“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.
op_origins
I became interested in Bitcoin during the bull market of 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?
op_revival
Things changed when I read Broken Money by Lyn Alden in 2023. 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 and a Bitaxe solo miner), and generally tumbling down the rabbit hole.
op_next
I’ve decided to build the kind of resource which would’ve excited me before I started taking Bitcoin seriously. I intend to write explainers, interactive tutorials, and publish my open source experiments. No hype, no shilling, no bullshit.
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 hello@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