They say history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. Drilling down a bit deeper, rhymes are similar sounding utterances. Words with phonetic adjacency share patterns in their vibrational profiles. If graphed, the same person saying “king” and “ring” would produce two graph shapes that begin differently but the tail end of the graphed shape would be nearly identical for each word. When we produce sounds, we are producing waves. Waves are cycles with peaks, midlines, and troughs. When they’re saying history rhymes, they’re pointing out the ‘geometric similarity’ between events of the past and events of the present. Better yet, knowledge of the rhythmic nature of history may offer one the ability to benefit from trends expected to change the world, like Bitcoin.
Sound isn’t the only wave with which we interact on a regular basis. Everyone consuming this article is doing so because of light waves received by the eye and interpreted by the brain. In science classes in many schools, students are taught about the visible spectrum of wavelengths of light as well as the invisible tails on either end of the visible light spectrum that humans cannot typically see without the assistance of specialized equipment.
By now chemists are screaming at me about the cyclical nature of electrons orbiting nuclei. Matter itself is composed of many, very small things moving in cyclical patterns. Zooming out to the macro, the Earth itself spins on its axis every 24 hours, the moon cycles every 29.5 days from New Moon to New Moon, and the Earth revolves around the Sun once every 365.2425 days according to the Gregorian system. (Side note:@ZoomOut21 on XTwitter is a good follow for content for orange pilling normies with a “modern” attention span.) The gravitational pull of the Moon due to its combination of mass and proximity to Earth is sufficient to cause the tides on bodies of water worldwide. It’s not just the Earth, Moon, and Sun that cycle though. The Universe itself cycles. The Milky Way galaxy and all galaxies cycle. All of the stars and planets cycle.
Political scientists, technologists, economists, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, ecologists, meteorologists, demographers, cosmologists from many traditions, astrologers, and astronomers all have a tendency to focus on cycles, revolutions, waves, pendula, etc. We have life cycles, the oxygen cycle, oceanic shipping trade wind cycles, extreme weather events like hurricanes and tornados that exhibit cyclical behavior and many more. Many economic and market pundits, e.g. Mark Moss, like to talk about shorter term technological cycles, medium term economic cycles, and longer term political cycles. It makes sense that Bitcoin would participate in cycles just like everything else.
Political Cycles:
A well known theory of political cycles is The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. The Fourth Turning is often summarized succinctly with the following four statements:
The fourth turning encapsulates concepts like the hedonic treadmill, “necessity is the mother of invention”, and “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction”. Each generation, which lasts roughly 20-25 years according to Strauss and Howe, inherits certain conditions which, in alignment with Newton’s third law, causes a relatively predictable reaction and course of personal development for members of that generation. When that generation reproduces, their children will inherit a different set of circumstances that will cause a different, but still relatively predictable reaction and course of personal development for them. Each “turning” is the shift from one chapter of time to the next. The Fourth Turning is one of destruction, often involving war or some kind of revolution, bloody or otherwise.
Politically speaking, Bitcoin is as agnostic as language is, which is appropriate, because the expenditure of money is the expression of value, and therefore speech. Anyone at any time may choose to speak any language. Likewise, anyone holding Bitcoin may express value in the open market at any time by spending Bitcoin at any time. While the flaws of centralized money have existed long before 1913 and long before America itself, one modern political movement to which Bitcoin is rather inextricably linked is the Congressman Ron Paul “End the Fed” movement as well as Congressman Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign. The income tax and Federal Reserve originated in 1913 in the United States due to the Revenue Act of 1913 and the Federal Reserve Act. Congressman Ron Paul, for decades, has spoken out against fiat money, central banking, Keynesian economics, and the Federal Reserve. He advocated many times to both audit and end the Federal Reserve. Congressman Ron Paul, for decades, has seen what Bitcoiners all see: the inherent flaws of the legacy banking and money system.
The sub-prime mortgage bubble that caused the Great Financial Crisis and the Great Recession burst sometime in 2007 and 2008. Michael Burry pointed out in The Big Short that the housing positions showed returns in the 2nd quarter of 2007. For reference, Bear Stearns collapsed March 11th, 2008. Bitcoin’s Genesis block occurred on January 3rd, 2009. In the United States, the Tea Party movement arose in 2009, advocating for laissez-faire domestic economic policy. September 17th, 2011, a group of disenfranchised young people calling themselves “the other 99%” gathered at New York’s famous Wall Street to protest.
