Part 1: My personal Bitcoin discovery journey.
I did not need to learn to understand Bitcoin. Understanding Bitcoin was intuitive for me. I loved reading as a kid. Asterix and Tintin comics were a staple for me and I grew into the F.W.Dixon Hardy Boys books. Reading about theft, danger and sleuth mysteries pivoting into fantasy stories and then all manner of fiction and authors I am not going to name because it does not really matter and most I have forgotten. I devoured a substantial amount of fiction as a child. At one point when I was 13 years old in 2000 I decided to read a grown up book. My dad had a copy of Des Griffin's book (Fourth Reich of the Rich) on his bookshelf. The reason I picked that book is because it looked serious and ominous and it had a big swastika on the cover. I assumed that if I am going to read a grown up book this one seemed to challenge me. I read the book and it blew my tiny child brain wide open. I realised how complex and potentially evil the world could be. No one forced me to read it, no one recommended the book to me. Learning about the financial system and how finance is used to break the spirit of man and corrupt our lives with war and destruction germinated questions and doubts in my mind. Sunday school, rainbows and butterflies be damned. My world was shattered and I needed answers. I decided to go as far back as I possibly could and before the end of that year I had finished reading the Bible. I had an orange NIV at the time and I just started at page one and read every day until Revelations 22. In hindsight I managed to learn very little on my first read through, my underdeveloped mind lacked a lot of life experience and wisdom to really understand most of what I consumed but I had built a skeleton of the time line anchoring me through world history and that was more meaningful than I understood at the time. The most important thing I discovered about myself in the year 2000 is that I was obsessed with history not for history's sake. I needed to understand the why behind the why. I was on a mission to discover why evil exists and what is going to fix it. I had read through the Bible cover to cover about 7 times since. For the next couple of years I went onto the rabbit hole of conspiracy and mysticism. I had read the largest amount of nonsense rubbish books written by some of the most depraved moronic minds the world had ever conjured into existence, hoping that I would find some clue to the origins and purpose of evil and it's elusive cure. When a 15 year old reads Morals and Dogma by Albert Pike trying to find a grain of truth only to realise he has discovered delusional hocus pocus aerie faerie shit moving on to the next author spouting incessant crap leading nowhere. It took me many years to learn that there is no magic behind the freemasonic order or Adam Weishaupt's Illuminati. I concluded that there did not exist a freemason who knew the truth or would communicate the reality about the existence of their order and it's origins. After reading hundreds of books and documents ranging from Aesop to Marx to I had to capitulate into a nihilistic faith in Christ. Because the answer to evil was simply a hope in the second coming where Jesus might wipe out evil and punish sin. The only way an inkling of justice could exist among mankind. Having discovered this hope the way I did was not healthy because inaction is the only requirement and all action becomes meaningless. If good and right cannot project from within the created being and it is doomed to be a spectator to the performance of divine justice then I might just as well capitulate and die for my life is just as meaningless as the one who does all that is right and good. I reverted to an ecclesiastical, stoic, nietzschean frame of mind, everything is meaningless and nothing means anything, all can go fuck themselves. It was a doom loop in my mind which lead me to giving no shits about anything. I would drink, do dangerous things just to exact my own private kind of revenge on whoever I felt deserved it. I hated the world and wanted to see it all burn. My most ardent hate was reserved for money and people who showed any form of respect for money or wealth. A homeless woman confronted me on the street one day asking if I have money for her. I took all the money I had in my wallet and said to her all I have is this communist rubbish paper and I said to her she can have it all but I feel bad that I don't have anything of value to give her. It was about R70, I did not have much. She started crying when I gave it to her and she even seemed unwilling to take it when I offered it to her more insistingly.
