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:

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.