I am not sure if any of us was doing "god's work" merely because we happen to be early adopters and attempting to spread the word. Yet, at the same time, of course, times change, and so many folks in recent times have heard about bitcoin and they might even think that they know what bitcoin is, yet there are so many who are still quite ill-informed about bitcoin and there are also some people in which they have not really formed any impressions about what bitcoin is because they occupy themselves with other topics and they may well not realize that bitcoin is relevant to them and aspects of their lives.

For sure, I am torn about these ideas of why any of us should be scared to interact with others in the real world and/or to either bring up the topic of bitcoin or to pursue such topic if someone else were to bring it up... and yeah, even in the real world, their are trolls and disingenuine folks who are just trying to suck out information or to not contribute proof of work into a topic.. .I cannot necessarily blame folks who might be reserved in acting rather than talking and/or potentially talking in ways that are evasive and non-commital.. yet I see no reason to necessarily be guilty of the same kind of behaviors, since some of us have some knowledge about the topic of bitcoin and we might have some responsibilities, even though surely we are not forced to have to share information and/or to necessarily put our own-selves at risk.. but at the same time, we may well need to figure out for ourselves how great of an idea it might be to attempt to be secretive about bitcoin even though we might have mixtures of genuine and disingenuine people within the folks who will hear about our bitcoin discussions or even their coming to suppositions in regards to whether or not we have coin.


I am not opposed to taxes and/or arguments that certain kinds of activities might be more "deserving" of tax than other areas.. especially since I do consider that there are such things as public goods and/or that some public goods/services might not be produced without some kind of a reasonable public intervention.. .and yeah of course, abuses take place and yeah, sometimes systems for assigning of value to public goods/services can also be abused and/or abusive.

Wealth taxes do seem a bit problematic - even though there may be contexts in which they are not really unfair given other possible revenue sources (or other ways of extracting taxes to the extent that there is an agreement that some kinds of funding might be justified beyond mere policing and/or dispute resolution or the bare minimums of government/public service that some libertarians might consider as acceptable... not that the libertarians are correct on either assessments that government services are not needed and/or that some of the positive outcomes would not be carried out absent some kind of governmental overlay.


It does help when some folks have gone through some personal experience to see the number go up angle that might also get them to consider why the number is going up rather than presumptively (and sometimes arrogantly) concluding that they understand it sufficiently to recognize that it is too expensive, when they are likely assessing it from an ignorant position that they cannot even appreciate their own lack of ignorance... and/or their presumptiveness.

I may have told this story previously, but I was with a group of guys golfing (actually at the club house after having had golfed - mostly like an amateur kind of a gathering which why I was there just to have funz), and we were mostly peers with maybe around 6-8 guys in the conversation, yet other guys milling in and out of the conversation, so it was maybe a total of 12 guys who participated in aspects of the conversation.  

There were a few guys who were younger and some older.. and for some reason we were really going to town in regards to our bitcoin discussion, and I am thinking that it was early July-ish of 2019 since it seemed to have had predated covid, but it was still fairly recent in times.. so yeah the bitcoin price had gone from $4,200 to $13,880 and then crashed back down again.. so I think that I might have been talking with those guys around the peak of bitcoin's price for that run, even though the price had already begun to come down from the $13,880 price peak.

There were guys on the fence and several naysayers, and they were just having a good ole time ragging on me as the ONLY one who was really standing up for bitcoin, even though there were a couple of quasi-allies in the group who liked me as a person (so I had some respect in the group).. so yeah, it was a fairly fun conversation and a bit memorable for its intensity since from time to time, I was throwing out some insults towards guys who were proclaiming that bitcoin was a bubble or that it was a scam or that it was just some ephemeral phenomena... . Several arguments that I had already heard and/or addressed in this forum and also with other real life bitcoin naysayers.

A couple of the guys in the group said that they might want to get into bitcoin and/or to follow through with looking into bitcoin, yet I get the sense that none of them really did, even though they weren't exactly people that I see on a regular basis, so every once in a while I might see one or another from the group, and I might not even recall who was in the conversation or participated for some short periods, though surely several guys seemed to really enjoy the topic.. .There may have been some girls too.. but I cannot remember any specifically.

Some of the arguments about BTC price dynamics, I would suggest to not give too many shits about price, yet that those guys needed to get the fuck started buying bitcoin regularly and then maybe reassess after several years of accumulating and consider their involvement in bitcoin as a long term play rather than a trade.

Surely several of the naysayers of the group were correct for the next year or so, but they hardly could proclaim themselves to have been correct after October 2020-ish when largely bitcoin was going up and really did not come back below $10k or even below $15k anymore ever again... even in spite of the short-term period that bitcoin spent bouncing around between $15.5k and $20k in 2022 and even into parts of early 2023.  Many of us would just love to have sub $30k bitcoin and even sub $40k bitcoin would be a dream to many guys in these current times.  The odds of sub $40k or even sub $30k bitcoin ever happening again seem to be quite low, probably in the sub 2% territories, absent some bitcoin is broken discovery.


You are like the most scientific person that I never did meet.

 


This is a gloomy view of our needs (as a people - and even individually beneficial) to be able to socially interact based on a variety of topics, including something so important, such as bitcoin.