Episode 19: Dale (@btc_shepherd from www.thebitcoinshepherd.com) on discovering bitcoin, orange pilling no-coiners, badmouthing shitcoins, broken legacy system incentives, and finding purpose.

Thanks to our guest: https://twitter.com/btc_shepherd of https://thebitcoinshepherd.com Host: https://twitter.com/mission_bitcoin Sponsored by HardBlock: https://www.hardblock.com.au Notes - Dale's personal journey into bitcoin after dabbling in law, real estate, and financial planning - Learning about money printing, inflation, "intrinsic value", and macroeconomics from the likes of Lyn Alden, Paul Tudor Jones, Raoul Pal, and Simon Dixon - Understanding the philosophies behind bitcoin (e.g., separating state and money) - Starting The Bitcoin Shepherd (www.thebitcoinshepherd.com) to help orange pill no-coiners and help them with self-custody - The importance of understanding the economic, technological, and philosophical reasons for bitcoin - Needing nuanced and adversarial thinking to check your biases - Bitcoin's value comes from its utility and monetary properties - Bitcoin provides full risk with full reward, whereas bonds provide a negative real yield with the full risk of default (i.e., no returns, all risk!) - Finding a niche in bitcoin education and prioritising quality of life (rather than just mining fiat) - Writing about bitcoin and badmouthing shitcoins as a journalist for www.cryptonews.com.au - Working with South Africans to establish geographically distributed multi-signature custody options - Wrestling with the desire to wear bitcoin merch and talk to everyone about bitcoin while keeping good opsec - Differences in privacy and security risks between South Africa and Australia - Using multi-sig, ColdCard decoy pins, and decoy passphrases to improve bitcoin security - Buying property, bitcoin, and/or bitcoin miners and then using the assets as collateral to buy more bitcoin - Choosing a vocation/career based on what problems do you want to solve - Non-fungible tokens (NFTs): benefits for artists, hype cycles, wash trading, scams, and money laundering - How family and friends have responded to transitioning to a bitcoin evangelical vocation - Mainstream / corporate media: Bitcoin holders are psychopaths, and if you want to buy a house you should save more fiat, invest in stocks, and leverage more debt - Lightning Network will cut the lunch of expensive, inefficient, and corruptible intermediaries - Using demonstrations to orange pill, rather than just explanations (although 'what is money?' and 'fractional reserve banking' are always important topics to discuss) - 4-year political cycles incentivize manipulation of the money supply - Legacy media is driven by broken incentives (e.g., being first, being sensational to get clicks, and lazy writing that is derivative of other articles) - There's a fine line between dispelling FUD and giving it credibility by responding in the first place - Using memes and calling out absurdity - Benefits of bitcoin mining (bootstrapping renewable infrastructure, stabilising grid demand, rescuing stranded and otherwise wasted energy) - Most normies will own or use bitcoin without even realising it (e.g., due to superannuation allocations) - Things to be bullish about: Lightning adoption; hash rate ATH; nation-state adoption; bitcoin development and mining thriving; bitcoiners are honest, motivated, and innovative; and Jerome Powell and Janet Yellen's recent comments about the US dollar and bitcoin - Threats to bitcoin: cryptocurrency as a distraction, government over-regulation, and privacy concerns - Topics that tangent out from bitcoin: low time preference.