Honestly, I didn't grow in an environment that I think obviously would've inevitably sent me down the rabbit hole. Didn't grow up in communism. Fairly stable family life. Not very techy, geared more towards arts. I picked up music from a young age, that stuck with me ever since.
Not exactly a lot of overlap between bitcoin and music (for now...hoping to help change that at some point..)
One thing I think set me for the rabbit hole though was being instilled with a strong sense of independent thought. From a young age I learned of the importance of this.
A less emotionally-intelligent version of myself would let that get the best of me...thought I would go into politics at one point (LMFAO - as an "independent thinker"). I was always a contrarian thinker, just with misapplied energy.
Bitcoin unplugged me. Truly was a Matrix-like experience, as much of a meme as that may be. I finally was able to apply my natural lean towards contrarianism in a much healthier, conducive way.
What about yourself? I know that everyone's road to Bitcoin probably comes from a combination of sources, but what are some key takeaways from your childhood that you think brought you to bitcoin so early?
Grew up in communism definitely "helps", and the main reason causing so much fear in people is exactly everything they own can pretty much be taken away; And the richer people are, the more anxious inside of them.
Being fed fake news from a young age, it trained you to read the lines inbetween all the news, e.g. if they ban something, when means should have a look at it, and ha, many countries are "banning" Bitcoin, and yet it never dies.
And I hate being told what to do, all I want is to be left alone and do whatever I find joy in, without dealing with unnecessary dramas, and Bitcoin enables me to do that:)!
reply
it trained you to read the lines inbetween all the news, e.g. if they ban something, when means should have a look at it
Approaching politics or MSM this way clarifies everything -- their intentions make much more sense when you have this understanding
If you dont come to this realization, you'll always be stuck frustrated at the random ppl on the TV for being "dumb" -- they're not dumb, they are playing you like a fiddle
reply
Bitcoin allowed me to reflect on my personal history through a new lens.
I had a fortunate childhood upbringing. I travelled a little and thought the world was a place that rewarded hard work and a strong work ethic; Western free market capitalism was a beacon to the world. I watched society and the government grind down my father and our family; robbing him of his savings, his dignity and finally his life. His hope for a better tomorrow, patience and low time preference was his undoing.
I felt called to a life of service and entered the military, seeing the world from a different perspective to that of growing up. I worked hard, saved and had a measure of security. But I have seen the dark side of human nature and it is a wake up call… but what to do?
In the last 10 years my life has collapsed and I am on the same course as my father. My body is broken and still I put it on ragged edge to earn minimum wage every day… just like him. But at least now there is BTC.
Bitcoin is the absolute best hope humanity has at restoring the law of the farm; patience and saving for a brighter future. The politicians, short term business decisions, corrupt foreign aid policies and exploitative rent seeking have destroyed the world and trapped 95% of its inhabitants.
My insight from childhood has been watching a broken system happen in real time and then see it come for me.
reply
Thank you for sharing :) Bitcoin is hope!!
reply
deleted by author
reply
i blame my punk music upbringing on why i gravitated towards bitcoin.
reply
honestly SAME too i didnt really think of that
reply
Not fitting in makes you question what you're not fitting into.
  • As a child athlete, I was often the youngest on my teams which made me the default scapegoat
  • My parents are addicts (mom more than dad) so society's rules were clearly negotiable. (I was also alone emotionally and intellectually for the majority of my childhood.)
  • Until age 13, we lived in Sunnyvale. My parents are blue collar and I wasn't really conscious of the tech industry, but I was probably affected by the surroundings anyway.
  • My parents went through a bankruptcy when I was ~12. My dad swore off credit for two decades and the whole thing scared me away from credit too.
  • My high school math teacher was amazing and technology forward. He encouraged us use calculators for everything and taught from experimental textbooks that presented every problem as a word problem.
reply
I really admire your transparency and thoughtfulness
reply
Thanks! Honestly, I do it selfishly.
I think holding stuff in makes us rot emotionally. And I think lying does that and more by blinding us to the rot.
Transparency and lying aren’t the same thing obviously but they’re related in that opaqueness is often motivated by reserving the option to lie.
