https://medium.com/@bitcoin.barry.bennett/i-tried-out-midjourney-for-a-month-and-literally-lost-my-mind-4c57c99837b3 I tried out MidJourney for a month, and literally lost my mind. Especially considering how young the tool is, and how quickly it’s improving, the possibilities for expanding creativity are huuuuuuge. There will be a new “floor”, once it gets really pervasive and people get more comfortable with using it in a really basic way. If you need unique and tailored but not particularly strange or stylish images, you can crank out a lot of stuff, astonishingly fast. Combined with even rudimentary photoshop (or GIMP!) skills, you’ve got a very effective clip art generator, and can mix and match and embellish away. As an imagination crutch/accelerant, it’s going to give people that already have skills and vision and talent the ability to take their already world-class creations into dazzling new directions. If you wag your finger at AI-generated (or assisted) art, solely because the image wasn’t made by a human being physically moving a pencil or a mouse or a stylus, you don’t understand the potential. If you think AI art will eliminate the need or appreciation for talented artists who have creativity and vision and imagination, then you are worried about the wrong thing! Humans tend to experience the world and conceptualize it primarily (?) in images and in words, right? Even if they aren’t FUNDAMENTAL to our conscious experience, we’re getting pretty close to the bedrock of MIND-STUFF. Midjourney is phenomenally capable of interpreting text, and presenting images that correlate. It’s a mechanical imagination. It’s a different sort of engineering problem, but I can’t help but think: if we can use MATHEMATICS to meaningfully traverse from words to images, why not back again? Bitcoin gives us new ways to experience and conceptualize the world, new ways to THINK, and thus new ways to build new artifacts. New designs for new tools and new systems. Bitcoin is a particular implementation of the more general phenomena of “digital sound money” or “digital scarcity”. Proof-of-work creates a way to “translate” the material world (physical energy/electricity/hash power) into the digital realm. Midjourney is a particular implementation of the more general phenomena of “digital semantics” or “digitized ‘conscious, human, thought-level ‘concepts’’. Even using it “just” to make pretty pictures is ridiculously fun, and potentially a huge aid for anyone who works with images creatively or professionally. Both as clip-art generator and prototype generator, it enables a single person or a small team to accomplish what would have taken dozens of people, thousands of hours, and probably millions of dollars. And it’s $30/month for an unlimited membership. Absolutely astonishing!!! Also very addicting. I’m living life hanging by my fingernails, fiscally. (The COVID era was very rough on us financially, but we also had our life turned upside down about 18 months before, that’s a whole other story…). I was hoping to use MidJourney to hustle up some graphic design work. I used to wear a lot of hats at a very small business for a long time, including “graphics guy”, “marketing guy”, “website guy”… So I signed up for a month. Asked around with a few friends to get some project ideas. The idea was to learn the software, build a growing portfolio of diverse things, and hopefully make some tips or get some referrals. … I got REALLY into it. Felt like I was leveling up pretty quickly. Saw more and more and more exciting possibilities. Began to feel like the program was a mirror, and I had somehow flipped to the other side. Instead of a mind, looking at images, through software… I felt like software, looking at a mind, through images. It was exhilarating and also a little frightening to explore the intersection in your mind, where words and images meet and bounce off of each other, going in and out in a million independent orthogonal directions all at once. As alluded previously, my life was already in a shambles and this was a bit of a hail-mary to conjure a side hustle from thin air. I had some kind of mental breakdown. It was INTERESTING, but inconvenient, to say the least. Also scary for my wife. That’s a story for another time. Thanks for reading. I’m maybe including a small selection of things I found along the way. I’m wondering if anyone has experienced anything strange in their own mind, beyond just the “oh wow this is really cool!” vibe. If I can get my life on track and do things in a healthy way, I’d ***love*** to work with this creativity or “professionally” somehow. I maybe got three weeks use out of it total, did NOT renew, lol. Business is picking up at my day job, so for the good of my family i really should focus on THAT. That’s the plan. In the meantime, I’m wondering if these unaltered, raw-from-the-algorithm, works-in-progress, varied explorations will at least be interesting? Do I have a knack for this, or do I just like these because they’re mine? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Thanks

*CAN there be another BTC? Yes. Will there? Probably not! Think of Bitcoin as a PROTOCOL, not the “thing” (“bitcoins”/“satoshis”) itself. It’s not that there CAN’T be another one. Something else may have worked, had history gone differently. But here we are. History is what it is. We are ***early*** in terms of raw numbers - most people have heard of Bitcoin, but a very small subset holds some, and a smaller subset of THAT group are hardcore Bitcoin-only But a strong foundation is being built. Bitcoin may not be “perfect” - but it’s good enough! It performs the function of separating money from state. People are opting in. Standards are being developed, infrastructure is being built, best practices are emerging. Every new user and use case increases the value proposition of adopting a Bitcoin standard, which attracts new users, who create demand for continued improvements. A virtuous cycle. A positive-sum game. Anchored in the unforgeable truth of physics and mathematics. The only losing move is not to play. Much like driving on the right side of the road, the specifications for electrical outlets, or “righty-tighty-lefty-loosy” in the human-engineered world, or the genetic code and Krebs cycle in biology, the protocol has “going to fixation”. Bitcoin wasn’t the first effort at “digital cash”. But it was the first one that WORKED. It has the properties that are needed to create a fair system that separates money from state. The META-trick was the invention of “digital scarcity”. Proof-of-work + digital signatures + difficulty adjustment + ongoing hashed timechain was Satoshi’s particular implementation. And of course, two features #Bitcoin maybe didn’t “need” as a minimum tech spec for a viable digital cash, but have certainly enhanced it’s memetic fitness: *21 million HARD-CAP *the immaculate conception Technically, another “sound” and “viable in principle” digital cash system could be invented. But the real world, full of real humans, is NOISY! Satoshi effectively threw a basketball from across the ocean, and the trajectory was 99% spot on. As as been said many times elsewhere, not only did Satoshi have a good idea, TECHNICALLY. By appearing from nowhere, and then disappearing the way he did, he gave his seed of an idea some fertilizer and some protection. Like so many great discoveries, the creation and early nurturing of Bitcoin would not have happened the way it did without hard work, incredible foresight, and plenty of dumb luck. Can there be “another Bitcoin”? Maybe. But for those of us who can see the writing on the wall, we are CERTAIN there is ‘t a shorter way to get “there” from “here”, when we define “there” as “separation of money and state”. Bitcoin may not be perfect, but holy shit IT IS GOOD ENOUGH. IT WORKS. IT’S WORKING. Satoshi tossed the ball from 21 million miles away, we just have to tip it in! We just have to not fuck it up.