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As I was scrolling through my timeline, I saw a guy I’d given the Orange Pill a while back. He was addicted to drugs and gambling at the time. He heard me preach about Bitcoin and got hooked with almost religious fervor.
Then, under the influence of a small amount of the truth of the Orange Pill, the sunlight of nature, the bitter reality, and the sweet high of Orange Enlightenment, his life changed completely. He overcame his drug and gambling addictions and became a Bitcoin Maximalist.
This makes perfect sense, and it speaks to the larger role Bitcoin plays in society than just being the perfect money.
Here’s the guy’s tweet: I’ve highlighted the relevant parts, so make sure you follow along:
Private B
Bitcoin
“Who or what made me take the Orange Pill? It was a combination of gambling, @maxkeiser and drugs. Let me explain.”
First it was gambling. I used to be a professional online poker player. The US government banned it in 2011 and took that right away from me. Soon after, there was talk on the 2+2 poker forums about a new, uncensored currency that could potentially get around the US gambling ban.
Enter @MaxKeiser circa 2013. Back when Bitcoin was at $100, he was on a podcast I watched called London Reel.
Max was a huge success, and he explained the benefits of Bitcoin very eloquently.
Silk Road has gained a critical mass of Bitcoin users.
This is true of all new technologies. Drugs, gambling and porn are gateways to the future. For example, the video cassette owed its initial success to porn. The same goes for the early introduction of the home computer. When I lived in France in the early 90s, I remember that France had Minitel, the world’s first large-scale online portal, before America took over with the World Wide Web.
Minitel was introduced in 1980. So what happened? Why didn’t France scrap it? Yet another French idea that went out of fashion because the French capital market is rotten cheese. There is no equivalent of NASDAQ in France.
But Minitel was initially popular with the sex industry: I remember seeing stickers on phone booths with sex workers’ Minitel numbers, and the prostitutes of the Boulevard Saint-Denis and Boulevard Pigalle were initially upset by the sudden appearance of amateur competition, but they quickly embraced the new technology.
Heck, even the Bible contains a titillating story about a naked Adam being gaslighted by a naked Eve with an apple.
Flashcut: Steve Jobs and his Apple smartphone, and the rise of the mobile internet.
FLASHCUT: Pornhub takes a huge percentage of internet traffic.
Now, the rise of AI and deepfake porn seems unstoppable and will require a huge amount of energy.
The reason Bitcoin has such a high hash rate is because it is fighting AI and porn in a global energy battle.
Look, the big three vices – gambling, drugs and porn – are guaranteed money makers and are publicly traded companies with huge market capitalizations on global stock markets. A new app that pairs and matches faces with naked bodies is sure to make a ton of money. Still dreaming of being a kindergarten teacher? With AI, you can find your grade school yearbook photo and kick off a steamy simulated affair with a tricycle and a five-cent box of chocolate milk.
I think AI is the demon dog, the Ring-Ding, the Twinkie, the Yodel of childish intimate fantasies. AI will eradicate the incel plague. Maybe AI will stop all those mass shootings by frustrated incels, at least that’s what these fools think.
On the other side we have our hero: Bitcoin.
This is a battle between AI and Bitcoin for energy dominance. That’s why Bitcoin has a high hash rate. We have to win the energy race with AI and farts.
We believe we can win. Bitcoin reflects a better version of ourselves and inspires us to be better people. This is Satoshi’s hope.
Unless you’re born irredeemably bad, then the Bitcoin protocol will bring out your worst qualities, like the witch in Snow White gazing into the mirror and asking “Who is the fairest of them all?” only for the mirror to reply “Not you.”
The witch goes mad and tries to kill a beautiful woman in a tight skirt wandering the forest, but this backfires and karma comes back to haunt her.
This is what Bitcoin does: kicking the hell out of karmically harmonic circles.
The spirit of Bitcoin. The spirit of Karma.
Bitcoin looks back at us from a perfect, divine angle. Not a mirror image, but something deeper and sharper. Like a surgeon cutting into our souls.
A few years ago, Stacey and I were wandering through a museum in Mexico City. There was an exhibition in the lobby of the Central Bank, and we came across the most amazing artwork I’d ever seen in a museum, an installation that, for me at least, was a personal epiphany.
What I saw were dolls placed on top of a staircase leading down to the floor below.
The doll had a mirror in front of it, and it was on the top step, facing one way, but as it went down, or was pulled down, it transformed into something, sometimes something strange.
The regular doll on the top row might turn into a pineapple, or an aardvark with a bow tie.
What was going on? My interpretation is that during life and after death, we, the dolls on the stairs, get closer to and know who we really are. Who we really have been all this time. The act is never-ending. The total of 60,000 decisions we make every day continue after birth.
The journey of life begins, and we are ignorant of ourselves. Life goes on. We begin to know ourselves. This is painful, so we adopt a persona to hide who we are. But personas are like paint that fades. We put on another mask. We drop the pretensions. We face life bravely, as we are. But it is still painful. We call it wisdom.
And then death. And the journey of the self continues. We are on a continuum. The illusion of life and death disappears. The artifact of time is discarded in favor of what is there. We see the cyclical nature of things, the fractalization of everything.
William Blake understands this.
“Seeing the world in a grain of sand
And heaven among wildflowers,
Infinity in the palm of your hand
And in an hour comes eternity.”
On the other hand, TS Eliot is a bit of a disappointment.
“I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust.”
Bitcoin is exactly this. Bitcoin accelerates the process of self-awareness on an individual level, leading us to the Bitcoin Singularity, which will soon be followed by a society-wide revelation.
You can be William Blake and, as Stacey Herbert puts it, relentlessly optimistic, or you can be the Brits and shed a tear in a country pub while lambasting Manchester United all day long, because, by the way, the Brits will never understand Bitcoin.
For Sam Bankman-Fried, Bitcoin accelerated his sleazy, not-so-sexy life of sexual indecency and financial crime, realizing an entire career of theft and self-abasement in the space of just a few years.
For those who are morally in tune with the universe, Bitcoin offers a sense of instant nirvana. Michael Saylor is someone who has spent his entire career waiting for Bitcoin to come along so he could realise his dream of engineering a better future, and it has.
The man in my timeline, the man I gave the orange pill to, is walking down the stairs to the mirror and becoming his true self, a process that continues even after death.
With the world burning, the Orange Pill is more important than ever.
We call it GIABO (Global Uprising Against Banker Occupation).
It started with Occupy Wall Street and now in Argentina we have Javier Millay, who is a Bitcoin advocate, a follower of Hayek and a lover of Austrian economics. This is a political backlash against central bankers and GIABO is gaining momentum. We saw a vigil at the Argentine Central Bank during Millay’s inauguration. He wants to euthanize the central bank.
We are on the threshold of Renaissance 2.0.
This will be brought about by Bitcoin.
Take a look in the mirror and you’ll see what I mean.
This article was published by Bitcoin Magazine “The Inscription Problem”. Click here here Get a yearly Bitcoin Magazine subscription.