One year later, Congressman Ron Paul’s presidential campaign was in full swing. His message was one that resonated with libertarians and Austrian economists, whose respect for the perspective of the ultimate minority, the individual, is so resolute, it belongs in conversation alongside the topic of unconditional love. As such, Congressman Ron Paul’s base of campaign supporters came to adopt the word “revolution”, but with a bit of a ‘twist’.
The political belongs to the realm of statecraft, of legislation, of jurisdiction, etc. In Rome, the Codex of Justinian compiles legal proclamations issued by Roman emperors from the second to the sixth centuries CE. Bitcoin is a political rƎVO⅃ution because it represents the basis for a virtual nation in which code is law and no political boundaries are respected. Political revolutions are often bloody. Bitcoiners tend to fall on the pacifist end of the spectrum when it comes to matters of of war and the military industrial complex. Memes like “Bitcoin makes war unaffordable” or “fix the money, fix the world” are testament to that position. For that reason, Bitcoin is the heir apparent to Ron Paul’s rƎVO⅃ution.
Technological Cycles:
Moore’s law is a law that computers seem to obey regardless of state based legislation. Unlike laws of physics, Moore’s Law is linked to gains from experience in production. Moore’s Law essentially states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. Integrated circuit should sound familiar to miners, as the Bitcoin mining industry standard, the ASIC computer, stands for Application Specific Integrated Circuit.
The mining industry is alive with innovation and improvements including plenty of aftermarket innovations including fans, stands, chips, and more. Over the life of Bitcoin, mining computers have generally behaved in accordance with Moore’s Law. OG Bitcoiners mined Bitcoin on their laptops back when CPUs were competitive hashrates relative to the network hashrate. Eventually someone figured out GPUs were better than CPUs. Then someone put together ASICs which outperformed GPUs. Since then ASICs have been improving every year with higher hash rates and more efficient hash rates.
The Bitcoin halving cycle:
ASICs participate in the cyclical nature of Moore’s Law but it is their participation in the Bitcoin halving cycle that seems to get far more attention from people. In order to understand the significance of the Bitcoin halving cycle on public attention, you have to understand several other things first.
1. People fill the demands of their biological vulnerabilities most often via the economy. Most people are not self sufficient to a meaningful extent.
2. People tend to watch out for themselves first and foremost.
3. The price of 1 Bitcoin, when denominated in fiat currency units, fluctuates based on supply of Bitcoin to the markets for sale by owner and demand for Bitcoin within the markets by interested buyers.
4. Demand for Bitcoin is, on average over time, increasing.
5. Supply of Bitcoin to the markets for sale can come from a few different camps: miners, hodlers, traders, and exchanges.
- Exchanges have fiat costs to cover so fees denominated in Bitcoin that are earned by exchanges from traders often get converted into fiat. Exchanges represent a minor source of sell pressure on Bitcoin in markets that would result in lowering Bitcoin’s spot price.
- Hodlers tend to hodl and stack sats by cost averaging in with their ‘McDonalds paychecks’. Hodlers goal is to increase their stacks. Collectively, hodlers represent a net demand when it comes to Bitcoin in markets, as hodlers aren’t typically putting Bitcoin up for sale but they’re always buying.
- Traders are always selling and always buying so collectively they’re neutral on the supply and demand balance of Bitcoin/fiat price action.
- Miners have fiat operational costs like electricity, mortgage, rent, payroll, or business loans used to establish renewable energy generation infrastructure, stranded energy harvesting infrastructure, etc. Miners’ business product is Bitcoin, but their operational costs are often denominated in their local fiat currency, therefore, in order to satisfy their operational costs, these miners must sell some amount of their mined Bitcoin in exchange for their local fiat currency.
In summary, Hodlers don’t typically sell and always stack sats, traders will be traders, exchanges will be exchanges, but miners are the most consistent sellers for a variety of business model reasons.
