EvoLensArt on Nostr: IFoundations 1Bitcoin Only 2Don’t Trust, Verify 3Not ...
IFoundations
1Bitcoin Only
2Don’t Trust, Verify
3Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins
4The Get-Rich-Slow-Scheme (DCA, BTFD, HODL)
521 Million (Absolute Scarcity)
62.1 Quadriliion (You Don’t Have to Buy a Whole Bitcoin!)
7Digital Gold (What is Money?)
IIResilience
8Not Your Node, Not Your Rules
91 BTC = 1 BTC
10Shitcoiners Get REKT
11Worth Every Watt
12Fork Around and Find Out
13The Immaculate Conception
14Antifragile, Unstoppable
IIIThe Peaceful Revolution
15Separation of Money and State (Bitcoin as “’Fuck You’ Money”)
16Fix the Money, Fix the World
17You Don’t Change Bitcoin. Bitcoin Changes You
18FreedomTech
19Bitcoin and AI
20Tick Tock, Next Block
21Strange Game (the Only Losing Move is Not to Play)
If I could send a letter to myself five years ago, this book would be it.
I’m not a Bitcoin expert. I’m not a developer, a coder, or an economist. I don’t have credentials, connections, or capital. I’m a blue-collar guy who stumbled into Bitcoin almost exactly four years ago, and like everyone else, I had to wrestle with it to understand it.
Bitcoin is one of the most misunderstood, misrepresented, and misinterpreted ideas of our time - not just because it’s complex, but because its very structure makes it easy to distort.
It’s decentralized and leaderless, which means there’s no single voice to clarify what it is or defend it from misinformation. That’s a feature, not a bug, but it means that understanding Bitcoin isn’t easy.
It’s a system that doesn’t fit into any of our existing categories. It’s not a company. It’s not a product. It’s not a government.
There’s no marketing department, no headquarters, no CEO.
That makes it uniquely resistant to corruption, but also uniquely vulnerable to disinformation. Whether through negligence or malice, Bitcoin is constantly misunderstood - by skeptics who think it’s just a Ponzi scheme, by opportunists looking to cash in on the hype, by scammers who use the name to push worthless imitations, and by critics who don’t realize they’re attacking a strawman.
If you’re new to Bitcoin, you have to fight through layers of noise before you can even see the signal.
And that process isn’t instant.
Even if you could explain digital signatures off the top of your head, even if you could hash SHA-256 by hand, even if you had a perfect technical understanding of every moving part - you still wouldn’t get it.
Bitcoin is more than just technology.
It rewires trust, reshapes incentives, and challenges the foundations of power, enforces sovereignty, resists censorship, and proves that something as simple as 21 million “coins”, an open ledger, and a fixed issuance schedule can shake the foundations of the world.
And that’s why this book exists.
Bitcoin isn’t something you learn all at once. It’s something you unlearn first.
You start with assumptions about money, value, and authority that have been baked into you since birth, and you slowly chip away at them.
It’s like peeling layers off an onion.
At first, you might come for the speculation. A lot of people do. But those who stick around, who actually take the time to understand what’s happening here, don’t stay for the “profits”.
They stay for the principles.
If you’re holding this book, you’re somewhere on that journey.
Maybe you’re at the very beginning, trying to separate the signal from the noise. Maybe you’ve been down the rabbit hole for years and you’re looking for a way to articulate what you already feel. Either way, this is for you.
It’s not a technical manual, and it’s not a sales pitch. It’s a distillation of everything I wish I could have told myself when I first started.
So if you’re where I was, consider this a time capsule from the future. A hand reaching back through the noise, saying:
“Keep going. It’s worth it.”
***
Preface
The End of The Beginning
March 2025.
The moment has arrived. Most haven’t even noticed, let alone processed it. The United States is setting up a Bitcoin (Bitcoin-only!) strategic reserve.
It’s not a theory. Not an idea. The order is signed, the ink is dried.
The people who have been wrong, over and over (and over!) again - for years! - fumble for explanations, flipping through the wreckage of their previous predictions:
“Bubble…’’
“Fad…”
“Ponzi…”
No longer.
The same analysts who once sneered are now adjusting their forecasts to protect what’s left of their credibility. Those who dismissed it are now trapped in a slow, humiliating realization: Bitcoin does not require their approval.
It never did.
Something fundamental has shifted, and the air is thick with a paradoxical cocktail of triumph and panic. Bitcoiners saw this coming. Not because they had insider information, but because they understood first principles when everyone else was still playing pretend.
Bitcoin was never just surviving.
It was infiltrating.
The question is no longer whether Bitcoin will succeed. It already has. The only question that remains is who understands, and who is still in denial.
Think back to 2022.
At its peak, FTX was one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, valued at $32 billion and backed by blue-chip investors. It promised a sophisticated, institutional-grade trading platform, attracting retail traders, hedge funds, and politicians alike. Sam Bankman-Fried, with his disheveled hair and cargo shorts, was its eccentric figurehead, a billionaire who slept on a bean bag and spoke of philanthropy.
Then the illusion shattered.
FTX collapsed overnight, an implosion so violent it left an entire industry scrambling for cover. One moment, Sam Bankman-Fried was the golden boy of crypto - genius quant, regulatory darling, effective altruist™.
The next, he was just another fraudster in handcuffs.
Billions vanished.
Customers locked out.
Hedge funds liquidated.
Politicians who had once taken photos with SBF and smiled at his political donations, suddenly pretended they had no idea who he was. The same regulators who were supposed to prevent disasters like this stood slack-jawed, acting as if they hadn’t been having closed-door meetings with FTX months before the collapse.
If you were Bitcoin-only, with your satoshis in cold storage, you didn’t even flinch.
From your perspective, nothing important changed:
A new Bitcoin block still arrived every ten minutes (on average).
