GM everyone except for people who text you 'can I ask you something' instead of asking the actual thing

Last night we had our monthly @Bitcoin Bitches meetup in Milan, Italy We used to have a fixed spot for the meetup, a place that accepted Bitcoin but it recently shut down. So we found a new one. It’s this old music shop that’s recently turned into a wine and food bar. Kind of a magical place, actually. Also, the food and wine are.... perfection 🫶 The owner accepts Bitcoin… but he’s not excited about it. He doesn’t really get it, and honestly, it feels like paying him in sats or with Paypal makes zero difference to him. His friend put him place on 'btcmap.org', downloaded him 'Wallet of Satoshi' and I was his first transaction two months ago. The old bar owner was totally into it, you could feel the vibe. This guy? You get the feeling he’d rather be paid in cash. SO WHO'S BETTER? I mean, of course it’s more satisfying to support people who are excited about Bitcoin. They usually give you a smile, sometimes even a discount. But the truth is, Bitcoin is a payment system, not a religion. It’s not supposed to feel like a revolution for everyone. And if we keep waiting for ideology to win people over, we’ve probably already lost. That’s not how this works. This guy has no idea how to convert his sats into euros, and I actually told him not to bother. One transaction a month? Just keep them. One day, while his euros buy him half of what they used to, his Bitcoin might quietly be worth more. That’s how you get orange-pilled sometimes, by accident. In the end, I kind of like this pragmatic approach. Sometimes at conferences I’m overwhelmed by people who changed their friends, their diets, their mindset, everything for Bitcoin… and honestly, I think we’d be better off looking at it with colder eyes. More clarity, less noise. So let me ask you: Would you pay in Bitcoin at a place where they don’t care about Bitcoin at all, or do you prefer to support only the enthusiasts?

I made a mistake during my Bitcoin lecture last week in the university of Bologna. One I’m not going to repeat. I assumed something. And I shouldn’t have. Since I was talking about my job, I told the students that a big part of it is debunking myths around Bitcoin... You know, the usual stuff: Bitcoin is a Ponzi, it’s going to zero, it’s killing the planet. I built like 15 slides for this. I was ready to fight. Ready to debunk every single one of them, one by one. So I asked them: “What’s something negative you’ve heard about Bitcoin?” Silence. No one raised their hand. No one mentioned pollution. No one said anything about volatility or scams. These were 22 years old, curious, open-minded, and genuinely there to learn. They didn’t have myths to unlearn. So there I was, spending the next 20 minutes talking about gas flaring, carbon-negative mining, and all the reasons Bitcoin is not what “they” say it is. But “they,” in this case, didn’t even exist. The only person bringing up those narratives was me. And that’s when it hit me. All these years in the Bitcoin scene have trained my brain to always be on the defensive. To expect resistance. To anticipate criticism. And that mindset slowly killed a part of the joy I used to feel when I first learned about Bitcoin. Back then, no one had told me it was bad. I just found it exciting, revolutionary, empowering. My brain wasn’t busy filtering negative takes it was busy being amazed. That beginner’s energy, that childish awe, that sense of discovering something precious, it’s something I want to reconnect with. I don’t want to be the person who walks into a room full of open minds and immediately starts talking about the bad things people say. I want to talk about freedom from banks and government, creativity, women empowerment, potential. I’m not saying I’ll stop responding to critics when necessary. But I want to stop assuming that everyone is a critic. There are way more people out there who are just curious, interested, open to learning, than there are loud contrarians I’ll never change the mind of anyway. From now on, I want to speak to the curious ones. Not the ghosts in my head.

Maybe the mistake I’ve always made when talking about Bitcoin was saying that the system was broken, like economists were stupid or something. But it’s not broken. It works perfectly. It took me a while to realize this. We live in an era where we can cure once-incurable diseases, send people to Mars, and build AI that simulates human thought. And yet, we can’t ensure that two working adults can afford a stable life? No, it’s not incompetence. They're not stupid. It’s not bad luck. It’s by design. The economy isn’t in crisis. It’s just that we’re not at the center of it. It’s engineered to transfer wealth and power upward. The Cantillon Effect isn’t a side effect = it’s the engine of the system. Money is the source code of power. And as long as it’s arbitrarily created by those who decide who gets it first, every effort within this system is doomed to be extracted. Bitcoin doesn’t exist to fix anything. It exists to build an alternative outside this rigged game. A system where value isn’t distorted at its creation. Realizing that the system works perfectly, just not for us, is the first step to opting out. I opt out.