To understand Bitcoin mining better, consider an open game of 10 minute Sudoku BINGO. The classic 9×9 newspaper logic game, Sudoku, can be difficult to solve or quite easy to solve depending on the initial numbers provided and the player’s ability to process and reason. The goal is simple in Sudoku just as it is in Bitcoin mining. In Sudoku, you want the numbers 1-9 to appear once and only once in each row, column, and in each of the nine 3×3 miniature grids that compose the 9×9 grid overall. In Bitcoin mining, each miner strives to be the first to produce a valid block hash which, among other things, means the block hash must have a sufficient number of leading zeros.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s block height was 833,052. The hash for block number 833,052 is 00000000000000000000a528d9ba5d8a6fd42bf89fca34f13738be41268dfb61. Notice the hash has 20 leading zeros. If that hash had anything other than a 0 in front of that “ leading a” it would have had only 19 leading zeros and would have been an invalid hash.
It’s pretty easy to count the number of leading zeros on a hash just like it’s pretty easy to check a sudoku puzzle’s rows, columns, and mini grids for 1-9. To be fair, there’s more to checking the cryptographic validity of a Bitcoin block hash than merely the quantity of leading zeros, but, for computers, the process of validating that hash is lightning quick.
Next, one must understand that the goal of the game is to have there be one winner every 10 minutes, on average. If there were only 3 people playing 10 minute sudoku bingo and your goal is for one of those 3 people to complete the puzzle, you might want to make the puzzle a little bit easier. If there were 3,000 people playing, trying to win the prize, with more minds attacking more puzzle variations, the law of averages suggests that one of those 3,000 competitors will anomalously solve their puzzle much earlier than their fellow competitors. In order to ensure that that anomalously early solve doesn’t happen for approximately 10 minutes (on average), the level of the difficulty of the Sudoku puzzles distributed for that round with 3,000 people playing should be increased accordingly.
In sudoku, difficulty is adjusted by providing more or less “starting numbers”. In Bitcoin, the difficulty is adjusted by changing the quantity of leading zeros required for a block hash to be considered valid. To make this easier to understand, let’s pretend there are only 12 place values worth of space to be filled by characters in a Bitcoin block hash, as opposed to the 64 place values worth of space there are in the actual hashes. 12 place values corresponds to a trillion possibilities if we’re using the decimal system as opposed to the hexadecimal system used in Bitcoin hashes.
Pretend that the current difficulty level of the Bitcoin mining competition is such that, in order to win a block, you must be the first one to find a block hash that has 4 leading zeros. That means, with 12 place values and a decimal system, you would be looking for one out of 000,099,999,999 valid possibilities, or one out of 100 million valid possible hashes.
Let’s say that the Bitcoin mining computer network, as a whole, begins finding blocks much faster than once every 10 minutes. In our hypothetical scenario, it used to take the network 10 minutes on average to find a block. In our hypothetical scenario, due to recent technological advances in mining computers coupled with more mining computers being brought online to mine, the network, as a whole, is finding blocks once every minute now, 10x faster than before.
In order to make it 10x harder to find a block, the Bitcoin mining difficulty is adjusted by increasing the number of leading zeros on a block hash that are necessary for that block to be considered a valid block. In the example, we had 12 place values and a decimal system so there were 100 million valid block hashes. After the difficulty adjustment kicks in, we would still have 12 place values but we would require 5 leading zeros instead of only 4 leading zeros. This means miners would be looking for one out of 000,009,999,999 valid possibilities, or 10 million valid possible valid hashes. The target just got 90% smaller.
When the target is smaller, it’s harder to hit. That difficulty is balanced out by the volume of shots fired by miners in an attempt to hit the target. Lesser volume of shots fired, larger target. Greater volume of shots fired, smaller target. The difficulty adjustment was Satoshi Nakamoto’s primary innovation, as the other design elements of Bitcoin had already been innovated by other cypher punks during the years leading up to 2008.
Next, one must understand the BINGO aspect of this world game. Once every ten minutes or so, someone wins the game and a new game is immediately begun. Whenever someone wins at BINGO, they win a prize. In Bitcoin mining, whenever someone wins by finding a hash with a sufficient quantity of leading zeros on it, they win two prizes! One prize is the “block subsidy” aka the “block reward”. The other prize is the transaction fees associated with each transaction represented in the block of transaction data they are “processing” in the act of writing the next block of data to the blockchain.
