"The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred."

--Ayn Rand

Rand warned about the fallacy of prioritizing collective well-being over the individual. Adopting Bitcoin as your primary means of payment and store of value is an individual choice, while the errand of orange-pilling people is construed as performing a social, or even collective, good. Bitcoiners themselves are not unlike the nodes validating network transactions and enforcing the fixed supply mechanism, in the sense that they bear the responsibility of ensuring the social integrity of the network. By this, I mean adhering to the same principles on which Bitcoin came into existence, those based on the sovereignty of the individual. In observing interactions of bitcoiners online, I became motivated to express my thoughts about the risk that despite the best intentions, I have seen some fall into the trap of passive, ideological adherence to the collectivist idea that everyone ends up better off if the world just accepted bitcoin. I do not think this to be necessarily true, but make the argument that educated users who are empowered to think for themselves make the network stronger and lead us closer to our common goal of a freer society.

Having the courage to learn about the technological requirements of running a bitcoin node is no small feat for the average non-technically inclined person. Yet, courage here is the primary barrier to be overcome. The technical knowledge needed to participate in the Bitcoin network by running your own node, though not intuitive, is readily available online through easy-to-follow tutorials, yet many people who hold Bitcoin will never endeavor to do so. At this point, anyone can buy or sell bitcoin and even spend it without as much as having heard the word node, let alone understand how to run one on their own machine. By far, the more burdensome task than the technical aspects of node participation is the social task of enabling the future bitcoiners of the world to use bitcoin as money. It is for this reason, I am arguing, that it is a moral imperative to view every current bitcoiner as a social node.

While not capable of validating bitcoin transactions (with the exception of those actual node runners), bitcoiners bear the burden of solving the far more complex social problems of harmonizing the hostile world of fiat with Bitcoin. Bitcoiners are societal nodes, and serve the polyvalent function of validating social transactions and ensuring the integrity of the bitcoin network of users.

I'm not talking about shilling bitcoin, bitcoin evangelism or "orange-pilling" your friends and family. As far as I can tell, the jury is still out on whether this is a desirable use of our function as social nodes in the network of bitcoin users. As we all know, a new user who dives into the unknown without having done their due diligence might be taking a serious risk. Also, while Bitcoin's value will benefit immensely from wider adoption, paradoxically, this will make it more costly for its present users to accumulate more. Far be it from my intentions to make an argument against advocating wider Bitcoin adoption; however, in this essay I find it incumbent upon me to consider the ramifications of shilling the coin irresponsibly. Another one of my objectives here is to explore the functions of participating as a social node in the Bitcoin network.

Explanations of the exploits of fiat currency, the anti-fragility of the bitcoin network and its value proposition as money qua store of value as well as a medium of exchange can be powerful evidence for non-believers. These top the list of revelations I had to have before being able to accept the reality that fiat is the real Ponzi scheme whose stability-seeking central planning approach drains the life force of the people who actually produce value in the world (see my essay, Dracula and the Federal Reserve Banking System). By saying that every bitcoiner is a social node in the network of potential users, I am proposing that due diligence be taken to ensure that initiates are properly introduced to the technology, lest they fall into ways that perpetuate the evils of old.

The question of bitcoin mass adoption is no longer one of "if," but "when." With the President of the United states floating the idea of purchasing a strategic reserve of one-million BTC (we'll see), and Microstrategy announcing plans to amp up their purchasing of bitcoin to 42 billion USD, among other instances of institutional adoption, over these next few years Bitcoin will not need any more evangelism. The real task of being a node in the social network of bitcoin users lay in envisioning what the world is going to look like on a Bitcoin standard and educating people about how they can prepare. Making sure that initiates in the network understand the common best practices will be the most daunting task.

Humans are social creatures. This necessarily implies that the mass uptake of new technology will have massive social repercussions. While we may rely on the economists to offer us analysis on trends in the social aspects of bitcoin adoption, and the software engineers and developers as experts on the tech stuff, it is the task of the every-person, the plebs, in the network to find the wrinkles and distortions that impede it from working for everyone. What I mean in saying we are all nodes is this: each individual bitcoiner shares the responsibility for ensuring the accuracy and relevance of information as it is distributed in their broader social networks, especially new users. This involves informing people about the various freedom to which bitcoin enables us. I am suggesting that we think deeper than simply proclaiming the "Good Word" that bitcoin is the best money ever known to human civilization, using ideological arguments to persuade. What I'm proposing is a judicious and considered approach to encouraging proper education among the yet-to-be-initiated.

