My Nym is Blogging Bitcoin

My nym is Brutus Bond Blogging Bitcoin. You won't find this name on my driver's licence . Brutus is not my legal name. Neither is Blogging. I chose to explore life as a nym because nyms are distilled to ideas. You don't n**** eed to focus on my my pronouns nor my ethnicity. Nobody needs my address or a credit card number. Don't need a social security number to be Blogging Bitcoin. You just need to be someone writing a blog about bitcoin. My avatar is my identity. It comes from a bitcoin key which is just a big ass number. Humans translate this big number into a BIP39 mnemonic. Each 4 digits of a big bitcoin number are represented one of 2048 specific words. My avatar is derived from one of those big random numbers. 1's and 0’s like on and off switches in a double helix. That avatar comes from a paynym. Each feature is calculated and a paynym is generated according to a specific key. You can pay me like magic by sending sats to +softmountain942. Want to know it's really me? All you need to do is send me an amount of sats between 1 and 100,000 sats to +softmountain942. If I can give you the exact number you'll know I am either who I say I am, I am a mind reader, or posess unbelievable luck.

Normies often argue bitcoin has no utility. Who the hell wants to wait ten minutes for a cup of coffee? Bitcoin uses as much energy as the North Pole. "You know what bitcoin reminds me of?"

You're gonna say "FUCKIN' TULIPS" aren't you?

It's not their fault. That's what the news programs them to think. They never hear about all the ways you can use bitcoin, like as an identity more unique than a fingerprint.

I began writing a about bitcoin because I've been obsessed with it since 2014. I want a way to explore my ideas about bitcoin and teach people how to use it. I'm using a psudonym to learn how to use bitcoin like a cypherpunk

My nym is Blogging Bitcoin. You won't find this name on my driver's licence, but I as long as I am the only one in posession of this key, I can prove my digit identity.

I first heard about bitcoin in 2014 on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience. I fell down the rabbit hole as soon as the Andreas Antonopolis episode ended. Most people say they first heard about bitcoin in the early days, but dismissd it before they came to see what a powerful new cash system it is. This was not my experience. I already had one foot hovering the rabbit hole ad the other foot firmly planted on the proverial banana peel. I listened to podcasts anywhere from 4-10 hours a day to learn as much as I could while simultaneously forgetting the boredom of my fiat job. I listened to Freakonomics, Dan Carlin's hardcore History and Common Sense, the two plus two poker podcast, and EconTalk back then. I also started reading articles from the Mises Institute before the summer before hearing about bitcoin.

Why Was I So Interested In Bitcoin in 2014?

I was always nerdy and my high school friends always said I was the biggest rule follower they know. Nowadays, I bet I would have an IEP and be classified somewhere along "the spectrum." I just think that makes me somewhat of an introvert that likes to do research. I don't have a diagnosis, but I'm sure I talk to computers better than I talk to people. For whatever reason, I have noticed many people at bitcoin conferences who have been around before the block size war might also fit this description. My anecdotal evidence suggests brains that work like this have an evolutionary advantage over most people at understanding bitcoin. At least, this is my hypothesis. Right or wrong, people like me tend to like using computers.

MySpace

I was always shy with women until I found MySpace. The history books will call this the first social media, but it was my first dating app. It allowed me to copy pasta HTML an CSS to do some cool things with my MySpace Page. I was young and fairly good looking so ended up dating several women I met on the social media platform. At the time, my roommate asked me how I met so many women. I told him about how I met them on MySpace. I was also into things like Napster and BitTorrent. He said I was pretty good at coding and should look into joining the Cypherpunks Mailing List. Jullian Assange was on there. For the record, I was not good at coding. I was good at Control + C and control + V, so I did not join the list. I didn't think I was good enough to join some hacker group like that and although my proclivities made me respect Wikileaks, I wasn't sure it was something I wanted to get tangled up in. On second thought, this was the first touch point I had with cryptography. I dismissed it because I didn't understand it and as a human I tend to fear the unknown. This was a couple years before the bitcoin white paper was released on the site. I guess that was my first touch point and I dismissed it like most other people.

I would like to think if I had joined the list, I would have found out about bitcoin at the inception. I could have mined some of that early bitcoin when the block reward was 50. I could have been a real OG, but that's not true. I would have lost it because I didn't know enough. I would have bought weed on the silk road or threw away a laptop that would one day be worth billions. Bitcoin has become a lot easier since the early days. There is way more information about it now too. As the saying goes, you get into bitcoin at the price you deserve. I did not deserve the price of bitcoin on January 3rd, 2009 because I did not understand the importance of public key cryptography in 2007.

Fractional Reserve Banking

Economics was my favorite class in High School because I had a great economics teacher, Mr. S. On the first day of class, Mr. S told us his back story. Before becoming a teacher, he and seven of his friends pulled together three million dollars and started a bank. He said you only need three million dollars because of something called fractional reserve banking. When you deposit $100, the bank sets aside that money for you. This is the money in your account you are able to withdraw. This is your money. The banks don't use that money to give loans out like you might have seen on It's a Wonderful Life, No. The bank gets $900 worth of magic fiat money to loan out to other people. They only need to keep the hundred bucks in the bank. but get to loan out 900 bucks based on your money. New money is created when people pay their loan back with interest. On the other hand, if a borrower defaults on the loan, the money is destroyed.

My jaw dropped. My dad was unemployed at the time. Our family was struggling. Meanwhile, the banks get money for free, just because? It was obvious the rich get richer in this scenario and people who work their ass off for a living get screwed in ways they don't want to be screwed. I didn't understand why people did not protest this system more often. Looking back, there was no alternative. My dad cashed his checks at the grocery store. He only used cash. He did side jobs for cash. He didn't keep his money in the bank. I didn't know it at the time, but this had a profound effect on my world view. The problem with paper fiat currency is central banks make it impossible to save. A hundred dollars in 1995 bought a lot more than it does today. If he held on to some of those thirty year old hundred dollar bills, he would have lost much of the purchasing power his blood, sweat, and tears produced. Like I said, The banks get richer and the people who work for a living get screwed.