As was stated above, people tend to act in their own interests. Therefore, in order to get someone to act in your interests, you must incentivize them to rent out their interest to you for your purposes in exchange for some fee. Whenever a person makes any kind of payment, some kind of service occurs. Credit cards, debit cards, gift cards, personal checks, cashier’s checks, and money orders all require some kind of processing in order for redemption of that value to occur. Some employees of some bank or of some credit card issuer are doing things in the background to make your transaction happen for you based upon your demand. In return for satisfying your demand, that credit card issuer or bank takes some small fee for their services.
Fiat currency paper notes and metal coinage come with service fees as well. The service fees are self imposed and come in the form of time, energy, and attention spent on tasks like withdrawing or depositing cash from/into banks or ATMs, physically handling and securing cash and coinage, ensuring that notes and coins are not counterfeit, ensuring that you’re not short changed in transactions, etc. The fees paid for handling fiat cash are paid in the currencies of your own time and attention.
The ultra rare case is the self sufficient type. They may not need money but they pay fees in the form of time, attention, and energy, as they must produce every single thing they have for themselves. Living in a post barter economy top heavy with specialized professionals means self-sufficient types will also miss out on a lot of the perks of modern society that arise specifically due to specialization of occupation.
No matter which way you decide to live, you’re going to pay some kind of fees in order to satisfy the demands of your biological vulnerabilities. Bitcoin is no different. When you pay the clerk working the local farmer’s market 10,000 sats for a couple Honeycrisp apples, you will be paying a fee, whether it’s on the Bitcoin base chain or on the Lightning Network or on Liquid. Those fees go to the entity who provided the service, as it ought to be. In the case of the Bitcoin base blockchain (i.e. not Lightning and not Liquid), those fees you pay go to the miner who processes your transaction by including your transaction data into the block they are adding to the end of the “blockchain”.
Of the two primary incentives to mine Bitcoin, the fees are the lesser incentive. The dominant incentive, for the time being, is the block subsidy or block reward. Whenever a miner finds a valid block hash with a sufficient quantity of leading zeros, a few things happen. A batch of new transactions has just been processed within the Bitcoin network. The miner who found that valid block hash and processed that batch of transactions, having done work on behalf of the network, earns some amount of newly minted Bitcoin.
Like any currency, Bitcoin must be ‘minted’, so to speak, by some process. Fiat money is minted nowadays with a few keystrokes and clicks of a mouse. How many people click mouses hundreds or thousands of times per day but never earn billions or trillions of dollars for their efforts? The selling price of any product approaches, from above, the cost of production, due to competitive forces within the marketplace. If trillions of US dollars can be printed with the click of a mouse, those dollars are, for all practical purposes, worthless. Think about it. How much would you personally be willing to pay another human being to click a mouse and maybe type a few keystrokes? Nowhere near billions of dollars, let alone trillions.
In Bitcoin, there will not be billions or trillions of units. There will only ever be 21 million units of Bitcoin, or, 2.1 quadrillion satoshis, as there are 100,000,000 satoshis per Bitcoin. No matter how you slice this pizza, the pie is absolutely scarce. In order to issue those 21,000,000 coins, Satoshi Nakamoto devised an issuance schedule that the Greek philosopher, Zeno of Elea, would appreciate. Zeno reasoned that a runner would never reach the finish line because the runner must first cover half of the remaining distance to the finish line. Once there, the runner must cover half of the remaining half of the distance to the finish line. Once at the three-quarters mark, the runner must cover half of the remaiing 25% of the distance to the finish line, etc. Zeno extrapolates this ad infinitum and reasons that the runner will never cross the finish line which is practically absurd.
Satoshi’s Bitcoin issuance schedule is very similar. The first 50% of all Bitcoin that will ever exist were minted between January 3rd 2009 and November 28, 2012. For those first few years, every time there was a new block found by some miner, that miner earned, in addition to any transaction fees that were offered by network transactors, 50 newly minted Bitcoin. Half of 21,000,000 is 10,500,000, and at 50 newly minted Bitcoin per block, that divides out to 210,000 blocks.
210,000 blocks at a targeted average of 10 minutes per block maths out to roughly 3.99 years. Every 210,000 blocks, something important happens in Bitcoin. The block reward gets cut in half. This is known as the halving or the halvening depending on which Bitcoiner you ask. That means on November 29, 2012, miners were only earning 25 Bitcoin per block instead of 50 Bitcoin per block like they were just a few days prior.
