Hi, nice to see you. I’ve been there and over there and over over there, but very rarely here.

I’m going to try and write more HERE. So, BitCoin. I don’t know an awful lot about it.

I’m going to try and just throw my very meager brain/knowledge at a wall based on what I think I know right now. I’m not going to link anything, I’m not going to do any amount of research now that I have started this post. This is the beauty of blogs that I have missed.

Okay, what is BitCoin? I think it’s the concept of a decentralized currency, something that is theoretically universally accepted and usable by anyone, anywhere. There’s a ledger for each transaction (called a blockchain) which you can trace the journey of this new kinda money.

My understanding is that it’s really energy-intensive maintaining the blockchain, lots of CPUs necessary due to cryptography being used to, I dunno, make sure it’s not tampered with, not faked, etc. Somehow, devoting gobs of energy to help calculate/verify transactions on the blockchain ends up maybe(?) minting new Bitcoin pieces? I DO NOT KNOW FOR SURE.

Uh, there’s a concept of a “sats”, or a “Satoshi” which is the smallest unit of a Bitcoin (BTC). It’s like a billionth or a gazillionth of a BTC or some other shit. Satoshi is named after “Satoshi Nakamoto” who wrote a white paper in 2008 that proposed the concept of BitCoin. At this point, I think the consensus is that this was a pseudonym, and no one knows who he or she really is. They went silent around 2010 and haven’t been heard from since and BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAHBLAHBLAH.

/end terrible, misinformed explanation of Bitcoin

One thing I have noted is that lots of BTC enthusiasts have LASER EYES. The following pictures in the image below were pulled from Twitter profiles, all of them acting in some capacity as evangelists/ambassadors for BTC.

Look, Laser Eyes Tony Soprano at A3! Salvador Dali at G1! Look, there’s a Gandalf at C5!

The guy at A1 is named Michael Saylor and is apparently very rich and very important and balls deep in BTC. If you look at his Twitter feed, it’s mostly him making posting stylized BitCoin “brand” images of trains, vaults, fireworks, toilets (haven’t seen a BitCoin toilet pic yet, but fingers crossed), etc. Note that he has laser eyes AND lightning eyes.

I thought as a project I would start asking the ppl with the profiles “why the laser eyes?” and see what they said.

My wife asked if me if I was being snarky, and I said, well, 45% snarky, but 55% curious. Anyways, I only asked a few of these guys and only one person answered me, saying “yeah, this one guy added the lasers to my pic, this other guy added the flames, and this other other guy added the bear” (see if you can figure out which pic it was in the collage!). It was an answer, but a very literal one.

What I want to know, is “what does having laser eyes represent to you”? I feel like it’s a form of braggadocio, but I think it’s a bit simplistic to just chalk it up to that. I feel like there is some “visionary” vibe going on as well. Like, these people think they are seeing beyond, I dunno, our financial system as it has been for years, at least since the abolition of the gold standard, and are aware of THE NEW WAY. Do they think of themselves as simply smarter than everyone else? Do they think of themselves as saviors to the rest of us? I don’t know.

It seems like BTC is quite a bit of commotion over something that really doesn’t seem like it’s going to make humanity happier or healthier.

Oh, during a recent vacation break from work, I puttered about on this newer protocol called “nostr”. It’s an attempt (I think) of having a decentralized social media, an alternative to everyone feeding at the same corporate trough at places like Twitter and Facebook.

In the nostr space, people are rushing to write clients etc., and many people are (or were) excited when I was poking around there. Right now it seems to have a kind of high bar for less technical people. I actually offered one of the nostr developers my help, but I have a Mac from ten years ago and I can’t develop anything on my stupid computer.

Anyways, as I was on nostr the thing that people were SUPER excited about was including the use of lightning wallets via nostr. Oh, I forgot to say, BitCoin has all this digital wallet crap. As far as I know, lightning wallets are just a flavor of a BitCoin wallet. As people excitedly posted “invoices” of a long alphanumeric string for what amounted to be a few cents, then another person replied “PAID!”, they were proving that they could pay and get paid via nostr, but for me, it just kinda bummed me out. It seemed like that the whole payment thing was the most important aspect of nostr to all these people, and I couldn’t really understand why it would make me or anyone happy. It wasn’t my tribe.

One thing that was very surprising to me was Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, was present on nostr, and not only that, he regularly interacted with lots of people on nostr (he answered a question or two of mine, for example) when I was there. I wouldn’t be surprised if he continued to be very active and present, but I just kind of ducked out with all the lightning wallet stuff. He seemed to feel really positive about the whole thing.

I really don’t have an opinion about Jack Dorsey. I have not “done the research”. I know many people are probably annoyed by him, other people praise him, whatever. He seems to feel like BTC is something special and wonderful. He seems to have his heart in the right place, but what do I know?

But look at his profile picture! It’s his EAR! And no lasers are coming out of it! I find that somewhat encouraging and comforting, but I don’t know if I should.

I don’t know about a decentralized social media, but things were are lot more special when we wrote blog posts and didn’t use some billionaire’s website to express our thoughts and feelings.

I liked it more when we were all points of light, and think it is something we can be again, whether we pay each other invoices or not.

XOXOXO