Ok, so hear me out, I feel like one of the issues no-coiners have, especially no-coiners from the collective West, is that it is hard for them to understand the WHY of bitcoin.

They say, 'I have the snp500' or say things like 'my bank card works just fine' and totally miss the point of bitcoin.

And I have to wonder, if not for my history and travels, would I have fallen into the same hubris?

You see, I grew up in the UK and always held certain truths to be self-evident - banks are safe, my house won't be stolen by the government, and the currency I use is fine, great even.

I had the definition of first-world privilege and I was totally unaware of it.

Things changed when I moved to Moscow to study Russian when I was 19.

Although I didn't know it, the ruble was in its golden decade, mostly thanks to super high oil prices. 1 pound was always 50rubles, give or take a few, and one dollar was around 28-30 rubles.

I was working, freelancing, and studying and not really thinking about what the currency was up to, but what I would hear were people's stories - people who had all their savings wiped out during the fall of the USSR and who were left destitute, too old to start again. Or I would hear people talk about the devastation of the 98 default.

People who were lured into keeping their savings in banks thanks to high interest rates - then the banks fail and these people lose everything they ever worked for, instead of money given "coupons," as a stopgap solution, with a promise that these could eventually be redeemed for cash. Needless to say, it never happened and people got wiped out in the most brutal fashion.

(on a side tangent, there is an exact parallel with what the Russian central bank is doing now with its high interest rates and history makes me think that if the war doesn't go in Russia's favor, the government will simply 'borrow' the citizen's money and 'promise' to pay it back later with some worthless IOU).

Naturally after talking to people, I started to think, what if my rosy idea that I would just live to a certain age and get my pension could not be as secure as I thought? After all, these people lived their lives 100% sure that if they did the 'right' things, they would be looked after and the Soviet Union would be there forever.

I'd look at old babushkas trying to sell socks by the metro and think, this person's life was destroyed and their pension is worth nothing and this is, largely, a result of playing the game that was expected of a 'good citizen'.

I started to feel that my friends and family in the UK were perhaps all too naive and that a government is not something that could be implicitly trusted (as silly as this sounds now). This was pre-bitcoin and at the time, my most logical thought was, that I should make sure I try and get property or something that would allow me to at least earn some rent and travel and not rely on a government pension.

I didn't have any more major epiphanies until Russia annexed Crimea and sanctions started to kick in and the whole economic landscape started to change, the constitution and legal framework was being updated on a seemingly monthly basis.

All of a sudden, the ruble slipped by ten, and 1 pound was now 60 rubles. I was on some forums at the time and a ton of people were in denial about how the ruble would never go past 50 to the dollar. They were so sure of themselves, and yet, the ruble tumbled further still until even the dollar was at 60 to the dollar. Their hubris cost them and they were too stupid to see it.

My good friend had recently got a raise at work, from 30k rubles to 60k, so from one grand to two, and he was like, I only just made it to 2k dollars, and I'm back down to 1k again.

Because of the lessons of the past, most Russians would keep dollars or euros, but they would be kept in the bank, and in about 2014 the banks started placing more and more controls on limits on foreign currency purchases and what people could do with their own money. There was a lot of fear that banks would outright take people's money - a bit like the bail-in haircut they got in Greece.

This was when I thought, ok, really, how much do I trust the banks? Because when shit hits the fan, banks will do whatever they want and I will be stuck. Even if I had paper gold or currency, or things in a bank safety deposit box, they could freeze that too. Stocks are great, but they can also be controlled.

Years later when started hearing about something called bitcoin and started googling wtf it was, there was a part that made immediate sense. Money that cannot be stolen or confiscated by a government that you have full control over, what could be better than that? How do people not see the value in something like that?

I was like, all Russians need this, this is anti-authoritarian money. I even tried to get my mother-in-law involved in about 2016 but as part of the older generation she couldn't conceptualize something having value that wasn't physical like gold or dollars (she still can't actually). I said just get 100 dollars worth and she was horrified at the thought lol.

Now, of course, I still didn't get the whole picture, my journey has not been linear, but to me, the value proposition made total logical sense. When I saw what happened with the Trucker protests it just cemented my position even more. And while I trust the UK legal and banking system a lot more than the Russian one, I will not rely on it in any way to bail me out. When they jack up the pension age to 80, I won't skip a beat.

After all, who is to say that the UK might not end up doing an 'Argentina'? We still have a ton of Empire legacy hubris and I for one will not allow a misplaced trust in a government (any government) to lead to my financial destruction and possibly my family's too. I will not be selling socks outside a metro station when I'm 75.

So in this way, I have Russia, specifically Putin, to thank for planting the seed of hatred and despair and opening my eyes, priming me to understand the value of a p2p, censorship-resistant bearer asset. Me and the wife left 10 years ago, but sadly she has her income in rubles and I have to pick up a lot of financial slack as our budget takes a hit and will continue to do so as the ruble continues to lose value.

Luckily there is bitcoin and, as my user name implies, I just need to stack a little harder!