There have been 3 halvings in Bitcoin thus far and each halving has been followed by a massive bull run. The November 28, 2012 halving was followed by the 2013 bull run. The July 9, 2016 halving was followed by the 2017 bull run, and the May 11, 2020 halving was followed by the 2021 bull run.
Yellow arrows are post-halving bull markets.
So why does this happen? It comes back to the basics of economics: supply and demand. In general, the demand for Bitcoin has, on average, been somewhere between neutral and increasing which should have a positive impact on price, standing alone. If we consider supply of Bitcoin for sale on the open markets, the primary sources of Bitcoin are exchanges who must sell some of the Bitcoin fees they collect into fiat to pay their operational expenses and miners who must sell some of the Bitcoin they mine into fiat to pay their operational expenses. When the halving occurs, the miners income has been cut in half, meaning the miners, as a collective, have half as much Bitcoin available to sell to the open markets without dipping into their own Bitcoin savings.
If the demand for Bitcoin is neutral to increasing but the supply of Bitcoin for sale to the markets is, all of a sudden, cut by a significant percentage, there will be a bidding war amongst those demanding Bitcoin and the price will surge upwards. This is why, every 4 years or so, the price of Bitcoin skyrockets up to new all time highs to much fanfare and speculative hype, particularly from the mainstream media and outsider tourists in awe of the price volatility.
Esoteric/Religious Cycles:
We’ve seen that Bitcoin participates in political cycles, technological cycles, and halving cycles. For a moment, let’s entertain some other kinds of cycles of a more esoteric nature. We use ideas like eras, ages, and epochs to functionally describe distinguishable periods of time from one another. The Mayan Calendar famously cycled on the winter solstice of the year 2012. Many people misinterpreted that Mayan calendar event as “the end of the world”, however, the more appropriate translation would be “the end of the world as we know it”. The world we knew before 12/21/2012 was pretty different. Computers, internet, satellites, smart touch screen camera phones, and wireless internet were in the process of completely changing life on Earth. All human knowledge had become available on demand in a pocket sized package. Less than a month before the Mayan calendar changed over, the first Bitcoin halving took place. From a zoomed out perspective, such as the Mayan calendars, that’s incredibly well aligned, chronologically speaking. While Genesis Block Day was a few years before, everything is a process and epochs, like pieces of fabric, are joined by some amount of overlap/seam.
Maya, interestingly, is a word native to both the western hemisphere’s Mayan civilization as well as the eastern hemisphere’s Buddhist and Hindu religions. In Buddhist and Hindu teachings, maya is the veil that is pulled over our eyes from birth, that exists between reality and our perception. Buddhist and Hindu teachings also have cycles. Karma is often described as a cycle. A Yuga cycle consists of four “world ages”. The four Yugas are Satya (or Krita) Yuga, the Treta Yuga, the Dwarapa Yuga, and the Kali Yuga. According to Puranic sources, the Dwarapa Yuga ended and the Kali Yuga began in 3102 B.C.E. with the death of Krishna. Near the end of the Kali Yuga cycle, when virtues are at their worst, a cataclysm and a re-establishment of virtuous behaviors that promote societal harmony occurs. Kalki is described in the Puranas as the avatar who rejuvenates existence by ending the darkest and destructive period to remove unrighteousness, and ushering in the Satya Yuga, riding a white horse with a fiery sword.
While, technically, we’re only just over 1% of the way through the 432,000 year long period of Kali Yuga, many Bitcoiners would quite eloquently point out the remarkable similarities between the description of the Kali Yuga period near the end and modern day clown world. As noted in one of my previous articles entitled “Time is Bitcoin”, the ‘Bitcoin metanoia’ is quite real. People who put in a sufficient amount of work to understand Bitcoin ultimately follow a similar pattern of life choices. The Bitcoin metanoia produces healthy eating, exercise, entrepreneurial endeavors, marriages, growing baby Bitcoiners, art, philosophy, and, ultimately, some kind of “higher seeking”, or what Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs would call self-actualization. This Bitcoin metanoia seems to align well with the ‘re-establishment of virtuous behaviors that promote societal harmony’ which was the description of the cataclysm that occurs at the end of the Kali Yuga when morals are at their worst.
