good discussion with this stuff, I think it should be acknowledged and understood better if you want anyone to come along with you down the rabbit hole. for me, it was the insanity of chaotic protests during summer of 2020 in the US, and I saw that the side I was on was recklessly programming me. I was horrified to discover that I allowed myself to be programmed. So when I started to untangle that mess, I wanted to know if there was anything secure to trust or believe or build a life off of. Wrote about this a little for citadel21. love to talk about it.

When 40% of all dollars ever created were printed in 2020-2021

I just started asking…what is money?

There were a lot of little ah-ha moments in between, but the basic order of milestones was: 9/11 ---> Conspiracy theories about the Rothschild family involvement ---> History of Rothschild family and central banking ---> Bitcoin

The rabbit hole for me was the 2007 Ron Paul Revolution. I was already vaguely libertarian, but that's when I started reading political philosophy and economic theory. By the time Bitcoin came around, my concerns were rooted in economic theory.

Basically, I was skeptical of the claim that it was truly scarce. I got that Bitcoin specifically had a limited supply, but there's no reason any number of other identical cryptocurrencies couldn't be created.

I guess my orange pill "moment" was seeing Bitcoin firmly establish itself and develop network effects.

My story was more gradual and not very interesting, but I was completely unaware of the hackgate scandal. Thanks for posting the links.

Hayek’s Road to Serfdom

It all started when a 10 year old boy got his first PC, an amiga 500, and it turned out that having the freedom to write native applications for this system required more than a laborer's month of wages. The manuals were AUD$600 or so, and the compiler some $800 or more.

I thus was only able to play and learn how to do things with my own computer if I used Micro$oft's crappy amiga basic, which was less powerful than the version on my father's first PC, a TRS-80 Color Computer. The language had ZERO support for writing GUIs and very crappy limited input and only barely faster than CPU writting to the display, meanwhile I'm watching all these amiga demos on the pirate games and apps I got from friends (who mostly got them directly or indirectly from BBS's)

The lesson I learned in this: Technology is encumbered by unfair and unreasonable limitations that exclude a huge number of people from ever being able to learn how to use them.

If you think through the implications of that you see that of course I am furious at the entire system of copyright and licensure, and most especially the middle/upper class elitism.

By the time the first precursor to GCC appeared, DICE, as it was called, I was already too busy being a teenager. I did get to play with Macro68 assembler, i forget what it was called, but the premiere 3D rendering app for Amiga, and a friend had the RKM for AmigaOS 1.3. So I did get to play a bit, opening screens, and the open source started to open up with version 2.0 and they invented the RPC encoding precursor tag system, and an early form of hypertext called AmigaGuide.

My entire 20s and 30s I basically had given up on being in this industry ever, until 2013, when Bitcoin gave me the hope of a parallel economy where such asymmetries were eliminated.

I will live to see it, and I will help make it happen. And I know that there is hundreds and thousands of you people out there who will be working in concert without a conductor.

Libertarianism was my rabbit hole.

The moment I read this rule in the Monopoly rule book it changed my perspective on money.

The Bank never “goes broke.” If the Bank runs out of money, the Banker issues IOUs for whatever amounts are required by writing the amount on a piece of paper. IOUs can be exchanged for cash whenever cash is available.