I cleaned up my act a bit when I met a girl I liked and we started a relationship. She was still at school and I picked her up in my Volkswagen Golf after school and took her home every day. With time as our relationship developed I started to feel responsible for her well being seeing how emotionally dependant she became on me over time. I did not have a job. I was always setting up LANS and playing computer games with my buddies and sponging of my parents, I had no interest in earning income or looking for a job. In spite of this unproductive attitude to life my girlfriend loved me, I could articulate abstract concepts and explain mysteries and organise thoughts into coherent ideas of life and philosophy and we had many friends. I decided that I was going to get my life in order so that I can man up to the responsibility of having a woman in my life. I got a job at a car dealer got into a fight with the manager and fired my boss after a week of witnessing the most shallow insipid style of life and world view. The fiat system was so repulsive to me it would make me sick. I even refused to open a bank account which did not help with trying to find employment. I ended up working for my father learning skills from a man I could respect because his character was honourable and above reproach. I could disagree with him and retain my respect for him. He was stuck in a fiat clutch of debt, a hard worker and honest businessman but the fiat world never allows good men a moment for pause. He was willing to pay me in cash and I started to provide for my young wife and newborn daughter. I discovered the bitcoin whitepaper in 2011, in this time but I was not in a position to attain any because the rails for purchase did not yet exist in my country, I did not have internet access at home and my PC was just standing at my parents house at the time so mining was not an option.
We did not even have electricity, I shut it off because I had a fight with my wife's fiat minded family who wanted to split the electric bill on the property equally. I had purchased a kwh meter that I was going to install at my distribution board to calculate how many units of power we used monthly. They did not like that idea and I got push back from them. So I disconnected our house and paid the two following bills, when the third bill came I did not pay. They were very surprised to find out that we were living without electricity to for two months already and they did not even have a difference in the price of the electric bill. We were hardly using any power and was paying a bulk chunk of their bills. Anyway...
I immediately understood Bitcoin and the problems it could solve for me personally with regards to the fact that I hated money so much. My disconnect with reality suddenly did not reflect my madness but the madness of the world. I adopted Bitcoin in my heart and had my hopes pinned on it achieving some type of success. Bitcoin became a placeholder in my mind thereafter something I knew I would keep track of into the future. In 2016 sometime I watched a video where Jack Mallers discussed placing verifiable and peer to peer bets on chess games online using Bitcoin. I got so excited I wanted to explode, I called my dad and my brothers and I wanted them to see the video. Their reaction left me disappointed because I realised that the implications of what this tech could become was lost on them and I could not adequately explain it in analogies that made sense, I just seemed like a rambling nutcase. Anyway I did a bit of searching and found that it was possible to buy Bitcoin online in South Africa. I did not waste any time and opened a bank account for the first time in 11 years. (I had a savings account when I was a kid.) I needed to be able to do transfers to purchase bitcoin. Our first purchase was R150 we ended up with 90 rand after the exchange took a third of the amount in withdrawal fees because I immediately taught myself how to and took self custody. It was about 0.01170000 sats. I used all those sats to order a type of debit card from England wherewith I tried spending the bitcoin at a local supermarket. I was not trying to save the sats, I wanted to test the technology and did not know I was spending potentially thousands of rands in future savings buying a card and some junk food. It worked for about two weeks then regulations forced the company that supplied the card to shut down its services. They emailed me and apologised. I did not care, this technology was going to change the world forever, the only thing I could not yet predict was how long it would take for adoption to happen. In my mind we were on the precipice of a revolution and the whole world was going to see the light overnight. I was so wrong and my expectations were 100% unrealistic. I had way too much confidence in humanities collective intelligence and their ability to see the change in monetary dynamics I perceived as the ultimate liberation of all mankind. When I realised how unresponsive people are to this I took up the responsibility of educating everyone I came in contact with about Bitcoin and I did not even own any meaningful amount properly yet. The price did not matter to me. I did not even understand how valuable it would become as wealth, the function of cutting out all intermediate institutions was the selling point for me. No one valued, understood or even bothered taking me seriously. Some people humoured me and some laughed and scoffed at me. I became frustrated. But for the first time in my life, I had hope, meaning, something to aspire to...
...and that is valuable.
To be continued...
...