Likewise, the figure of Satoshi Nakamoto aligns with the image of Kalki. Kalki bears a flaming sword symbolic of divine knowledge and the power to cut through ignorance, falsehood, and the forces of darkness. Many Bitcoiners wonder if Satoshi was a time traveler, a benevolent alien, a group of collaborators, or a divinely inspired genius polymath, among many other possibilities. Certainly Bitcoin has the power to cut through falsehoods and ignorance. The Bitcoin network takes the mutual distrust of network participants and flips that mutual distrust into a sort of “trust protocol” that facilitates mutually beneficial commerce while protecting network participants from economic gatekeepers and the devastating effects that money printing has on the purchasing power of national fiat currencies.
Many Bitcoiners will tell you all about the nefarious plots of central bankers gathering on Jekyll Island or at Bretton Woods. They’ll tell you all about the military industrial complex’s role as a beneficiary of the Cantillon Effect, which essentially points out that those ‘closest’ to the money printer benefit the most from the newly printed units of currency. The further one gets from the font of newly issued units of currency, the less marginal benefit one gets. Distance from the money printer can be measured in terms of the number of ‘spends’ it takes for any of the newly printed money to reach a particular participant in the economy. Bitcoiners often talk of Bitcoin evangelism as orange pilling, the color wheel neighbor of red pilling. In ‘The Matrix’, taking the red pill was like ringing a bell that could not be un-rung. Orange pilled Bitcoiners and red pilled conspiracy theorists have a lot of overlap in their Venn diagrams. Bitcoiners are often keenly aware of clandestine plots, hidden agendas, and systemic oppression often couched just under the surface where normie vision fails to penetrate.
Universal cycles:
In Greek mythology, the phrase “under the surface” might well apply to the underworld. Pluto was the god of the underworld. As Jason Lowery pointed out in his Amazon best-selling MIT thesis “Softwar”, animals in nature engage in power projection competitions in order to come to a consensus on the state of the chain of custody of resources. Pluto, astrologically speaking, is all about exposing power and truth. Pluto takes 248 years to complete a full revolution meaning it tends to spend many years in each astrological sign’s “house”.
Since 2008, Pluto has been in Capricorn. Capricorn is a sign of industry, unfailing drive, tradition, etc. This period since 2008 has belonged to the Wall St. banks and major Fortune 500 corporations. These entities have cozied up to the politicians and bureaucrats positioned next to the levers of power, i.e. the money printer and the gears of government. Since the sub-prime mortgage bond bubble burst in 2007/2008, these “too big to fail” entities have been the beneficiaries of favoritism in the form of socialist corporate bailouts funded by the theft of purchasing power from the masses via “quantitative easing” and other euphemisms for money printing.
Aquarius, on the other hand, has an energy of pure intentions, truth, and transparency. Aquarius has a “facts don’t care about your feelings” type of attitude much like the Bitcoin honey badger community. Aquarius has a communicative, innovative, rational energy to it, much like Bitcoin.
The last time Pluto was in Aquarius was technically 2023 because Pluto has a bit of a ‘wonky’ orbit. From March 23, 2023 through June 11, 2023, Pluto had its ‘first transit’ through Aquarius before returning to Capricorn for a bit. Bitcoiners might find it interesting that, just 2 weeks before Pluto entered Aquarius, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank both failed. In May 2023, First Republic Bank failed as well. While the dates don’t line up exactly, Bitcoiners looking for signs indicating that a Bitcoin standard is imminent may find what they seek in the alignment of the stars.
As of January 20, 2024, Pluto is back in Aquarius and will remain there until September 1, 2024, at which point it will make it’s final transit through Capricorn this cycle, just in time for U.S. election season…yikes. It’s worth noting that the SEC approved 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs within 2 weeks of Pluto moving back into Aquarius for this second transit. Pluto will wave goodbye to Capricorn for a very long time on November 19, 2024. Pluto will remain in Aquarius until March 8, 2043.
Excluding the 2023 transit and the present transit, the last time Pluto was in Aquarius was roughly 226 years ago. The period from 1778 to 1798 included the majority of the American Revolution, the establishment of the United States of America, the French Revolution, the Irish Uprising, and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The world saw a major shift in power and truth. Monarchies and dictatorships were exposed. Constitutional republics and representative democracies were formed in many countries. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to a new class of global powerbrokers: the industrial tycoons. That said, Pluto’s presence in Aquarius seems to have already signaled the downfall of the legacy financial system and the rise of something communicative, rational, innovative, humanitarian, and fact based: Bitcoin. We have roughly 19 years of Pluto in Aquarius for the Bitcoin rƎVO⅃ution to play out.
