Imagine if I said to you "Earth is an uninhabitable place to live"
You look at me sideways and say "Ah... why?"
I reply "Planets are awful bad. Pluto/Uranus/Neptune, you'd freeze. Mercury, you'd burn. Venus, you'd be poisoned. Jupiter and Saturn, you'd be crushed. Mars: nothing to breath.
It's true. Most of the planets, including over 5700 exoplanets, are really really bad places to live.
The conclusion that this means earth is uninhabitable is a basic logic fail.
Now imagine some self-proclaimed crypto-commentator tells you "Bitcoin is a scam"
Again, you look at him sideways and say "Ah... why?"
He replies "Most crypto has gone to zero. VCs dump on retail. Memecoins are complete rugpulls. Pre-mined tokens, you get diluted to oblivian. ICOs, you're the exit-liquidity for founders and early investors.
It's true. Most of the thousands of cryptocurrencies launched since 2009 are complete scams.
But again, the conclusion that this makes Bitcoin a scam is equally a basic logic 101 fail.
Earth is the only planet with a breathable atmosphere, the right temperature band, and liquid water.
Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with the combination of no insider enrichment, a fixed supply that nobody can change, and a 17-year unhacked decentralised ledger.
In both cases, some very special and unique features make the general rule inapplicable to the one obvious exception.
This logical fallacy has been around long enough to have a name. Aristotle spotted it about 2,300 years ago and called it the "Fallacy of Accident" - taking a pattern that's true for a category and forcing it onto the one member where evidence shows it obviously doesn't hold.
A few days ago, Ben McKenzie sat on Jon Stewart's podcast and committed this exact logic-fail: citing crypto's failures as his evidence against Bitcoin.
He's not the only one to fail in this way. Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Warren, Jamie Dimon, Christine Lagarde all conflated Bitcoin with all crypto for years. Many journalists still fail to distinguish Bitcoin from all other crypto (though the better ones are starting to).
In fact, this fallacy has been deployed for years with impunity by people who either don't know, or forgot to mention that Bitcoin has unique features making it materially different from all other crypto.
The irony is that Bitcoiners and crypto-critics are on the same page: the rugpulls, the insider enrichment, the tokens engineered to extract value from retail investors are all things that Bitcoiners like @CorySwan and other have been vocally calling out for over a decade, long before category-conflating journalists and actors from teen dramas decided they had an opinion about it.
It's not that hard
Unless you have the attention-span of a gnat-fly, you can easily do 5 mins research (AI-assisted if you really want) and discover either what the core differences are between Earth and all other planets, between Bitcoin and all other crypto.
Earth is an incredibly, uniquely habitable planet for humans to live.
Bitcoin is an incredible, uniquely suitable form of currency for humans to use.
What do you say if someone says "But Bitcoin mining blockrewards won't be profitable soon and fees are not enough to sustain mining."
Here's how I just responded
I completely get why you'd be concerned that fees are not enough to provide ancillary mining revenue as halvings but into block rewards. And you're right, this was a big concern a few years ago.
The reason it is no longer an issue for mining companies is because they have found a myriad of ancillary revenue sources including grid stabiliization (demand response, FCAS, 4CP, blackstart in particular), heat recycling, carbon credits, RECs. I was talking to a mining company 3 days ago that's now regularly earning 2/3 of their income through proactive grid stabilization. This is why I have no concerns about the long-term economic viability of mining.
Cory introduced me to a couple of VCs a while ago. But they didn't want to talk so much about the coaching work I did with founders.
They wanted to know how Bitcoin mining could save the planet.
... and I was happy to share exactly how that worked
Apparently I've now done 7,090 FUD-busting related tweets about Bitcoin across 5 categories (Environmental, Criminal/Terrorist, Ponzi/Scam/Bubble, Political/Partisan, Technical FUD). 🤣
Unsurprisingly, 4,318 of them (61%) were on environmental FUD and benefits of Bitcoin, but surprisingly the best performing rebuttals or pre-emptive positive messages about Bitcoin have been when I've been responding to the nonsense message "Bitcoin is used by criminals"
Coaching a number of Bitcoiners, I've found that the inner critic causes more damage to Bitcoin innovation than any outer critic ever can.
But happily, when you disarm this, no Bitcoin critic can stand in your way
Government of France: providing free Bitcoin marketing since 2015
doing free Bitcoin marketing since 2015
The Bitcoin Policy Institute of France was catalyzed by a single unknown Bitcoiner who took a few smart, bold, needle-moving moves, were encouraged by a group of other Bitcoiners on our coaching group. It is now influencing across the political spectrum. You have more potential inside you than you think.
When you're talking to people about Bitcoin (or anything), your content is relatively less important. emotion creates motion
You've heard of AMA sessions (Ask Me Anything)?
These are powerful sessions where no question is off-limits. It extends our imagination just by attending.
But by themselves, they are limited. Why? Because you can only ask what you have the self-awareness to ask.
Most of the questions we ask have not that much value. It's about attaining something, or gaining some thing.
But most of the things we try to attain and gain aren't even our own innermost intentions, but something we've come to believe is our own desire through osmosis.
