My Nostr bio says "progressive bitcoiner." I've taken some heat for it and been called the usual toxic names. I don't mind, but I'd like to explain myself a bit more. Someone once said there's bitcoin, and then there are bitcoiners. Bitcoiners are a very diverse group, and they arrive for all sorts of reasons, because bitcoin works like a mirror: whoever looks into it finds reflected back whatever they were looking for. I consider this a strength, not a defect. If you're a libertarian, you see money separated from the state: resistant to seizure and censorship, permissionless, decentralized, transparent, the ground for individual sovereignty. If you follow Austrian economics, you see sound money with its 21 million hard cap, and a built-in incentive toward low time preference. If you're an investor, you see digital gold, number-go-up, a hedge against inflation, portfolio diversification. If you're a progressive, you see a way for marginalized communities to build generational wealth, for women to keep savings out of an abusive partner's reach, for people living under totalitarian regimes to hold money nobody can confiscate, or an incentive to build renewable energy capacity in poor regions through mining. And so on. As I've written many times, bitcoin is for everybody, and it's in everybody's interest to see it adopted by all sorts of people, as long as they champion bitcoin for what it is, and nobody tries to bend the protocol to fit their own worldview or value system (Hello, Luke!) So why signal "progressive" here on Nostr, when it provokes such nasty reactions? (I've been told several times that I should stay away from bitcoin.) Because a label, even though it puts you in a box that never quite fits, still works as a signaling device: it lets other people who hold progressive values know that there are others like them in bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't care who you are, but other bitcoiners do. It's important that progressives point to real examples of bitcoin serving progressive ends, because people come to bitcoin through language and stories that resonate with them, not through someone else's. My hope is that the broader bitcoin community makes room for progressive bitcoiners like me, and sees that while we may disagree on political ideology, social issues and economics, we all agree on one thing: bitcoin.