Covid lockdowns angered me while giving me time to read. Before that I was stacking sats without real psychopathic enjoyment.

Reckless money printing in 2020. I think this was a turning point for many.

Losing bitcoin IOUs to a cefi scam. Losing a lot of fiat to comply with certain regulations turned me Ancap / agorist and even more of a bitcoiner.

I am not radicalized. I am a sane human driven by logic and reason that refuses to go along with clown world.

The Bitcoin standard

GME. When I dug into the financial corruption after I'd looked into that saga. That was when I orange pilled, I want out of this corruption and BS.

I'm not going to bore you with the details, you can look them up for yourselves. But when you watch something like that play out in real time and the people who's job it is to enforce the law are either complicit or outright don't care. That's when you know you can't escape the playpen fence they made.

BTC is the wire cutters. The fence has a hole. All you gotta do is crawl through it.

relentless posts by @DarthCoin and of course a lot of reading, put me over the edge

Cypriot financial crisis in 2010-2013 when the Cypriot government imposed a one-time bank deposit levy on all uninsured deposits there. Didn't even have a bank account there, just really pissed me off. Then I knew it is gonna happen elsewhere, just a matter of time.

It started with Ron Paul. A tale as old as time. I heard about bitcoin very early on and was interested. Downloaded bitcoin with the intention of using it. Totally forgot about it until 2017. During this span of time I fell down the rabbit hole of Austrian economics. I was interested in bitcoin and crypto from 2017 on but didn't really dig in and connect the dots until 2020. In 2020 I started to see that bitcoin is the answer to so many issues I see in society. The money printing in response to Covid and the free time led to a deeper exploration. Learning the tools and doing my own research is what really orange pilled me. Seeing for myself how hard it would be to stop bitcoin and how resistant it is to censorship.

The other part of this was that during the covid years I renewed my focus on living with integrity and living my beliefs. IE, if i really believe the fiat system is at the core of the problems then why on earth am I NOT focusing on it. I began to see a lot of so called freedom lovers as hypocrites. I started to see myself that way. Bitcoin was one of many things that I changed in my personal life.

I was "radicalized" nearly a decade before bitcoin's invention by Atlas Shrugged.

Ron Paul "radicalized" me in 2007. Believing in Bitcoin was logically downstream of that.

Reality. Constant money give-a-way can't be the way.... Nice to have something to stick to that will potentially hold value better than others.. We know fiat wont.

Lol looking at my pension, savings and ETFs I was shilled back in 2015 not doing jack shit, I knew I had to find something else, I just didn't know what it was, the next year I found Bitcoin, then the following year shitcoins got rekt and by 18, I was radicalised AF

Seeing most of my childhood conspiracy theories turn into facts and a bunch of redacted documents.

Student Loans

That banks use fractional reserve what a scam

Freedom.

Being caught wholly unprepared for the 2007–2008 financial crisis and vowing to never let that happen again. Ending up living in a garage after being relatively OK before the crises, helped a lot.

I couldn't buy btc with my trump stimmy check until I called my bank.

Reading history. Espcecially about communism. Hearing from my grandparents how hyperinflation took all their savings. Seeing hyperinflation in other countries today. Seeing Collateral damage video from Iraq.

But also...since a child I had very fundamental relationship to truth, I got very angry at anyone I noticed lying.

inflation and the sale on Bitcoin back in December.

Learning about inflation and the federal reserves role in our current monetary system during 2020/21.

The thing that really triggered me was at the age of 18, my school introduced a social credit score system.

A psychopath egomaniac English teacher found my "disrespect" so problematic (not handing in assignments that were retarded and taught me nothing about the English language) he used this social credit score to attack me, openly refused to let me decide the book for a book report after asking the class group if they had a preference.

That was before he downgraded my score, leading to me completely abandoning my studies and by the end of the last semester, all my class results had fallen to D, with IT, mainly SQL, having a C, and I should note I got 99% on the SQL test.

The end result was I got an OP (tertiary entry score) of 15, which was still a high score, in the top 10%, but not enough for Computer Science, which required a 9, and after witnessing how little school had to do with education - this incident was just the cherry on top, I was at that point an avowed enemy of all human authority.

Let's just say that he couldn't have picked a better moment to make me realise that the education system was not about helping people learn, but shaping them into loyal servants of the system.

There was other things that all contributed together, and I was, as it was, taught a lot of things about the society we live in being corrupt and evil, via the Seventh Day Adventist church doctrines and stories, and my family were all misfits, and from day one I encountered the malice of people in the open prison they call school.

Atlas Shrugged in the late 90’s, TARP during the great financial meltdown of ‘08-‘09, Ron Paul in 2010, then learning more about the outrageous seizures of gold and the removal of silver from coinage (a single $0.25 Washington quarter from 1964 has a silver melt value of $4.09 today). That was pretty much everything I needed to know

Just the world and all the things in it, really. Simple.

Not radicalized. I'm simply a pragmatic person. If the tool makes sense and provides "value", I will make use of it to improve my life and the lives of those around me.

If something better comes along, I won't stick to the existing tool for ideological reasons.

RHR "radicalized" me to get on the mission and start building in the ecosystem.

Many, many things over the years. But especially in the last few years. Nowadays it seems like the mainstream point of view isn't just 50/50, but it's actively wrong on almost everything.

I have more reasons, but the above should be enough.

I asked one simple question... "What is money?"

That lead me down a path of learning more about history, economics, politics, geography, business, law and so on. All subjects I had little interest in previously.

The more I understood the more I felt like I could see through the BS. Everything is connected. Everything starts to make more sense.

After diving into economics and going to business school. This shit didn't make any f*cking sense. Their equations and models just don't add up.

This NPR episode about buying lunch with BTC (transcript of audio here).

I wrote about this on Hive at https://hive.blog/hive/@crrdlx/thinking-back-to-back-when?amps and also at http://satoshitimes.wikidot.com/blog:13

Co-inventing the world's highest performance aerospace structural manufacturing capacity (by a long shot) and learning just how retarded VCs are.

This comment is a good litmus test btw, your reaction may indicate you are a noob who has minimal true need for bitcoin.

For me it was the lying of our government, the lockdowns in 2020, and most importantly the Canadian Truckers. We are all one bad decision by our leaders for our bank accounts being closed.

This all woke me up and radicalized me.

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