Wielding Bitcoin because simply HODLing is not gonna cut it

It is not our right to defend ourselves from attackers, it is an obligation. Neglecting this truth results in violation of our self ownership rights and leads to destruction of mankind. 

Are we in the midst of World War 3? More like World War Wave 3: the last part of a trilogy that began in 1914 and will end once bitcoin cuts the funding for the production. No more sequels. 

Hodling is cool, but it’s not going to cut it moving towards a global village society where bitcoin is money, English is language and internet is domain. Lines drawn on a piece of paper by legacy conquerors will soon hold nothing but sentimental value and human civilizations will unite and cooperate through a decentralized starfish network of free cities connected by caravans of merchants weaving together the meatspace and the cyberspace.  

Wielding bitcoin shifts the paradigm from dependence on state into voluntary cooperation based on specialization leading to individual profitability maximization. A cornerstone of human development since the beginning of time. State does not provide the services it once perhaps did and it is once again time to wield the power and responsibility ourselves. 

Humans have always collaborated because it has been the best way to achieve individual goals and to secure the continuation of our lineage. This manifests most accurately as Nash equilibrium, where it is not beneficial for any player of a non-cooperative game to change their strategy as it would result in worse individual outcome. Life is a non-cooperative game that promotes cooperation, and bitcoin is the best catalyst to incentivize peaceful co-existence, as relinquishing the control of bitcoin to foolishly go to war bears a huge cost. The mechanism of monetary disarmament is best described as Thiers’ law, where good money drives out bad. 

This is why hodling can prevent wars by wresting the leverage from the hands of warmongers. 

Preventing wars is a great start but our humanity demands we live, that is, to act in order to alleviate uneasiness, to enjoy life, to do whatever the hell we want to do. 

Hodling bitcoin is a high time preference activity as it entails a massive opportunity cost, meaning the money saved is deducted from the new wonders of the world to be built. By simply holding on to our bitcoin, we forego the rewards that would result from successfully wielding bitcoin and manifesting an environment where humanity may thrive. 

If we stand aside holding our sat-stack who is going to build the moon? 

Our reliance on what we can perceive (bitcoin is absolutely scarce) rather than what we can’t (fat sat-stack means nothing in a barren world) is known as the broken window fallacy. The effects of hodling may be more clear to us than investing in an uncertain future; it is after all a wise decision to hold a cash balance in an unpredictable environment, right? But the thesis of holding bitcoin relies largely on the assumption that by doing so, humanity would be moving towards a more stable condition, albeit our development is likely to keep increasing exponentially due to the inflexible monetary energy storage that is bitcoin. Expending capital is risky for sure, but our risk assessment  methodology for investments has been heavily skewed by the fiat economy. In other words it has become difficult to identify malinvestments. So let us get back to basics. 

Gather knowledge, stack sats. Grow cattle, raise kids. Build infrastructure, craft weapons. Wield bitcoin.

Gather knowledge 

Books, specifically printed paper, books are a great store of informational value. They have a high Lindy effect, meaning they will likely be around much longer than many humans. 

E-books are great too, but in a shit-hits-the-fan-event, paper books are invaluable. Don’t shy away from spending sats to hold books, as they will be an investment worthy of holding and passing on to your heirs. Consider that you are also supporting the authors, helping them contribute even more great ideas to the eternal information pool that grows stronger when tapped into. 

Moon is built on actions prompted by good ideas. 

Stack sats 

Having a fiat job can be useful, especially if it requires little to no effort and the time expended can be justified by the extra sats accumulated using fiat earnings. However, using fiat to purchase bitcoin has heavy downsides, of which the most difficult one to ignore is KYC that is done at the very base layer of fiat. Unless you are working off the books for cash and also using a non-KYC way to buy bitcoin. 

There are an increasing number of bitcoiner jobs that allow you to stack sats directly by expending time and effort, just put a shoutout on your favorite social hub and see all the helpful bitcoiners rushing in to help you find one. Let’s be realistic though, as of now many bitcoin jobs are not comparable to fiat jobs in terms of payment unless you are an exceptional talent. However by getting employed by a bitcoin company, you are also supporting the ecosystem and helping to build the moon. 

Affiliate programs that pay in sats such as the one we have at Konsensus Network are a win-win-win because you can help someone find a product they need, help the merchant make sales and get paid in sats while you do it. This strategy is especially potent for content creators that already have an audience.

Making content is ever more popular and very competitive, but thanks to innovations such as streaming sats over the Lightning Network, it is rapidly becoming easier to get paid for what you love doing anyhow. In the attrition war against the clown world, every sat counts. As bitcoin knowledge spreads, content creators ought to find their audience more easily. 

Just like content creation, routing Lightning payments to collect fees might not be quite the sat stacker just yet, but as the Lightning Network grows and bitcoin adoption soars, you will likely be able to capitalize the knowledge you have accumulated while helping to build the moon.

Grow cattle 

Or pay someone to do it for you. The power of division of labour allows us to focus on our expertise and what we enjoy most. Most people will never be cattle farmers, nor is there a need for that. One competent cattle farmer could service the whole citadel, and provide quality meat packaged and delivered to your door. No centralized, inefficient supply chains required. Even cow farts can be turned into sats! Imagine the misty-eyed eco-hippies who think bitcoin and cow farts are our worst enemies.

Raise kids

Sex is a high time preference activity, procreation is low. 

Investing in children is probably the best use for your sats, as it’s highly unlikely you will ever have the impact on human civilization that your offspring will. It’s also crucial to ensure future citadels are populated with well trained, morally sound citizens of the global village society. Funnily enough, the moon we build is actually earth. 