Astrology and astronomy were once one and the same study. Both areas of study focus on cycles. Bitcoiners, when out in the trenches, distributing orange pills to normies, are often met with the question of systemic failure due to an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), natural or man-made. Man-made EMPs would not wipe out the entire Bitcoin network. All but one node would have to be taken down, as would a ton of mining hashpower worldwide. Students of Bitcoin’s decentralized anti-fragility might suggest that Bitcoin as a whole will survive such an event, barring total nuclear apocalypse.
Likewise, Bitcoin, as a whole, would survive any natural EMPs it encountered, such as the EMP that accompanies a coronal mass ejection (CME). CMEs can occur at any time, however, during the maximum phase of the 11 year solar cycle the frequency and magnitude of these events peaks. CMEs disrupt the flow of solar wind. This can damage systems near Earth (e.g. Blockstream satellites) and on Earth (e.g. nodes, ASICs, etc.). During the “solar maximum” phase of the cycle, for several years, the frequency of G4 and G5 geomagnetic storms due to a CME increases. If a G4 or G5 storm hits Earth, it could possibly have a significant impact on communications including cellphone networks, satellite networks, and wireless internet access.
In the event that a region’s electronics got fried due to a solar cycle CME EMP, Bitcoiners would be temporarily disabled from using Bitcoin, depending on the extent of the damage and the location of each Bitcoiner respective to the center and radius of the damaged region. Money is the method used by most Bitcoiners to satisfy the demands of their biological vulnerabilities. We all need to eat food, drink water, have shelter/warmth/energy, and create and maintain security. We typically pay for food someone else has produced, energy that someone else has produced, etc. Few people produce for themselves in a self-sustaining capacity.
Lack of self-sustainability is a threat to the Bitcoin rƎVO⅃ution. Bitcoiners must persevere. Bitcoiners must thrive and outcompete nocoiners. It would be most ironic for any wealthy Bitcoiners to die because they were ill prepared to deal with a medium to long term power outage caused by a probabilistically predictable and astronomically-cyclical event. The empty apartment memes are funny, but depending on the totality of circumstances of the sat stacker living the minimalist lifestyle, that empty apartment may be a huge mistake. What happens when the world shuts down? We got tastes of that at times over the last 4 years. You’ll have no pantry depth, minimal security, no land to grow, hunt, fish, trap, or raise livestock upon, reliance on the water grid, reliance on the energy grids, etc. Bitcoin is anti-fragile. Bitcoiners would do well to follow suit in planning their lifestyle.
In Fantasy Football, when a pro football team has two excellent running backs as starter and backup, a Fantasy Football team owner who acquires the starting running back might also elect to acquire the backup running back too. This is called a “handcuff” play. If the starter goes down, you have the backup. This is the fantasy sports version of the Survivalist’s Rule of Redundancy, i.e. two is one and one is none.
Preparedness, in the ‘Doomsday Prepper’ sense of the term, is a logical handcuff to being a Bitcoiner, because, in the event that there is some sort of grid down scenario, whether it’s due to war, famine, disease, CME EMP, or otherwise, the prepared Bitcoiner will be able to survive long enough regain access to their Bitcoin. Once that is done, they’ll yet again be able to use their Bitcoin to acquire more resources or services as needed, including the replenishment of emergency preparations that were needed and used during the emergency.
Prepping isn’t just a good idea to hedge against war between nation states or CME EMPs. Prepping is a good idea from a missionary vantage point. Bitcoin stands to disrupt the hegemony of the Rothschild family central banking cartel and their network of collaborators worldwide. These are the same people who fund both sides of wars just so they can hold some power over the victor, regardless of who the victor is. It may be a huge mistake to assume that the legacy system on which many Bitcoiners still depend will always be there for us. Military strategists and historians know. Siege warfare is effective because it cuts off the castle under seige from supply lines. They dam up the river that serves the castle. The castle is limited to the food it has stored inside which will only last so long. Eventually the people inside capitulate from thirst, starvation, or worse. Supply line warfare is a very real threat and everyone would do well to mitigate it as best they can.