So what is more powerful than AMA is M-AMA!
An AMA session preceded by Meditation. Why?
Because Meditation is literally the art of practicing self-awareness. After meditation, the irrelevant questions atrophy and the questions you really want answers to arise.
Don't take my word for it though. Like Bitcoin, meditation is best understood my using the tool, not just reading about it!
We're having a M-AMA session This Friday 7-7.30pm PDT// Saturday 1pm NZST// Sat 11am AEST
You can bring any questions you like: about meditation, SKY breathwork, life, energy, Bitcoin, or whatever. These sessions tend to bring people from around
Come a couple of mins early, as we lock the session just after the hour so that latecomers don't disturb meditators.
Drop a comment, or message and I'll send you the zoom link to join.
There's a decision-making method gaining traction in AI circles right now.
You spin up five AI agents, each with a distinct thinking role: first-principles thinker, contrarian, systems thinker, domain expert, pragmatist. Plus a chairman who runs the process.
Each agent drafts an answer independently. The chairman strips the names off and circulates them anonymously. Each agent critiques the others without knowing who wrote what. Then the chairman synthesises the best answer.
The anonymity is the genuinely good part. It forces evaluation on content, not on who said it. Ego gets removed from the room. That alone makes it better than most boardroom decisions.
But it's still modelled on a boardroom. And a boardroom is not where the best decisions get made.
Here's what's missing.
1. No real iteration. Ideas develop the same way people develop: through feedback and iteration. In this model, the iteration is perfunctory. Ideas get assessed, not evolved.
2. No brainstorming. Effective brainstorming deliberately separates "divergent thinking" (the process of imagining all possibilities, including crazy ones) from convergent thinking (the process of whittling them down to what's possible within the constraints of time, space and budgets).
The best discussions with the best ideas happen when you go wide first, then narrow. This protocol puts a convergent black-hat thinker in the room at the same time as the divergent thinkers. That collapses the exploration phase before it even starts.
3. Optimised for evaluation, not ideation. It's designed to select the best existing idea rather than generate one that's better than any individual agent could produce.
4. The chairman selects rather than facilitates. There's a difference between choosing the best idea in the room and facilitating the development of the best collective idea. A chairman does the first. A facilitator does the second. Different function entirely. The first is optimized for efficacy of process and efficiency of outcome, the second is optimized for the quality and robustness of the decision.
5. Swimlane identities. Each agent operates within a narrow role. "Domain expert." "Contrarian." Knowledge seldom comes from people locked into narrow identities. It comes from the collision between them.
The net result: no ideation, a marginally better selection process, and a high risk that an underdeveloped idea gets chosen. Worse, because the process looks robust and complex, the output runs the risk of getting acted on with more confidence than it deserves.
I studied this exact problem during my thesis. I had groups communicating anonymously, analysing a poem (I was an English major), exchanging ideas across rounds. The quality of analysis improved dramatically in the second round - not because the evaluation got sharper, but because people were building on each other's thinking, measurably. They were interchanging ideas, not just ranking them.
I've seen the same thing running mastermind groups since. When different minds get in a room and start sparring and introducing ideas, a network effect kicks in. Ideas emerge that no single person in the room could ever have produced. That process creates ideas through a principle that we call "advance and extend". And it's what this five-agent model doesn't have.
The fix isn't complicated. Let agents build on each other's drafts across multiple rounds instead of just critiquing them. Replace the chairman with a facilitator agent whose job is synthesis, not selection. Separate the divergent phase from the convergent phase. And stop assigning swimlane identities that constrain what each agent is allowed to think.
The five-agent idea is a step forward. But it's a step from a bad process to a less bad process.
The leap - to a process that produces genuinely emergent thinking - requires a different model entirely. And that model already exists. It just hasn't been applied to AI ... yet.
One Bitcoiner has just onboarded15 new businesses in his local town (in his spare time). How? A few things but, a key component was getting comfortable leaving things undone, focusing on needle-moving actions and getting better at identifying what those needle-moving actions were (and then taking them)!
You can do this too.
accebli
A short story about how one Bitcoiner leaning into discomfort rather than running from it, changed the world in a small way for the better, while advancing Bitcoin and his business at the same time.
You are capable of doing much more for Bitcoin than you can probably imagine.
... and here's the proof!
Thank you X for the free Nostr marketing
View quoted note →If you are considering doing something for Bitcoin, but you think you don't have the skills to do it .... GOOD! That's the reason why you should do it. Here's why.
It saddens me when people who experience imposter syndrome dont continue with their projects ... especially when they are cool Bitcoin projects.
This mindset shift I've found has helped a lot of Bitcoiners who were experiencing doubt to push through it
Yet to find a single Bitcoiner who has not noticed this same effect.
One of the biggest environmental benefits of Bitcoin is how it reduces overconsumption.
3 things are important when you're building a Bitcoin mission!
The technical and business side is what gets the attention, but the third element, at least equally important, tends to be get neglected.
It is my duty to remind you that Bitcion will use all the world's power by 2020.
