This article is featured in Bitcoin Magazine’s “The Inscription Issue”. Click here to get your Annual Bitcoin Magazine Subscription.
Scrolling through my timeline, I noticed a guy who said I orange-pilled him a while back. He was into drugs and gambling at the time. He heard me preach about Bitcoin and he got into it with near religious fervor.
Then, under the influence of micro-dosing Orange-Pill Truth, some natural sunshine, bitter reality, and the sweet high of Orange Enlightenment, his life turned around. He overcame his drugs and gambling addiction and became a Bitcoin Maximalist.
This makes perfect sense — and it speaks to Bitcoin’s greater role in society than just being Perfect Money.
This is the guy’s tweet: I highlighted the relevant bits and by all means, follow him:
Undisclosed B
@BitcoinUndisc
“Who or what orange-pilled me? It was a combination of gambling, @maxkeiser, and drugs. Let me Explain.
First it was gambling. I used to be a professional online poker player. The US government took that away from me in 2011 by banning it. Soon after, on the 2+2 poker forum, there was talk of a new, uncensorable currency that may be able to circumvent the US’s ban on gambling.
Enter @MaxKeiser circa 2013. He was on a podcast called London Reel when Bitcoin was only $100 that I watched.
Max hit it out of the freaking park. He laid out the case for Bitcoin in the most eloquent way.
Silk Road onboarded a critical mass of Bitcoiners.
It’s the same for all new technologies: Drugs, gambling, and porn are gateways to the future. The video cassette, for example, owed its initial success to porn. Early home computer adoption, similarly. I remember in France, when I was living there in the early ‘90s, they had Minitel, the world’s first big-time online portal prior to when America took it over with the world wide web.
Minitel was rolled out in 1980. So what happened? Why didn’t France kill it with this thing? Another French idea that withered because their capital markets are rotten cheese; they have no NASDAQ equivalent.
Minitel got its initial boost from the sex trade, however. I recall stickers plastered on phone booths with Minitel numbers of sex workers. The hookers on the Rue Saint-Denis and Pigalle initially got their knickers in a twist at the sudden influx of amateur competition, but they quickly embraced the new technology.
Heck, even the Bible has a saucy story about naked Adam getting gaslit by a naked Eve with an apple.
FLASH CUT: Steve Jobs and his Apple smartphone and the rise of the mobile internet.
FLASH CUT: Pornhub gobbling up a huge percent of internet traffic.
Now we have the seemingly unstoppable rise of AI and deepfake porn that takes A LOT of energy.
This is why Bitcoin’s hashrate is so high: It’s battling AI and porn in the global scramble for energy.
Look, the three primary vices — gambling, drugs, and porn — are guaranteed moneymakers and all have huge market capitalizations on the world’s stock markets as publicly traded companies. New apps that mix and match faces with naked bodies are gonna be huge money spinners. Still fantasize about your kindergarten teacher? Well, now with AI, you can find some old elementary school yearbook photos and start a steamy, simulated tryst on your tricycle and a $0.05 carton of chocolate milk.
I think AI is the Devil Dog, RingDings, Twinkies, and Yodels of infantile intimacy fantasies. It will eradicate the plague of INCELS. Maybe it will even stop all those mass shootings by frustrated incels, or so these midwits think.
In the other corner, we have Bitcoin, the hero.
It’s a battle between AI and Bitcoin for energy dominance. That’s why Bitcoin’s hashrate is so high. We must win the energy race with AI and fappers.
I have faith we’ll win. We see our better selves reflected in Bitcoin and it inspires us to be better people. This is what Satoshi wants.
Unless you’re born irreparably bad, in which case gazing at Bitcoin’s protocol brings out your worst traits. Like the witch in Snow White who stared into the mirror and asked who’s the fairest of them all, and the mirror shot back, “You ain’t it”.
The witch goes crazy and tries to kill the forest-wandering hottie in the tight skirt. This backfires, and karma kicks her ass.
This is what Bitcoin does: It kicks the ass of the karmically misaligned.
The spirit of Bitcoin. The spirit of Karma.
Bitcoin looks back at us from a perfect, divine angle. Not a mirror image, but something deeper, more cutting. Like a surgeon’s scalpel into the soul.
I was wandering in a museum in Mexico City a few years ago with Stacy. An exhibit was being held in the lobby of the central bank and I came across an installation that I will say was the most gobbed-smackingly best art I’d ever seen in a museum. For me, anyway: I had a personal revelation.
What I saw were figurines perched on steps leading down below floor level.
Facing the figurines was a mirror. The figures started on the top step, facing one way, and as they stepped down — or were pulled down — they metamorphosed into things. Sometimes crazy things.
An ordinary figure on the top step might change into a pineapple. One might change into a bow-tie wearing aardvark.
What was happening? My interpretation is that during life, and then after death, we — the figurines on the steps — get closer to being and seeing who we really are. Who we’ve really been all this time. The act of becoming never-ending. Each of our daily 60,000 decisions in aggregate continues into our postnatal existence.
The journey of life starts and we’re strangers to ourselves. Life continues. We start to know ourselves. This can be painful, so we adopt personas to hide who we are. But the personas are like a coat of paint that fades. We put on different masks. We shed the affectations. We face life courageously as who we are. But it’s still painful. We call it wisdom.
Then death. And the voyage of self continues. We’re on a continuum. The illusion of life and death bleeds away. The artifice of time gets junked in favor of BEING THERE. We see the circular nature of things, the fractalization of everything.
William Blake gets it:
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
Whereas T. S. Eliot is a bit of a buzzkill:
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
Bitcoin is like this. It speeds up the process of self-awareness to the point of Bitcoin Singularity on an individual basis. The collective societal epiphany comes right after.
You can be like William Blake and be relentlessly optimistic, like Stacy Herbert says. Or you can be drippy, like a Brit, handing out in a nowheresville shire pub, cursing Man United all day. The Brits will never get Bitcoin, by the way.
For Sam Bankman-Fried, Bitcoin speeds up his life of slovenly, not-so-“grippy” sex sleaze and financial crimes, and a whole career of stealing and self-debasement happens in just a few short years.
In the case of someone who is morally aligned with the cosmos, Bitcoin can give them the feeling of instant nirvana. Michael Saylor is someone who was searching his whole, long career for Bitcoin to show up to fulfill his dreams of engineering a better future, and then it happened.
The guy on my timeline, the one I orange-pilled, is climbing down those steps facing the mirror and becoming his true self. A process that continues after life.
Orange-pilling has never been more important as the world goes up in flames.
We call it GIABO — Global Insurrection Against Banker Occupation.
It started during Occupy Wall Street and now in Argentina we have Javier Milei — a Bitcoin supporter, a follower of Hayek, and lover of the Austrian school of economics. This is the political pushback against central bankers we need, and GIABO is gaining strength. I saw a vigil being held at the Argentine central bank during Milei’s inauguration. He is euthanizing it.
We are on the threshold of a Renaissance 2.0.
This will be ushered in with Bitcoin.
Look in the mirror and you’ll see what I mean.
This article is featured in Bitcoin Magazine’s “The Inscription Issue”. Click here to get your Annual Bitcoin Magazine Subscription.