The biggest liars I know are also the least self aware and consequently the most stagnant in the areas they lie about.
reply
Second. :)
reply
Truly is such a blessing to have had teachers like the one you did, they really can change your life. They are scarcer than bitcoin
reply
My dad, though if he was still around he would probably be skeptical of bitcoin. He was naturally skeptical of everything. He always went against the grain. In a family/neighborhood of Roosevelt worshipping Italian immigrants, he was a Republican. He almost got disowned by his in laws for supporting Nixon over Kennedy. He was naturally distrustful of the government, regardless of party. When the U.S. removed silver from coins, he hoarded the old stuff.
reply
It's amazing thinking about all the things my father used to tell me....and how so much of what he would say about the government (im sure very similar to yours) continually comes to pass as I grow and observe..
Very thankful to have had that early on
reply
Very true. He didn't articulate it the way we do now, but he saw through the fiat bullshit and played the cantillon game without knowing what it was called.
reply
I just really really like the idea of things being permanent.
Your body ages and decays eventually. Less and less physical items are made to last. And even those that are made to last, rarely have "forever" in mind. Software degrades - most of what you had on your 2005 computer is worthless now. Media like photos videos, digitized writing might keep up if someone cares.
Having Bitcoin might maybe be forever. At least hopefully the 24 words + BIP might outlast me.
reply
I gravitate towards Bitcoin for 2 reasons: Video games and Being good with money.
See, being good with money means to be frugal, patient, to wait for what you really want instead of throwing it away as soon as you have it. The debt obsessed are irresponsible who can never make it anywhere in life.
So as a saver, when you see the debt obsessed are actually rewarded with bailouts and the savers are actually punished with purchasing power devaluation, when the price of things you're saving up for run away from you and only the debt obsessed have the chance to get those things, you get a little grumpy.
Yeah this video I found decades after that feeling set in, describes it well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kukKpqd_B2c
I was looking for a tool to jujitsu against that devaluation mechanism and I thought that tool was gold and silver. Surely, if the debt obsessed rely on bailouts, and both debt and bailouts make my assets more valuable then gold and silver are the way to go. Turns out to not be the case lmao. It turns out that counter-party risk is a plague and those assets are stuck in a coffin made of it.
So then there's video games. I actually think the idea of a money you can transfer between video games would be cool. Imagine, you take your runescape gold with you into your next adventure. Makes starting from 0 in a new MMO less daunting I think right? The actual problem with this, is runescape gold is actually worthless lmao. So yeah, thinking of Bitcoin as video game money, helped my less developed self back then to get pretty excited about it.
reply
Man i cannot agree more. If I could've really monetized my runescape account.....
I think it's also healthy to view life through the lens of a video game too. Achievements, story lines, side quests, characters, leveling up, etc. -- just play it!
reply
This is the book for you man:
And this is your go to guy for advice: https://www.youtube.com/@HealthyGamerGG
reply
Questioning everything and thinking I have purpose/greatness in me using bitcoin as a tool has enforced that gave me the answers to those thoughts with it came selflessness, humbleness, gratitude and thankfulness if I had to do it all over again to get where I am in life I'd do it step by step
reply
My parents taught me to think for myself and question everything, even things we take for granted. Also, just as importantly, they never impeded my natural curiosity to learn about how the world works.
At a very young age I was already expressing interest in learning about financial markets and investments, having seen how hard my parents worked to give me and my brother a better life than the ones they had growing up in other countries. They encouraged me to explore that, opening up custodial accounts for me and taking me to the library every weekend to check out new financial books and autobiographies.
I'm beyond grateful for this in hindsight. While my parents didn't have the same interests as I did/do, they fully supported and affirmed mine without judgment or criticism.
That helped me build confidence in my ability to pull and synthesize information and form my own opinions on things. Many years later, I had my own opinions on the state of the economy, politics, and the world, and that's how I went searching for an answer to the questions I had and found BTC.
I owe my parents so much.
reply
Great question!!
I've been always interested into tech stuff even if I had a completely different path in my initial carreer. Eventually everything corverged again towards technology and I figured out bitcoin in the same period, both in technological and political/social terms.
reply
Same. Should've added that while I wasn't very tech minded, i was always pretty tech savvy and good at picking up new things quickly
reply
I always had very maximalist relationship to truth. Hated to see hypocricy, dishonesty and unfairness. Im from post-commie country too so stories from my grandparents and parents as well as books and movies and documentaries made me ralealize current democracy has oh so many similarities to communism.
"For the greater good, for the society" - they all say
In middle school I got book about cryptography from my IT teacher and Im sure this helped me understand the unbreakability of Bitcoin.
Im also naturaly very disagreeable, open minded and curious. A perfect mix to be into Bitcoin.