Of course, there are certainly going to be people to whom we will relish in saying "have fun staying poor," whom we will watch happily as they flounder in the dying paroxysms of the fiat machine while mass adoption takes off. However, there are also those, and this I am certain, to whom each of us would like to educate about the desecration caused by fiat systems, and the ways in which Bitcoin, the hardest decentralized and trustless currency that the world has ever seen, can save them. There is, of course, the adage that everyone gets Bitcoin at the price they deserve, but this should be said with the caveat that our friends and family deserve the absolute best price possible. My view here is that the only way to ensure that bitcoin remains representative of freedom is by each participant in the network ensuring that the right information reaches the right people at the right time.

By saying we are all nodes, in effect, is to say that each of us who proclaims the word of Bitcoin is an ambassador. The choice of how you choose to represent yourself is your own. You are the one who best knows your community and you know what will make bitcoin stick. Every ambassador of the network performs the careful work of understanding the how and why of bitcoin adoption in each individual case. Far more complex a task than the validation of transactions on the bitcoin network, being a societal bitcoin node requires the careful execution that can be achieved by people living in and connected to the world around them.

I prefer to talk about the process of initiating someone to the bitcoin network as one of on-boarding, rather than orange-pilling. To orange-pill someone implies some level of ideological persuasion - which, if you ask me, never really works, and only makes the unconvinced dig in their heels and gnash their teeth. I think the person who accepts Bitcoin does so because the time was ripe for it, not because of a nerdy cypherpunk's soothsaying. Even worse, to orange-pill someone pacifies the initiate into someone that needs to accept the truth as you it to tell them. The network doesn't need more people ready to drink the next hyped up flavour of kool-aid (even if it is orange); it needs rational thinkers who are ready to accept reality as it is, ready to think deeply about the problems yet to be solved.

From my experience, to say that the average person knows there to be something inherently wrong with the world is an understatement. People live their whole lives fear- or hate-ridden lest some boogeyman that they can't quite define will come and ransack everything they know and love. They use many labels, like Cabal, the establishment, they, the man... There is any number of pejoratives to which folks are ready to direct their hatred, though they be only vaguely understood. Yet, none of these labels fully captures the essence of the problem, which not the fault of a single entity per se. Instead, the fault lay in a system built on fiat. If history teaches us anything, it is that people are quick to find a scapegoat for problems that they do not fully understand. Doing so is much easier than admitting to having been duped into accepting a patently counterfeit construction of reality. The world's biggest Ponzi scheme, fiat, is just that. Thanks to generations of coercion and propagandizing, the average person has not the slightest clue of this. The result of this ignorance is that they cannot be bothered to understand why Bitcoin exists.

What the majority of people do understand is this: for one reason or another, each of us feels we have to achieve more with less. What distinguishes bitcoiners from the majority is the understanding that this feeling is valid because it has an identifiable caused in the world. It is not a collective hallucination, but the systemic theft that occurs in the form of currency debasement, organized and planned by central banking and governmental authorities. In order to make ideological converts, or orange-pill those who have not recognized this truth requires a subtle understanding of their lives and struggles. It requires knowing that most people do not readily give up their their most strongly held delusions. It requires a deep level of compassion, love and patience.

Orange pilling, therefore, might better referred to as on-boarding. To build the network of future bitcoiners requires that people are well adapted and have the resources to make full use of it. If people are not free to understand bitcoin and instead are coerced into passively accepting it, then humanity will be no better off than we are now. This is why I would propose we change the language used to describe when initiating a newcomer to the network. To say someone has been "orange-pilled" relegates them to being a passive recipient of an ideology. Myself, I have never been orange-pilled; in fact, I am skeptical of any pill. Here, I think the meme has outgrown its use and works against us. No--I have been on-boarded to the network, thanks to the many educators who work tirelessly to create online content, write their books or articles or expend their scarce time and energy discussing these ideas.

We risk repeating the mistakes of the past if each new bitcoiner is not treated with the dignity of being able to decide for themselves what is best for them. Those who blindly accept an ideology are arguably no better off then they were in the old system. As Ayn Rand has argued, the mind is not collective, but individual, and nor can any man or woman use theirs to think for another.

FR.