I was totally unemployed in 2020 and my life savings were depleting fast. It was horrible and terrifying! I had never heard of bitcoin or crypto and somebody told me that if you do these little learning things on coinbase, they'll give you $5. I thought, "OK, every itty bitty bit helps right now." I did the one for Stellar (a crypto project that I think is now totally dead) and immediately everything clicked. It promised permissionless, global "banking" without banks or other intermediaries. I immediately jumped on board. I had only had money in cash and my own personal home before. This was the first time I ever "invested" in anything, and it was primarily idealogical.

The problem was, Stellar and the other crypto projects I was discovering were fake versions of bitcoin. They weren't really immutable, uninflatable, and fairly distributed. But I hadn't even heard of the idea of bitcoin maximalism, and when you don't even know that there's a rabbit hole to go down, it's hard to begin that research. As 2021 progressed, I definitely felt the tug of truly degenerate crypto stuff. What started as truly believing in the promise of "crypto" (although I didn't actually know the difference between bitcoin and the scams) did start to look ugly. I don't feel I ever behaved in avarice, but that temptation was HUGE. The collapse of Celsius in June of 2022 was the big wake-up moment for me about bitcoin only.

When Hidden Repression came out, that's when everything REALLY clicked. I had always known about the IMF and all the problems they create, but the first somewhat believable solution I had every seen was with "crypto" so it was a pretty painful pill to hear that all these promises weren't actually being delivered. BUT, everything that I was excited about in that Stellar tutorial was ACTUALLY true of bitcoin...and so much more!

But this is also why I'm so ready to make sure we take seriously claims by folks like Whitney Webb. We should be vigilant about mining pool centralization. We should be vigilant about supporting privacy or self-custody advocates who get thrown in jail. Shitcoinery is definitely a plague I'd love to see stamped out, but I don't want to assume hyperbitcoinization is a given either.

OK, that was supposed to be my story, but it ended kind of preachy. Moral of the story, don't be like me. Don't assume you've arrived just because you made it to bitcoin the way I thought I arrived just because I made it to "crypto."