My earliest childhood regret happened at the mall. My mom dropped me and my sister off at the entrance of an arcade. The entrance looked like a big dinosaur head, and to get into the arcade you had to enter the dinosaurs mouth. I refused to enter out of fear and sat at a bench for an hour ( I was five or six years old and afraid). My mom finished her shopping held my hand and together we entered the (monsters) mouth. The inside was the funnest dinosaur themed arcade with candy and prizes and everyone laughing and having the best time that I'd ever seen. At that point I wanted to stay, but we had to go. I realized that I let irrational fear get in the way between me and a genuinely good time.
The rest of my childhood was spent running around outside with a group of close neighborhood friends. We would ride our scooter and bikes further than what our parents allowed and on dangerous paths that we knew we probably shouldn't.
Don't fear personal responsibility or freedom, freaks. "Fear is the mind killer"
reply
My parents taught me a vety low time preference. Mother had a mid-sized company, my father was mathematician. Saving, investing, studying, culture, sport - anything was embedded in this manner of forming Your character like a steady evolution on the basis of total selfsovereignty
reply
My childhood didn't lead me to Bitcoin. I was so fortunate that's all.
reply
Valid! Glad you made it here
Many "fortunate" ppl can easily take things like bitcoin for granted
reply
They gave me the illusion that we can become anything. Then I watched wealthy families produce children who have neither property, nor children, nor optimism, nor even interest in the future.
reply
In my early teens I really wanted to save up money to buy a body board. I think it was around $200 at the time. To get there I used to skip my lunch & save my $1 or $2 lunch money.
So I guess I've always been a saver. Bitcoin works well for people that can save for longer periods of time
reply
High school - started skateboarding and listening to Wu-Tang.
TL;DR - learning skateboard tricks is proof of work (practice and bruised shin bones)
bitcoin is punk - @aantonop
reply
good analogy
gonna give this a watch today
reply
Growing up in a small eastern European country in the late 20th and early 21st century, I observed the country's economic and political transition. In the 1990s, when I was a kid, my country underwent a period of rapid change, transitioning from a socialist regime to a market-oriented economy. During this time, the country faced economic instability, high inflation, and currency devaluation.
These economic challenges, along with my interest in technology, led me to explore alternative financial systems and digital currencies. As the internet became more accessible, I started learning about Bitcoin, which emerged in 2009 and I found 2 years later in 2011. The idea of a decentralized, digital currency that can't be controlled/debased by the government and which could potentially provide financial stability and privacy in a transitioning economy like ours intrigued me.
Throughout my teenage years, I followed the development of Bitcoin and the blockchain technology behind it. Even though, there weren't many quality articles, suitable literature or anything else than the Satoshi whitepaper (at least to my knowledge back then), I somehow blindly felt it as a potential solution to some of the economic challenges I witnessed. Over time, I may have become an early adopter, by:
  • using my newly bought CUDA laptop 💻 (which was the state of the art back then) to mine while the difficulty was low.
  • investing in Bitcoin (much later), building and engaging with the growing cryptocurrency community 👪 in the country.
My journey into Bitcoin might have been influenced by the mixture of the unique economic and political circumstances in my country during that period plus my curiosity about technology and financial innovation.
reply
Looking back on it, while my dad is probably more liberal than I am nowadays...he was a pretty hard core libertarian in the way he did things. He tried to be self-sovereign in things he did, and was very into DIY tech from the 90s (I have distinct memories of an incredible nest of wires under the computer table...it was epic). Set me up to be very attracted to bitcoin and freedom tech in general when it finally crossed me.
reply
I read a lot of medieval knight genre fiction growing up and idolized those with a strong sense morality and justice. This made the equality and morality aspect of bitcoin hit hard and led to a fast conviction time.
reply
interesting, havent heard of a medieval orange pilling before!
reply
I vaguely recall a friend talking about it in computer programming 2010. Damn if I would have listened. But I used it on and off, and got back into it with the introduction of Nostr.
reply
Had similar vague conversations in 2013....sigh..
reply
The war in Iraq after 9/11, and prior to it, the devaluation of our currency by 50% in 1994,, and the ensuing austerity measures have primed me for bitcoin.
When i hat about bitcoin for the first time in 2011, I'm ready, even though I don't get most of this novel tech. For me, it's enough to know that it's immune to governments' influence, so I hang on and research the subject. It took me actually a couple of years for the penny to drop.
Bitcoin has rescued me from a nihilistic path. It's shown me an alternative and brighter future that I could contribute to build, even with my modest and very limited means.
reply