Wish you well. While I am also not optimist about what is coming, Bitcoin remains for me the “beacon” of reason in this environment. Regarding your interesting 11month old post I have the following to say: Your quote: “Adopting a healthy way of living is hard. It means saying no to the constant onslaught of sugary snacks, fast-food around every corner, and social pressures to indulge. It means taking responsibility for your decisions, cultivating discipline, taking care of your body, your psyche, and yes, also your soul.” Did you walk down any beach in summer in any Western country? How many fit, healthy looking people do you see? Maybe 1%, 2%? Not much more. I have learned that the following is a rough rule of thumb which plays out both in society and within business/working environments: 20% are the smartest, critical minds, 20% are hopeless, dumb people nothing you can ever do to save them, they are wasted and a liability for society, 60% are the mediocre mass which can be positively influenced if the top 20% smart people are good enough to pull them on their side or, if the “dumb/hopeless” cohort is more influential than the smart ones, they can be negatively influenced. In this case - and there are many historical such cases both in societies and companies - the societies descend into chaos and the companies collapse. We are at this juncture in Western societies now. We are descending into chaos. The smart, critical minded cohort, which was attracted to #Bitcoin in the past is largely exhausted. I have explained it in this Primal article which has achieved the pretty impressive result of 0-zero, null, nessuno, rien, nada readings. https://primal.net/bitcoindollar/the-scarcity-of-critical-thinking-and-the-future-of-bitcoin Some, like myself, are voting with their feet and have already left or plan to leave. The rest does not have the capability, the will or the interest to understand what Bitcoin is, what money is, what power gives fiat money to the elites who benefit from that and what are the negative consequences for them. “Panem et circenses” is what they want and they are getting it, while the elites enrich themselves at the expenses of all the others. https://primal.net/e/ War is part of that, it always has been. Saylor is right, bitcoin paper financial products like STRC is all they will ever want and understand. Forget self-custody. We have always been a small elite, we are and always will be. Still, while the financialization of bitcoin is both inevitable and not a net positive, it is also not completely negative at least for its price in the medium to long term: if in the West bottom-up adoption is exhausted the only ones who can pull the price up by adopting Bitcoin is Wall Street adoption and its financialization. #Nostr is different. It is easy to understand and has a clear and immediate utility that people perceive in its daily use (censorship resistance). The only drawback is the slow growth of users and the network effect which still massively favors the incumbents. So much that so far Nostr has been for me a total waste of time both for writing content (no traction whatsoever) and for bitcoin fundraising for needing people in developing countries (again no traction whatsoever). So much so that I have almost stopped posting and using Nostr at all except for using it as a permanent ledger of news and topics which I want to keep an immutable record of. You cannot save the 80% from themselves, the elites know that, they old the keys of the system and will not let go. Custodial bitcoin becomes just another financial tool, coopted by the elites, to sterilize its monetary potential as a global P2P currency and make ensure that also they can safely transition to the new system (another fiat variation of the preceding) when the time will come. A scarce asset to preserve purchasing power in a collapsing financial system is also something they need. Just hold your keys and wait for that moment to come. It will. For once we have front-run them and they are playing catch up. Dont be shaken out of your coins. Successful revolutions have never been done from outsiders, an elite has always replaced another one, never the plebs.
