My new signature #zap is 84 sats. Here’s why: 84 is the two-digit abbreviation for 1984. It’s the year Apple under its founder Steve Jobs released the first Mac and started a revolution in personal computing. They celebrated this with a legendary Super Bowl ad created by the agency Chiat/Day and directed by Ridley Scott. It directly referenced the George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, depicting a dystopian future world where a totalitarian figure known as Big Brother has absolute power over the population, controlling their behavior and warping their sense of reality, and one person singlehandely challenging the status quo. In the almost 40 years since and under new leadership, Apple has transformed itself into everything it originally stood against, and now holds innovators and digital pioneers hostage, extorts value from them, and actively stands in the path of the decentralized revolution they know is coming, are powerless to stop, yet hope they can delay because it threatens their power. The other reason I chose 84 is because it is a multiple of 21, a reference to the maximum supply of 21 million bitcoin that will ever exist by the time the final block is mined more than a century from now. 4x21 also symbolizes the block halving, whereby the supply of new bitcoin is reduced by 50% every four years. The time between each halving is a period historically marked by a gradual rise then sudden explosion in both the fiat-denominated value of the asset and the attention it attracts, followed by an eventual and lengthy collapse of both. During these times, we are given the opportunity to build new technology, grow our community, and see who stays for the next cycle, and who only showed up for what they thought was easy money. This time around, we built #nostr, allowing us to begin to unshackle ourselves from abusive relationships with all-seeing, controlling, and corrupt social media and technology giants, and to use #bitcoin as the built-in mechanism by which we reward our fellow users for the value of the content they share. We are not selling digital goods, as Apple says. We are sharing digital good. They don’t understand this yet, and they may never, but in the end, it won’t matter, because in both nostr and bitcoin, we’ve discovered something that can’t be stopped, and will only become stronger as it is attacked. Apps will come and go, but protocols are here to say. I am confident that 116 years into the future, bitcoin will still exist, but Apple most likely will not.

We may have a long way to go to find the freedom we are seeking, but this is only the beginning. We are unstoppable. “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” — George Orwell “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” — Steve Jobs