I learned about bitcoin in 2013, when someone offered me to mine it on my home computer. At the time, I was not interested in it - getting some virtual coins that I don't know where to use.

The next time I came across Bitcoin was in 2017, when it became actively discussed due to the growth of its value in fiat. Then I had a purely speculative interest, like most beginners, probably. I invested a lot of my money and managed to withdraw most of it before the price drop in 2018.

After the bear market started, I started to go more down the rabbit hole and realize the real opportunities and benefits bitcoin offers to anyone, regardless of their social and monetary status. From that point on, there was no stopping me. I read several books known to everyone here, started changing my habits, shifted to more conscious consumption and practically stopped buying things I didn't really need. Got rid of the information noise that made me make unnecessary, impulsive purchases. My brain became calmer, more clear.

The next stage was that I tried to put my online life in order. It's no secret that when we use the services and services of large corporations, we pass on to them consciously and unconsciously a huge amount of information about ourselves. It was a shock to me to learn about the extent of surveillance by companies like Google. Having had the experience and sweet sense of freedom with bitcoin, I wanted more control over what information about me was stored online. From that point on, I dove headfirst into learning about online privacy and confidentiality. It's been a tough but extremely exciting journey that isn't suitable for everyone (up to a certain point in life). And that journey is still ongoing. I have eliminated as much as possible the companies that love to spy on us from my daily life, switched to open source counterparts: open source search engines like duckduckgo, searnx, startpage, self-hosted cloud storage, messengers that don't require personal data to use them, like session or SimpleX chat. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I started to pass on all my knowledge to my family and friends. But not all of them want to deprive themselves of familiar things for the sake of privacy.

Then there's offline life. Proper nutrition, sports, refusal of unhealthy and low-quality food. Because of this, there was more energy and motivation. I lost excess weight, my sleep improved.

From an ordinary user I turned into a person who is constantly learning something new, developing physically and morally and trying to share my experience with my family and friends.

I am very grateful to bitcoin for this change in my life... Over the past year, it has had the biggest impact in the situations I've talked about in my last few posts in September.

It's really the technology we needed so that we can become sovereign, independent or at least start to think about it and try to change our habits.