They say not to count your chickens before the eggs have hatched. In the interest of carrying this rƎVO⅃ution through, it is incumbent upon Bitcoiners to survive and thrive. We’ve had a lot of victories, especially lately. Many types of cycles seem to be aligning in Bitcoin’s favor, but we must be prudent. The Bitcoin citadel meme exists for good cause. If the legacy system goes full Orwell mode, the 15 minute cities will offer little to no hospitality to Bitcoiners.
Anarchy means “rules, without rulers”. The internet and Bitcoin are excellent examples of anarchistic systems. Permaculture is an anarcho design science focused on systems level thinking. Permaculture has a core directive and three ethics. The prime directive states that ‘the only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.’ The three ethics are: care of the Earth, care of the Earth’s inhabitants, and the return of surplus.
Bitcoin benefits people as has been discussed already. Brandon Quittem pointed out in “Bitcoin is a Pioneer Species” how Bitcoin benefits humans who, in turn, benefit the Earth, which, in turn, benefits all of Earth’s inhabitants. Students of the Bitcoin mining industry would be quick to point out that Bitcoin does not waste energy but rather Bitcoin uses wasted energy. This idea satisfies the “return of surplus” ethic of permaculture. Bitcoin is permaculture money.
Permaculture is not strictly a food production design science, however is is most often associated with food production. As Bill Mollison noted, you cannot rely upon the system you attack. We must build a parallel economy. We must produce our own everything as a Bitcoin economy. It’s a lot like Europeans settling in the Americas. There were no blacksmiths. There were no inns. There were no stables. There was no settlement infrastructure. They had to build it all up from scratch. Starting from scratch is a hard job but the fruit of success in such an endeavor is independence.
The 13 American colonies perhaps initially relied upon supplies brought by explorers from Europe, but, eventually colonists grew to be resource independent. Bitcoiners would do well to learn from this historical example, and not just in terms of food, water, security, shelter, etc. This applies directly to the technology we use in order to use the Bitcoin network. Apple’s and GooglePlay’s App Stores both recently gatekept Wallet of Satoshi. Apple leaned on mobile NOSTR browser app ‘Damus’ because of the zap feature. Microsoft, IBM, Apple…all of the big tech manufacturers are, for all practical purposes, beneficiaries of the legacy system’s hegemony which stands to be disrupted by Bitcoin. Sun Tzu, the wise, adversarial thinker, might suggest that Bitcoiners should familiarize themselves with Linux operating systems and learn to code in ways that are relevant to one’s ability to send and receive Bitcoin.
With that in mind, consider this a call to service. Your virtual nation, Bitcoin, needs your knowledge, your experience, and your talents. This economy needs Bitcoin friendly smart mobile devices, app stores, chip producers, miners, ranchers, producers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers, coders, and much more. As of right now, we are a semi-organized, autonomous group of network participants with, for sure, one aligned objective: the success of Bitcoin in ending the era of fiat money on Earth. While this is to be a peaceful battle, it would be appropriate to think of the Bitcoin community as an army of sorts. We share a common objective and we share common opponents. Armies need much more than front line combatants. They need administrators. They need people to make sandwiches. They need mechanics to check engine lights. They need engineers and buidlers (buidl…hodl…you get it) to design stuff. They need all sorts of people for all sorts of roles.
Bitcoiners are a growing but still small hyperminority. We don’t have that many people, but the people we do have possess incredible skillsets and intelligence. Because we’re working with a relatively small slice of the global population, we need as many Bitcoiners as possible working in Bitcoin on Bitcoin projects.
That said, all hands on deck! Banks are failing but this battle won’t win itself.
Many cycles are aligned. The world is ripe for change, and this time, the rƎVO⅃ution is Bitcoin!
March 24, 2024:
Fellow Bitcoiner, writer, teacher, and entrepreneur, Tim Niemeyer, in his latest contribution to the Bitcoin education sector, has begun a new podcast series entitled “Don’t Take My Word for It…” in which he reads written Bitcoin content in audiobook podcast format and, afterwards, offers his own thoughtful commentary on the piece. The pilot episode features this article, rƎVO⅃ution is Bitcoin. I applaud and am grateful for Tim’s appreciation and amplification of my message, literally and figuratively.
Thank you, Tim. I hope this message resonates with our fellow Bitcoiners as it did with you.
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