lends legitimacy to altcoins trying the tech. Beautiful stories about the noble and pure money system that fights against central banking? The Epstein files have effectively tainted the reputation of Bitcoin in the eyes of many normies. Biggest devs were under MIT’s paycheck, some folks even visited Epstein’s island in a time that was crucial for the project’s development. Reputations were destroyed, hopes were broken, new conspiracies emerged. The cyber hornet hivemind that brings peace, unity & laser eyes? The Bitcoin community has never been more divided and hostile – even to people who have been around for many years and brought significant contributions to the project. The purity tests have become so ridiculous that any sane person would purposely fail them. Retail grassroots adoption? People still remember FTX, BlockFi, Celsius, and the other failures of the previous cycle. Lots of money was lost, harsh lessons were learned, the likeliness of having these people embrace decentralized internet money is lower than ever. Hedge against inflation? Oh please, Tether has never been more popular world wide. To third world countries, USDT is the inflation hedge and the most desired medium of exchange. Even in the US the stablecoins are hotter than Bitcoin. The great power grid stabilizer? US miners are pivoting to AI because it pays better. Chinese ones are doing it too. Proof of Work mining is becoming less popular. The uncorrelated asset to protect you and your family from a total financial collapse? Oh please, Bitcoin trades like a tech stock. People invest in it because they hope it will one day fulfill its potential as a global digital cash. So when the stock market crashes, Bitcoin follows the trend. Will Bitcoin survive the reward halvings with empty blocks? Are people willing to pay $100 per transaction? There is still a looming uncertainty concerning these situations. Mostly because a bunch of loud gatekeepers shunned away all experiments that could turn into valuable use cases. Also remember: with the exception of last year’s bubble, every massive bull market has been precedes by a notable network upgrade. Bitcoin needs a new philosophy which embraces innovation in cryptography and computer science, nurtures experimentation & encourages builders to stick around. Arrogant close mindedness won’t work again this time.

Okay so a Satoshi-era wallet transferred 9k BTC to Coinbase Good for him, made a fortune just by being patient But the most important question is: why sell now? Did the OG whale lose faith in the project? Because if he still hoped Bitcoin was the future of money, he’d sell 100 for living expenses and keep the rest for another decade or so. Or maybe he’s dying and doesn’t have a good inheritance plan? Bottom line: when the guys who believed in bitcoin when the price was 0 are exiting, it’s never a good sign. These are the idealists who supported the project since its inception.

To everyone who is still here in spite of the bleeding markets: I salute you 🫡 It’s moments like these that differentiate true believers from tourists Better use the next 3 years to educate yourself about the tech you invested in & maybe build something meaningful.

Bear markets are the true conviction test.

There are useful idiots. There are paid shills. And then there’s @hodlonaut expressing opinions on BIP110 which he said he wouldn’t support but now promotes like it’s the second coming of Christ

How it started: let’s create sovereign money to liberate every person on the planet How it’s going: the humans don’t want it, let’s optimize the blockchains and L2s for AI agents

Anyone unironically supporting BIP444/110 is NGMI

A fork of Bitchat but it’s called bitch at

Quantum-resistant signatures are much larger in size than ECDSA Larger signatures -> more block space taken up by a single transaction -> higher transaction fees Hot take: a quantum upgrade for Bitcoin should be accompanied by a block size increase

Bitcoin won’t move forward until the spam lunatics leave and another UTXO fork onboards a lot of users Therefore, Bitcoin needs 2 hard forks to get back on track: – one that removes the loud non-technical LARPs (BIP110 is perfect) – one that welcomes all the frustrated builders, which creates the kind of competition that Core will take seriously Without these two, Bitcoin is stuck as an open source project. The problem isn’t technical, but cultural.

Emojis destroyed beautiful text-based emoticons such as >.< o(–_–)o ^_^ XD ^.^ X.X O.O UwU And I miss using these! Or even saying rotflmao instead of 😂

Left: Grok AI Right: my girlfriend on her iPad Same instructions, both of them were unaware of each other’s work and involvement in this experiment Which one do you prefer?