Silicon.Valley.S04E03 and Bitcoin

And I thought it was just me.

I have never questioned my own sanity as much as I have lately. I think I’ve lost it. I’m beginning to wonder if my friends and family all think I’m crazy but for whatever reason don’t want to tell me. I’m even wondering if I’m developing some kind of anxiety disorder that requires more than NA meetings. Sadly professional help usually means medication. And for me right now drugs, legal or not are out of the question.

It seems lately I can’t go out in public without thinking to myself how ignorant most people are, me included. Our eyes and ears are glued to our cell phones like an appendage. It’s hard to believe the technology we hold in our hands all day can rule our lives the way it does. And I wonder if the smart phone is making people any smarter or the complete opposite.

I think most people in the world are lost souls looking for someone or something to give them direction. Most don’t have a clue about the importance of bitcoin and how it will help them decipher from misdirection. In a dishonest world bitcoin is similar to a lie detector for the banks. Believe it or not Blockchain technology, for better or worse is going to profoundly change our lives. We now have a means to separate the banks from the politicians. We now have honest money for everyone not just the wealthy.

Sometimes I feel like I’m preaching about the second coming of Christ and if they just “believe” in this new technology they will learn the truth about the banking industry and they will be free from the same industry that has ruled over them for their entire lives. They’ll realize how the money system that enslaves us through a debt based economy is the same system that keeps us doped on religion, sex and TV. And you think you're so clever and classless and free. Yes that’s John Lennon.

Advertising and mass media (which are owned by the banks) tells us one of the most important tools ever invented for the banking industry is bad because it can be used by criminals to buy drugs on the internet. But what they fail to tell you is it that it can be used for much more good. It can be used by politicians to prevent the bankers from hiding their crimes and becoming criminals themselves.

The fact is everybody uses money. Unfortunately for us and fortunately for the banks hardly anybody knows anything about it. And the banks like it that way. Most of us just know we need it to buy stuff. That’s how I heard about bitcoin. I needed it to buy stuff.

I think people with a 120 or higher IQ would probably understand bitcoin right away. At 110 IQ it took me a little longer before I got it. But I finally figured it out and learned how to buy drugs on a website called Silk Road. I never went through with it but I proved to myself that necessity really is the mother of invention. We can learn anything if we need it.

Once I learned how bitcoin was peer to peer, meaning that you didn’t need a third party to conduct a transaction online I was hooked. To put it plainly it is like cash over the internet. It is something that’s never been done before. Totally new, totally revolutionary, totally fucken cool. Once I understood it I couldn’t get enough of it. It was like I had found a replacement for my drug of choice. But more importantly I had found a way out. I found a way to be in this world without using drugs yet remain a part it. “Be in the world, not of it.” John 17.

I used drugs and alcohol for the same reason most people do, to get high. I want to escape to another dimension, another plain of reality, I want to get stupid, I want to get numb. I want to change my mood and or alter my mind to feel or think different. Weather I feel good and just want to feel better or I’m in pain and want it to go away there’s a drug for it, however.

George Carlin once said. “I think there’s a degree of luck and intellect involved in giving up things that hurt you. It seems to me that drugs and these things are wonderful, their wonderful when you first try them, they haven’t been around all these millennia for nothing. First time you use it’s mostly pleasure very little pain, maybe a hangover. And as you increase whatever it is you’re using, the pain part, the price you pay increases and the pleasure part decreases until the balance is completely the other way and it’s almost all pain and hardly any pleasure. At that point you would hope that the intellect would kick in and say ‘ah this doesn’t work for me anymore, I’m going to die.’ But you need people around you that can help you and you need something to live for.”

Bitcoin has given me something to live for. I know it sounds crazy but near the end of my using I would actually tell myself that I was going out to do drugs to get stupid and possibly die. I would even tell myself that I’m going out to kill myself tonight. As they say in Narcotics Anonymous “most addicts are slowly committing suicide”. Lucky for me I don’t believe NA. I Believe in Christ and his promise of eternal life. In theory I may have committed suicide on a trillion other planets in a trillion other universes, perhaps there is a quadrillion other copies of me doing things slightly different from the world I’m in now. Who knows?

Bitcoin has given me the ability to think in terms of really big numbers. There are Infinite combinations and possibilities for things to turn out different in the universe as we know it. Much similar to the infinite number of public and private key combinations in a bitcoin address. You may not have a clue about what I just said, but trust me, in time you will.