If you find yourself a member of the Twitter-verse, or the occasional watcher of financial guru programming on CNBC, Bloomberg, Et Al, you’ve undoubtedly bumped into the hornets nest that is the eerily laser-eyed, HFSP shouting, Bitcoin Twitter (not crypto Twitter).
Who are these maniacs and what is the logical through line that links a Black Labrador with a Flag Theory Professing Russian Snowboarder and a 3D printer named F*ck You Greg?
Welcome to the primordial soup that is a generational paradigm shift.
You are peering into the source code that will one day be the new operating system of the world. This digital emerging market of Bitcoin oriented ideas is rapidly coalescing, just as interstellar dust might spin on itself for millennia before orbiting around an obvious elliptical path.
Prior world operating systems (hunting and gathering, feudalism, mercantilism, the industrial revolution) emerged in fits and starts, trapped within borders, and cultural identity, yet the Bitcoin Operating System, facilitated by a world that has been globalizing for the better part of half a century, and with near uniform technological adoption, emerges far more completely across the planet.
It would be an error to call the Bitcoin community some fringe ideology, formed haphazard out of a few cypherpunks or deep web surfers, but rather this community are the early adopters of a world operating system that better meets the material and spiritual needs of humanity. Our task, by meme or essay alike, is to discover the many ways in which we can serve humanity.
What can be shared between a Black Labrador, a Flag Theory Professing Russian Snowboarder, and a 3D printer named F*ck You Greg? All of them are striving to live on the Bitcoin Operating System, in rejection of the old, fiat world.
A Rejection of the Fiat World
You will hear Bitcoiners talking fiat this, and fiat that, and you are curious about the community obsession with Italian automobiles and modern monetary theory (it’s all about ‘making’ money detractors will say).
A (if not the) founding principle of the Bitcoin community, is an aversion to outside manipulation and cheap rule, or bureaucracy.
One sentiment shared amongst Bitcoiners is a rejection of kings and masters, the rejection of all things fiat, or rule implemented by decree or order.
Fiat is the embodiment of all things ephemeral, easily changing, lacking in principle or immortality and easily swayed by influence, central control, or power. It is a culture that eternally floats in the ether (pun intended), lacking any hard bedrock from which to build upon. Bitcoiners are inherently builders, not mere moneymakers.
The consequences of this ephemeral, fiat world emerge when you ask yourself, in my day to day life, are my needs being met by things based in wisdom, solid ground, and principles which withstand the test of time?, or have they devolved to cheap, fast, and entirely non-sustaining solutions? Am I building on bedrock, or on sand?
Fiat Food
For a complex technological protocol, it should seem strange that many Bitcoiners are ranchers, homesteaders, or farmers. Yet these individuals inherently understand the value of Bitcoin.
They have watched the food industry default to the lowest common denominator, whether it is the consolidation of the chicken industry into mega pens that fatten up hens at an astonishing rate, feeding candy byproduct to cows to fatten them up pre-slaughter, or the topsoil annihilating farming practices that have leeched nutrients and demanded massive injections of chemicals into the ground each sowing season.
For shoppers in a fiat food world, we have watched the center aisles of our grocery stores convert to similar varieties of cheap carbohydrates, processed seed oils, and salts. We’ve watched our meat degrade (and become actively disincentivized by those pushing a soy/veggie only, fiat future). Fiat food has prioritized the corporate centralization of production, speed to market, and consumption based on immediate mouth feel of salt, crunch and sweet, not nutrient density.
Savory and fats have been all but abandoned in a fiat world.
Bitcoiners have felt this creeping degradation and have rejected fiat food in favor of personal responsibility and health. You will find Bitcoiners on homesteads, ranches, in the gym (lifting heavy), practicing low carbohydrate, keto or carnivore diets, and often rejecting alcohol entirely in the name of personal health and happiness. The flight from fiat food, has meant a pull towards personal health, sustainable agriculture, and inevitably regenerative production practices.
Fiat Intimacy
What do love, marriage, sex and kids have to do with digital hard money secured by the world’s most powerful computer network?
Disposable intimacy has been a hallmark of the Millennial coming of age story. With the advent of the internet, came the online dating industry, followed by the mobile revolution and dating apps like Grindr, Tinder, Bumble, Hinge. Online pornography became omnipresent, both on sites dedicated to it, as well as the social media ecosystem (the Twitters and Tik Toks of the world, amongst others).
Even the mundane selfie or gym photo has become a practice in self-sexualization, for mere appearance and immediate consumption by the eyes.
Everywhere you click, if you are not met with an occasional nude, you’ll be met with a sexualized selfie of someone participating in an otherwise mundane (but now fabulous and romantic) task: hiking, shopping, sitting by the pool. The unexpected consequence of accessible sex and love by algorithm is the rise in sexlessness and virginity amongst Millennials and Gen Z. Everyone becomes a disposable image, no longer a complex individual.
Never before has there been such easy access to your wildest sexual fantasies and deviancies, yet the longitudinal research is showing fewer people are getting laid today. Fiat love is a practice in mere desire and consumption, lacking in consummation, trust, passion, and most importantly, love.
Bitcoiners are no puritans, but inherently reject that which is cheap, easily shifting, lacking in depth or wisdom. The present disposable culture of app and algorithm love and dating is pure fiat, meant to get you off, not carry you onward.
The flight to ‘traditional’ values, marriage, children, and family, is a return to relationships in balance with nature. Wherever you look, you will see Bitcoiners with their spouses and their children, practicing the wisdom of their parents and grandparents, not as a form of social control, but as a form of stability and emergent joy in life.
In the same way the heartbeat of the Bitcoin protocol births a new block every ~10 minutes, the Bitcoiner attitude towards love trends to that which is stable and fulfilling, not immediately gratifying. We are decidedly playing the long game in a world that demands we move more rapidly.
So it goes…
The examples continue, whether it’s a culture of fiat construction in mega city apartment blocks, or the dull cookie cutter suburbs with matching roofs, the culture of fiat journalism, feeding only the immediate political opinion and not the facts, the culture of fiat government, a study all it’s own.
The rejection of the fiat world is a return to base and immortal human needs over simple wants.
Never before has there been an innovation that so neatly embraced both the power of technology and the wisdom of the ancients, that all things must operate in balance, that decentralization is a robust strength, that you must work for what you desire.
It is not that Bitcoiners are hoping to recreate the world in their own image, but rather, Bitcoiners are hoping to come into greater alignment with the world and what it means to be fully human, having become estranged from it in our modern era.
Bitcoin as a protocol and network re-ground us in the belief that stability and regularity exist. The rules count for everyone, and in a world where currencies are actively debased, the media has become a purely ideological tool, and our so called ‘leaders’ provoke active division in communities, the human desire for peace and justice via the Bitcoin Operating System cries out even louder.
This is the hard money world Bitcoiners are building, and this is what a Snowboarding Russian, a Black Labrador, and a 3D Printer named F*ck You Greg have to do with each other.
