“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” - Satoshi Nakamoto
Everyone starts out thinking they’re late to Bitcoin; I certainly did.
The moment it clicks, though, you realise that the opposite is true. You are early.
Bitcoin is still a long way from its potential, but I’m convinced it gets there over a long enough timeline.
op_origins
I became a ‘casual enthusiast’ of Bitcoin during the first big bull market in 2017. I read Satoshi’s whitepaper, watched a few explainers on YouTube, and built up a basic understanding of how it worked. I thought it was clever - the parts I understood, anyway. I bought a small amount of Bitcoin and settled down as a long-term HODLer to watch the peaks, troughs, and wild headlines over the years.
My interest nosedived in 2021 when the NFT circus rolled in. Watching people get swindled into spending millions on cartoon monkeys and shitcoins, I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe this wasn’t the future of finance after all. If DeFi and blockchains were the technologies which would save us from the crumbling fiat system, why did everything new in crypto feel so grubby and scam-like?
The collapse of FTX and Terra in 2022 did nothing to change my views, and I more or less forgot about crypto for several years.
op_revival
Things changed when I read Broken Money by Lyn Alden. This is an excellent and highly accessible book, which I’d recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in financial technology and economics. The book’s latter chapters on cryptocurrency challenged many of my preconceptions, particularly around the energy costs associated with proof-of-work blockchains and Bitcoin’s role in developing or authoritarian countries.
After finishing the book (which is also available as an audiobook), I wanted to learn more. Since then, I’ve spent almost all of my free time reading about Bitcoin, listening to Bitcoin podcasts, building Bitcoin hardware (a node, a Bitaxe solo miner), and generally tumbling down the rabbit hole.
op_next
I’ve decided to turn this website - a decade-old blog which has drifted aimlessly for many years now - into something which excites me. The handful of old posts I wrote previously can now be found in the archives. Going forward, this website will be a Bitcoin resource — no hype, no shilling, no bullshit.
I intend to write explainers, interactive tutorials, publish my open source experiments, and generally create something I wish I’d had when I got started.
I’ve been inspired by Wait But Why and Learn Me A Bitcoin - both brilliant websites. Here, I’m aiming to create something in-between.
The site will run no advertising or marketing software - no cookies or tracking scripts whatsoever. It’ll be reader supported. If you like what I’m doing, any donations will be gratefully accepted (once I’ve built something worthwhile).
Thanks for reading. Any comments or feedback, you can reach me at tom@bennet.org.
“It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on. If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Once it gets bootstrapped, there are so many applications if you could effortlessly pay a few cents to a website as easily as dropping coins in a vending machine.” - Satoshi Nakamoto