Nobody Orange-Pilled You — Or Me, Or Anybody

“the first fractions of a bitcoin will find you
as soon as you are ready to receive them.” –Gigi

“Orange-pill” might no longer be the most accurate term for becoming a Bitcoiner anymore, but it conveys the core idea. Like Morpheus presenting the blue and red pills to Neo in the Matrix, it conveys a moment of choice, or being presented with knowledge: Who made you see that bitcoin was a good idea? Who made you a “Bitcoiner”?

Sometimes we can point to a specific such person or moment, but more often it’s a slow drip from a leaky faucet, quietly turning into an open tap and then, explosively… flooding the entire kitchen.

Everyone did; world events did; my subconscious did; perhaps even Satoshi himself did.

All of these answers are true-ish. In “Satoshi and Me,” Tomer Strolight spoke vividly about how Satoshi “got me… deep deep deep inside my mind. And he left his mark all over it.”

A friend asked me a few months back whether he was the one who orange-pilled me. “Pff,” I said, “if anything, you failed to orange-pill me!”

We referred to some flowy conversations in 2018 and 2019, where we went back and forth over money, savings, monetary policy, what central banks do and how economies function. He tried repeatedly to show me how bitcoin was better; I couldn’t grasp how that speculative, techy tulip thing could be — let alone how bitcoin could ever supplant an (ideally) functioning central bank. I saw the same macro problems he did; I just thought we needed better (fiat) monetary policy to fix them.

For those of us living not by the sword but by the pen, we have to do most of our learning in public; our ideas become a time-stamped matter of public record. Clearly, then, I became a Bitcoiner somewhere in the 2017-2021 region, having already very reluctantly received my first showcase sats well before then:

• “I Have Doubts About Bitcoin” (Dec ’17): Bitcoin-curious.
• “Bitcoin’s Fixed Money Supply Is a Weakness” (Aug ’19): a hostile no-coiner.
• “There Will Be No New Bitcoin Man” (May ’20): an annoyed obsessive.
• “How Much of My Portfolio Should be Allocated to Bitcoin?” (Aug ’21): an apologetic, an optimistic believer — a soft orange-pill.
• “How Bad Is Bitcoin’s Flaw?” (Dec ’21): one of us, one of us!

At the end of that year, on these very pages, I tried to account for my intellectual journey and pointed to Covid (authoritarianism) and market prices as having changed my mind. Those were important accelerators, but the point is that my mind was already receptive to the idea. I clearly remember having looked under Bitcoin’s hood with Yan Pritzker’s Inventing Bitcoin. Spending hours with Stephan Livera yapping in my podcast-hungry ears, beginning with his first podcast episode in July 2018, probably didn’t hurt either. (Since then, I’ve edited some of the most crucial reads for anyone’s orange-pill journey: “The Genesis Book,” Broken Money, Bitcoin Age.)

My friend’s repeated, passionate arguments during those formative years were probably decisive, setting me up for embracing Satoshi in my heart. There was no specific orange-pill moment, and the intellectual (and, I suppose, ethical) trajectory I went through was anything but smooth — with plenty of soul-searching and reassessments of core beliefs along the way.

Orange-Pilled Hemingway: We Learn the Same Way We Go Bankrupt

“I don’t try to orange-pill people anymore… but if you have a question about it,
I’ve got all the time in the day” –James “Checkmate” Check

We come to the realizations we do the same way we go bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly… and it’s hard to point to the beginning or an exact turning point, for orange-pilling or indeed anything we come to believe or embrace strongly.

At the end of his excellent essay, Strolight writes that when Satoshi was done with him, the experience left him speechless. Truly. Many people have expressed similar notions: When Bitcoin has finished rummaging around in your head, you are no longer the same person you once were.

This thing — whatever it is, whatever its fate — never ceases to amaze us. And even when it possesses us, making us obsessed with it, it’s hard to trace where, in our minds, it came from and who made us see what we now so clearly behold.

So, next time you have a Bitcoin conversation that felt like a waste of your time, remember: It might not have been.

This post Nobody Orange-Pilled You — Or Me, Or Anybody first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Joakim Book.