"And payments? They might emerge, or they might not. If they do, it will be because people are already operating in crypto-native contexts where crypto payments actually make sense, not because we've convinced a café to install a Lightning node for the three customers per year who want to perform monetary revolution over their cappuccino."
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tree 木
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npub1k23n...wga2
anarcho-convivialist 🌱
contributor https://parallelpolis.info
co-founder https://web3privacy.info https://gwei.cz https://ethbrno.cz
#privacy #freedom #decentralization #ethereum #cypherpunk #foss #javascript #svelte #3dprint #cannabis #events #travel #euc #movies
krypto, VPNkyyy, far cry 3, pokemon, náboženství, bohové, demokracie, anarchie.. v tomhle videu je všechno :) Jeden z nejvtipnějších Mikýřových kousků #czech
Truth & Treason (2025) #movies
The story of Helmuth Hübener, the youngest peaceful fighter against Hitler's regime, who was convicted and executed by guillotine at the age of 17. It's classically pathetic as WW2 films tend to be, but this is one of the better cases, def an interesting story.
“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde
One of Emma Stone's favorite movies is Forman's Firemen's Ball... wow. I've never been a fan of Hollywood actresses, but Emily is a different story :)
1080p YouTube quality... more epic than Nolan can ever be...
Still thinking what was the role of government agencies in this...
If you wanted to neutralize Bitcoin, would you ban it or just convince Bitcoiners that using it betrays it? Turn p2p cash into digital gold you never spend, make HODLing revolutionary, let the community police itself. You wouldn't need to compromise code—just amplify voices during the block size wars, fund some conferences, let tribalism finish it. Now the most dangerous financial tech ever sits in Coinbase accounts, perfectly surveilled, while everyone thinks they won. Coincidence?
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This is what Bitcoin culture has become. Not tools for economic freedom. Not permissionless markets. Just gatekeeping disguised as inevitability.
The promise was financial sovereignty for everyone. The reality is celebrating pricing people out. Measuring success by exclusion. "Be your own bank" became "fuck you, got mine"
They don't want more people to have economic freedom. They want the right people to have it—at the right price, with the right politics.
This is authoritarian thinking wrapped in libertarian aesthetics. Deciding who "deserves" access based on ideological purity.
Bitcoin culture doesn't want revolution. It wants a new aristocracy where they're the aristocrats.
And they call this freedom.//Bitcoin Culture is Dead: How Institutional Capture Killed the Revolution
I discovered Bitcoin in 2013, and it felt like witnessing the birth of something genuinely revolutionary. Here was a tool that could enable truly free markets, permissionless exchange, and economic sovereignty outside state control. The promise wasn't just digital gold—it was the foundation for an entire ecosystem of voluntary exchange.
By the time I registered with BitShares and later MakerDAO in 2017, I saw the natural evolution: programmable money, decentralized stablecoins, synthetic assets—all the financial instruments people actually need to participate in global markets. These weren't betrayals of Bitcoin's vision; they were its fulfillment. They offered people practical tools for economic freedom, not just a store of value to HODL.
//The Betrayal
But Bitcoin culture chose a different path. Instead of celebrating these innovations as expansions of unregulated markets, the community turned hostile. Those who once championed permissionless innovation began gatekeeping what counted as "real" cryptocurrency. They built walls where there should have been bridges.
I watched this transformation personally within the Czech crypto community between 2020-22. The pretense of caring about broader crypto culture evaporated. What emerged was pure tribalism—Bitcoin good, everything else scam. The community finally stopped pretending they cared about freedom and went full orthodoxy.
//The Philosophical Failure
Bitcoiners had the opportunity to be moral and cultural guides—to help people navigate new financial tools while maintaining principles of sovereignty and decentralization. They could have been amplifiers of unregulated markets, celebrating every innovation that gave people more tools for economic freedom.
Instead, they chose the path of the ostrich. Heads buried in sand, fingers in ears, chanting "Bitcoin fixes this" at every challenge. When DeFi offered people access to financial instruments previously gatekept by traditional finance, Bitcoiners called it a scam. When stablecoins gave people in unstable economies a practical tool for daily use, Bitcoiners dismissed them as shitcoins.
They stopped asking what people actually need. They stopped caring whether their solutions addressed real problems. The only question became: "Does it serve Bitcoin?" Everything else—utility, adoption, solving actual use cases—became secondary to narrative maintenance and price performance.
The irony cuts deep: a community that once embodied cypherpunk principles of individual sovereignty now demands ideological conformity. A movement built on questioning authority now has its own orthodoxy, complete with heresy trials for anyone who builds on other protocols.
//What Remains
Bitcoin the technology may continue. Bitcoin the cultural movement—the one that inspired me in 2013, that promised liberation through technology—that's dead. It died when curiosity became heresy, when innovation became competition, and when serving people became less important than serving the protocol's price.
Yes, philosophical depth still exists in Bitcoin—there are still cypherpunks in the margins asking hard questions and building for freedom rather than number-go-up. But here's the tragedy: when those people need visibility, funding, conference stages, or development resources, they have to interface with the institutions that actually control Bitcoin's trajectory.
And those institutions—the conferences, the media platforms, the development funding—are completely captured by the commercial/institutional layer. Money and power concentrate around figures who explicitly represent institutional capture, people like Saylor who literally advocate for Bitcoin's integration into the existing power structure.
So you get this bifurcation: rich philosophical discourse happening in the margins while the money and power concentrate around institutional capture. What remains is a cargo cult, worshipping the form while abandoning the substance. Then when it's time to "represent Bitcoin" to the world, which layer gets amplified? The Longreads philosophers or the BTC Prague conference keynotes?
The answer reveals everything. The revolution didn't fail—it was captured. The cypherpunks are still there, but they're not the ones with the megaphone. And most Bitcoiners can't tell the difference.
Sometimes I think about moving to Shenzhen to build my own hardware wallet... I haven't found the perfect one for me yet.
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I still think Hito (hito.xyz) has the best form factor for a hardware wallet. Credit card size, thin... I wish I had a Trezor like that


I have a strong "Return of the Obra Dinn" feeling from the
design
@Skyler Was that your inspiration? :)

Sovereign Engineering
Sovereign Engineering
The program that brought you Blossom, Nutzaps, Wikifreedia, Nsite, TollGate, Zapstore, and more...
Fuck Saylor, I want these two memebros on stage
@Jameson Lopp vs. Vitalik Buterin


X (formerly Twitter)
Jameson Lopp (@lopp) on X
@VitalikButerin @saylor I might have helped spread the mountain man trope a bit myself. 😏
Meme bros for life!
something like this


One of the things I would like to do that would make sense to me is a conference that would bring together all the cypherpunks and freethinkers from Nostr, AT Protocol, ActivityPub, but also Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero and all the other communities... The online space is incredibly chaotic, but when people come together in person, it often leads to a better understanding of each other.
How old were you when you realized that demanding everyone adopt your One True Protocol while calling all alternatives scams was just rebranding religious fundamentalism as monetary policy?
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"aesthetic rebellion"
This is what institutional capture looks like in practice. The aesthetic rebellion, the methods borrowed from actual anarchist tradition, all deployed to... beg for more state power. To frame billionaires as "parasites" while positioning the NHS, a massive state bureaucracy, as the solution.
"please regulate us harder daddy"
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