Using The Orange Pill App
The Orange Pill App is an app that helps you meet bitcoiners. It started off being marketed as a dating app, but there are not a lot of women on it so it's morphed into more of bitcoin friend meeting app in my opinion. This is great for me since I am married with children. I even have a grandchild. I bought a yearly membership for 100k sats. They offer a lifetime membership for 500k sats. This is essentially a paywall. I have written about paywalls in the context of blogs. TL;DR: Paywalls suck. They require you to pay a fee before you even know if the article or product has any value. The reason why I feel a bit different about the OPA Paywall is more of a classified ad. I could make a post on Craigslist asking to meet bitcoiner friends, but this probably won't work. I could sign up for a meetup.com account but they don't accept my simplelogin address. I need a whitelisted email, so it's not very censorship resistant. Besides, I have found that many of these meetups attract memecoiners, yam-swappers, and blockchain, not bitcoin bros. Maybe an orange pill app secretly holds Monero or evangelizes Ethereum, but they are told that this app is for bitcoiners and bitcoiners only. It's like an online country club for Holders.
At first, I had some trouble meeting people because it was awkward. Here's how it went. WOW! There's a guy who lives ten miles away from me that is really into bitcoin. I should talk to him and ask him out for coffee. Then I thought that sounds kinda gay. I felt like I was asking a dude out on a date. I'm no homophobe, and I'm rooting for Anita Posh. but I'm not interested in dating dudes. I'm also not interested in dating women because I'm married, but I do want to make local bitcoin friends.
The Good
Since Meetup-dot-com blacklisted my email service provider, I got the idea to use the Orange Pill App to start my own meetup.
I made a website
Hosted it over nostrsites.com/riversidebtc
Hosted it over TOR
Created a vanity nostr key.
Created a nostr chat.
I created a matrix room
I created a "keet up"
I hosted my first meetup by adding it to the nostrchat. Someone showed up. I listed the next meetup on the Orange Pill App. More people are interested in attending the next meetup. These people are ride-or-die freaks willing to pay for a service that connects them to other bitcoiners. That's great. Most of us have friends and family that are exhausted of us talking about bitcoin so much. I know my wife is. For these reasons, I have come to love the orange pill app.
The Bad
By the way, they are not a sponsor of this blog. I don't want them to be because I want my writing to be free from undue influence. This way I can also tell you about some of the risks involved with using an app that uses your location data. To be fair, they do not give your exact location. According to the website, it only gives your location within a 1/8 of a mile.
That's a little concerning. I would rather it tell other people the city I live in instead of my approximate location. Physical Bitcoin attacks are rare, but Jameson Lopp has a list on GitHub that keeps on growing.
Mitigate risk
If you use the orange pill app, it's best to meet people at a public place and be careful what information you reveal. Don't drive flashy cars or wear a fancy watch. Wear humble clothes that don't say THIS DUDE LOVES BITCOIN, ASK HIM WHERE HE KEEPS HIS KEYS.
Keep your actual location secret, I am an avid bicyclist. I'm not doing the Tour De Dope anytime soon, but ride about 5 days a week. I give location permission to the app only when I use the app. Therefore the app shows the approximate location of 5-10 miles away from my house. It's not perfect and I am not paranoid. It's just that bitcoin has taught me to think adversely and increased my game theoretical awareness of the world. I know a physical attack is unlikely. I also use multisig so I don't even have access to more than a few million sats at a time.
Of course, it should be obvious that you should meet at a public place and not dox your address. That's why I think starting a meetup is a good way to accomplish this. I almost had two people attend my last meetup, but the other person got there after we already left. If you do start a meetup, it makes sense to add a start and end time. I had to learn this the hard way because I'm really just winging it. Bitcvoiners are the smartest people I know so I'm sure you'll learn from my mistakes.
Build A Bitcoin Community
I urge you to join the orange pill app. One guy going around town putting tipcards from tipcard.io into tip jars around town is crazy. If 15 or 20 people do it, we are a movement. I am in this as an opposition to fiat and draconian central banks more concerned with printing money to fight wars, hand out free money to businesses, peanuts and lock-downs for plebs. We now see the cost of these government actions via high inflation. It's time to promote a decentralized alternative to central banking. After writing about bitcoin for over a year, I have learned that one man cannot do it alone. We need a group of principled men and women fighting for a new system that cannot be manipulated by political whim.
I'm no lefty. I came into bitcoin from a libertarian perspective, but there are millions of people in the United States that feel like something is wrong. I started reading the Progressive Case For Bitcoin and realized Jason talks about many of the same things Libertarians talk about. We say the Cantillon effect, and the progressives say wealth inequality. These are the same thing.
We analogize bitcoin to The Matrix so often because that movie has a great motif. The money is manipulated, but Adam Smith's description of the invisible hand is scapegoated. The Federal Reserve, Bank of England, or Bank of Venezuela are not invisible. They are big, fat visible hands. In a world where wealth inequality, un-affordable housing, and higher grocery bills, we can't just wait for our politicians to fix these things.
We need to build strong communities to address these issues on a local level. Elizabeth Warren talks a lot about Wealth Inequality, but she's funded by the banksters. We need to promote bitcoin as the solution to wealth inequality. You will not receive permission to launch an IPO. The Catillionaire politicians will not save you. The government cannot help you. We can only help ourselves.
Bitcoin fixes this. We don't need to tell people to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. We need to teach people how to circumvent the invisible theft of the visible hand that rules us all. We can offer an alternative to the fiat fuckery. We can save our peanuts in bitcoin until those peanuts become real wealth after a decade or two. You don't need permission to do this. Your wealth does not need to be based on your credit score, how much your family has saved for you to buy a house, or pay for college. You are not wasting your money on rent if you stack sats. Let's build communities to teach people how to do this.
Find Bitcoiners in your own community and build.
Blogging Bitcoin
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