Since we’re talking about renaissance of human civilization, it stands to reason that we homeschool our young instead of putting them in statist quo brainwashing institutes. Following the herd might feel tempting, especially if most of your time is consumed in a fiat job, but don’t fall for it. Quit your fiat job, take full responsibility. Perhaps one day under the bitcoin standard we’ll have real private schools, providing better education using the latest tools, but for now, the internet and time will have to do. 

If we can teach our children to read and to research, to pragmatically think of a problem and intuitively come up with queries to find the relevant resources to teach themselves how to solve any problem, they will become completely unstoppable. We are not here to teach them what to think but how to think. 

Children are natural first principle thinkers, asking “why?” until they have enough information to satisfy their curiosity. This tendency should be nurtured, and oftentimes it is extremely beneficial for the teacher to challenge their views in quest for hidden truths that might lead to accidental revelations and inventions. Like fire, wheel and perhaps to some extent, bitcoin. 

Teaching is by far the best way to learn. 

Raising kids and raising them right is not cheap in sats and especially not cheap in time, our most valuable asset. However, it must be done. Consider the alternative: you die heirless and your accumulated stack does what exactly? Besides, what are we building the moon for? For our retirement or to propel humanity to Kardashev III? 

Dead men can HODL so it’s hardly something to pride yourself with. 

Build infrastructure 

Bitcoin is backed by human action. 

Running a node and locking up some bitcoin in lightning channels seems like an obvious thing to start with, but why stop there? We need citadels, we need transportation, we need communication network redundancy. We need private defense forces, we need contractors to fix what the state has destroyed, we need a reliable free market solution to distribute and receive meatspace goods. 

Most of us had a pre-bitcoin life. What are you good at? Chances are your skills are needed now more than ever to overtake what has been left by the destroyers of the realm of men. No time to get lazy and complacent with your sat-stacking. Put it into good use and leverage your unique skill-set as the moon will not build itself.

Craft weapons 

Bitcoin is a weapon of self defense of the highest grade. It allows you to protect your personal property rights and to procure efficient means to enforce them. Your HODL stack might help disarm the state violence monopolies, but it doesn’t prevent someone performing a 5$ wrench attack on you or your family. Yes, you might have a distress wallet, but at this point any competent attacker will know about it. 

The best defense against a meatspace offender is often to remove yourself and your loved ones from the vicinity of the attacker as fast as possible, so at least until the current oppressive regimes are neutered, it would be unwise to set up a base that can be overrun. At least have a grab bag and a plan. 

Brandishing a lethal weapon might be enough to send them looking for easier prey, even if your gun could only reliably shoot a couple rounds. Best part is, no-one will know you have it, so they can’t come and get it. The simple existence of this technology offers some protection. 

In conclusion 

Bitcoin provides the highest degree of personal autonomy in providing protection services. In other words, it allows the replacement of all services that have been provided by state apparatus for centuries, but only if bitcoin users act to manifest a favorable situation. 

Think what you can do with bitcoin, not what bitcoin can do for you. 

Hodling is high time preference. WIEDL! 

P.S. this is just an intro, I have a lot more to say on the topic. 

Thank you for all the inspiration and ideas you have given me to complete this piece, I could not have done it without you: 

KnotOnion, Max Hillebrand, Francis Pouliot, Saifedean Ammous, Nakadai, Rafe, CtrlPew, Knut Svanholm, Ricardo Carmona and basically all of bitcoin Twitter.

It is a pleasure and a privilege to stand beside you on this hill. In all my life I have not found such honesty, integrity, morality and love.

Bonus: Wielding fiat, because people may stay retarded longer than we think

We have discussed the great importance of wielding bitcoin, but it is also important to address the green-backed elephant in many citadels. Bitcoin may have already won the money war but that information is distributed extremely asymmetrically. It would be folly to ignore the fact that, as of 2021, fiat still reigns supreme. This means that in most parts of the world it is necessary to use satoshis to acquire local clown-coupons to purchase essential products and services. There are several ways to do that and here are some:

Privacy/security: Find local bitcoiners and deal in cash. This is probably the best most of us can do at the moment, but it has trust issues, so networking with reliable brothers in bitcoin arms is paramount. Never make deals with strangers in a private place, but rather do it out in the open with witnesses. And never mention bitcoin in public to anyone if there is a chance to be overheard. 

Convenience/leverage: Risk a portion of your stack to secure a fiat loan from a custodian service that’s sufficiently over-collateralized to account for market volatility. Use it to acquire what is needed and pay it back when the market conditions are favorable, or dump any fiat income into the loan repayment. 

Convenience/relative privacy: Use a peer-to-peer service such as bisq.network to trade using fiat bank accounts or cash-in-mail. Using a fiat bank has obvious downsides due to inbuilt KYC, but cash in mail is a bit more private if you can send insured/registered mail without an ID. You might use a prepaid phone with a fake name for example. Of course, complicating the trade by including an often state-run operator like the post office might introduce an unbearable risk to many. 

Sovereignty/privacy: Earn or mine bitcoin. In theory both are quite private, but depend on your counterparty: who is paying your salary? Who is selling you the mining equipment? When done right, this option offers the best of all worlds in combination with techniques mentioned above. Once we start to have sovereign cities and self-sufficient citadels, it might even become feasible to work for board, meaning you wouldn’t even need money to acquire products and services, and you could still save the extra effort expended in sats. 

Privacy layer: CoinJoin is a technique you could, and probably should, combine with all of the above. It is a way to muddle the transaction history of your coins so it becomes more difficult to connect them to your identity and meatspace location. Of course, if you choose to buy bitcoin from a KYC-exchange, at the very least some interested parties will know that you at some point held bitcoin. This might be a liability in itself, regardless of what you do with the coins afterwards. Best to be smart about where you buy and who you tell that you did. Ideally no-one.