It took me six months of study before I sold any fiat for it. Now I want a way to explore my ideas about bitcoin and teach people how to use it. Too many people get caught up watching crypto YouTubers talk about red candles bogus patterns, and other fiat gambling games. I won't talk much about price. I am more interested in many of the cypherpunk ideals designed to propagate freedom around the world .

Online Poker

I got into Texas Hold 'Em after watching Chris MoneyMaker, an amateur, win the 2003 World Series of Poker on ESPN. He was the first person to qualify for the event by playing satellites on PokerStars.com. I played between 25 and 60 hours of poker per week at various times in my life. This was my first rabbit hole, a first intellectual love so to speak. This made me interested in bitcoin for two reasons:

1. I studied game theory and calculated Expected Value all the time. The game theory of bitcoin is phenomenal. I suspect many of the early poker playing bitcoin adopters recognize this, but it goes beyond the scope of this blog post.

2. Black Friday taught me an important lesson about trusted-third parties. After the government seized the domains of Poker Stars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker I was lucky enough to have kept most of my bankroll on PokerStars. They sent me a check within a week. I only had a couple hundred bucks on Full Tilt because the games were softer on stars, but I lied playing the limit hold em sit and goes on full tilt. As it turned out, Full Tilt Poker was a Ponzi Scheme. They commingled player funds. In other words, Full tilt Poker acted like a fractional reserve bank, but did not get any of the magic fiat money. So when I tried to cash out my couple hundred bucks, I found out it wasn't there.

I never got my money back from Full Tilt, but it wasn't very much anyway,. It was well worth the lesson. I learned how Trusted Third Parties Are Security Holes long before I read Nick Szabo's blogpost about it. This was the catalyst that made me so interested in bitcoin. Andreas said it's money nobody can steal from you so long as you keep can keep 12 words a secret. I also learned there were 25 bitcoin being mined every ten minutes. although I did not understand how at the time, I knew this was the opposite of fractional reserve banking. I also learned the number was getting cut in half every 4 years. Again, I didn't know how it worked yet and I was a little skeptical, but if true--this solved real world problems I had. Antonopolis said Coinbase was the easiest way to buy it at the time, but if was p2p cash I should be able to get some on the Internet. So I went on Coinbase and created a wallet. I took a screen shot of the QR code and asked for someone to please send me a small amount of bitcoin just so I could see how it worked. A nym gave me $1.50 worth of the stuff and told me to by a cup of coffee with it. He's still around. I downloaded the blockchain.info wallet, wrote down 12 words and took custody of that bitcoin from ChangeTip.(The service has been discontinued, but you used to be able to use a twitter bot to send bitcoin to people)

I studied bitcoin every day for another five months sold fiat for some. I stacked a little bit of sats every month. I also learned Dan Carlin accepted it. He asked for a buck a show, so I sent him a dollar worth of bitcoin every week or so.

In the early days, I used bitcoin as my bankrolll. I would sell some for a couple buy-ins when I had a downswing, but I kept my winnings in bitcoin. I didn't know as much about it back then. The only books I could find were Digital Gold and The Age of Cryptocurrency. I became more interested in it after after hearing about Wences Casares's experience of hyperinflation in Argentina as a child. This was more than a way to get around draconian poker regulations or protect myself from unscrupulous poker sites. Bitcoin is a way for citizens of the world to protect themselves from absolute tyranny.

Why Am I A Nym

• Anonymous writing has a long tradition in the US. I chose Brutus becuase it was the nym chosen by the person who wrote my favorite writers of the Anti-Federalist Papers. I started out with Brutus as my nym.
• Satoshi was a nym and showed that it was possible to have a completely peer-to-peer cash system that allows world-wide commerce without any government backed identity attached to it.
• I was inspired by Rockstar Developer's arguments for becoming a nym and having a funeral for this nym on Citadel Dispatch. Thankfully, Rockstar has since bee resurrected on nostr.
• I read this blogpost by K3tan

My goal is to teach people how to become a sovereign individual by building a small audience willing to pay me 250 sats per week or 13,000 sats per year. I will also donate 10% of everything I make to opensats.org. I realize making a living off donations worth 10 cents is a long shot, but it's something I want to try. I believe the Internet is better if we can avoid the surviellence capitalism that preys upon us all, making us spend more money than we should on things we don't really need.

The idea is to write about bitcoin everyday and ask for donations. I'm trying something I like to call a reverse paywall to do this. Normallly, a writer provides a small sample of thier article before asking you to pay 50-500 per year to read the rest. Other models include platforms charging subscriptions and paying writers a cut. This model is like a peer-to-peer Patreon. The information is put out there for free. There are no tiers. The reader is asked to pay the paywall at the end of the article.

250 Sats Per Week

I decided to present my article first and then ask for a small donation at the end of the article. The paywall comes at the end instead of the begining. You are only asked to pay 250 sats at the end of the article. If you can't afford it, you still get to read the article.

I hope you enjoy it. I started writing this blog on wordsmith. It's like a rough draft, but I'll leave it here in case you want to read more of my writing.

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Blogging Bitcoin
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Donate 250 sats I first wrote this before I heard about nostr, and before nostr had zaps. I used LNpay, but the link no longer works. If you wish to support this blog, check out my Value 4 Value Page.

Note: I first wrote this blog on Ghost. This is an updated version, but the original is available on my TOR archive.