The supply cap of 21 million bitcoins remained untouched.
Ownership was still protected by public/private key cryptography.
You were literally unaffected.
FTX wasn’t just a scandal, it was a filter.
Bitcoiners had already updated their priors:
“If you don’t hold your own keys, you own nothing.”
“Bitcoin is not ‘crypto’.”
“’Crypto’ is a casino.”
FTX was just another financial fire, another chapter in the never-ending saga of people trusting systems that had already proven themselves untrustworthy.
That moment was a prelude.
The U.S. Bitcoin pivot is the paradigm shift.
The Eukaryotic Revolution Is Upon Us
In biology, abiogenesis is when life emerged from non-life - a fragile, uncertain process where the first microscopic self-replicators struggled to survive against hostile conditions. That was Bitcoin’s early history. It had to fight for its existence, attacked by governments, dismissed by economists, ridiculed by mainstream media.
But it survived.
That era is over. We have entered the Eukaryotic Revolution.
This is the moment in evolutionary history when simple lifeforms evolved into something structurally complex - organisms with nuclei, internal scaffolding, and the ability to form multicellular cooperatives and populate diverse ecosystems. Once this transformation happened, there was no going back.
Bitcoin has just experienced its own Eukaryotic leap.
Once an outsider, dismissed and ridiculed, it is maturing into an integrated, resilient force within the global financial system.
On March 2, 2025, the Trump administration announced a Crypto Strategic Reserve.
At first, it wasn’t just Bitcoin - it included XRP, SOL, and ADA, a desperate attempt to appease the altcoin industry. A political move, not an economic one.
For about five minutes, the broader crypto industry cheered.
Then came the pushback.
Bitcoiners called it immediately: mixing Bitcoin with centralized altcoin grifts was like adding lead weights to a life raft.
Institutional players rejected it outright: sovereign reserves need hard assets, not tech company tokens.
The government realized, almost immediately, that it had made a mistake.
By March 6, 2025, the pivot was complete.
Strategic Bitcoin reserve confirmed. The President signed an executive order, and legislation has been introduced in the United States House of Representatives.
The U.S. government’s official bitcoin policy: hold, don’t sell. Look for ways to acquire more.
Altcoins relegated to second-tier status, treated as fundamentally separate from and inferior to bitcoin. The government’s official policy: sell, and do not actively accumulate more (ouch!).
“Bitcoin maximalism” – the belief that any cryptocurrency other than bitcoin lies on a spectrum between “bad idea” and outright scam - wasn’t vindicated by debate. It was vindicated by economic reality.
When the government was forced to choose what belonged in a sovereign reserve, it wasn’t even close.
Bitcoin stood alone.
“There is no second best.”
-Michael Saylor
Who This Book Is For: The Three Types of Readers
You’re here for a reason.
Maybe you felt something shift. Maybe you saw the headlines, sensed the undercurrents, or simply couldn’t ignore the growing drumbeat any longer. Maybe you’ve been here all along, waiting for the world to catch up.
Whatever brought you to this book, one thing is certain: you’re curious enough to learn more.
Bitcoin forces a reevaluation of assumptions - about money, trust, power, and the very foundations of the economic order. How much of that process you’ve already undergone will determine how you read these pages.
1. The Layperson → You’re new, curious, maybe skeptical.
Bitcoin probably looks like chaos to you right now. One person says it’s the future. Another says it’s a scam. The price crashes. The price doubles. The news is either breathless excitement or total doom. How the hell are you supposed to figure this out?
If that’s you, welcome.
This book was built for you.
You don’t need to be an economist, a technologist, or a finance geek to understand what’s in these pages. You just need an open mind and the willingness to engage with new ideas - ideas that will, if you follow them far enough, challenge some of your deepest assumptions.
Bitcoin is not an investment.
Bitcoin is not a company.
Bitcoin is not a stock, a trend, or a passing phase.
Bitcoin is a paradigm shift.
And by the time you reach the last page, you won’t need to be convinced of its importance. You’ll see it for yourself.
2. The Student → You understand the basics but want to go deeper.
You’ve already stepped through the door.
You’ve realized Bitcoin is more than just digital gold. You understand decentralization, scarcity, censorship resistance… But the deeper you go, the more you realize just how much there is to understand.
3. The Expert → You’ve been in the game for years.
You’ve put in the time.
You don’t need another book telling you Bitcoin will succeed. You already know.
You’re here because you want sharper tools.
Tighter arguments.
A way to shut down nonsense with fewer words and more force.
Maybe this book will give you a new way to frame an idea you’ve been struggling to convey. Maybe it will help you refine your messaging and obliterate some lingering doubts in the minds of those around you. Or maybe this will simply be the book you hand to the next person who asks, “Okay… but what’s the deal with Bitcoin?” so you don’t have to keep explaining it from scratch.
If you’re already deep in the weeds, you can probably skip Part A without missing much—unless you’re curious about a particular way of putting a particular thing. Part A is foundational, meant to clear the noise for those still finding their way.
Part B is where things get more interesting. Why you want to run a node, even if you don’t know it yet. The energy debate, stripped of media hysteria. The legend of Satoshi, and what actually matters about it.
If you’re a hardcore cypherpunk who already speaks in block heights and sending Zaps on NOSTR, feel free to jump straight to Chapter 15: The Separation of Money and State. That’s where the gloves come off.
Bitcoin isn’t just a technology.
Bitcoin isn’t just an economic movement.
Bitcoin is a lens.
And once you start looking through it, the world never looks the same again.
This book will teach you what Bitcoin is, as much as it will help you understand why Bitcoiners think the way they do.
It isn’t just something you learn about. Especially not in one sitting, or from one book.
It’s something you grow to realize.
Regardless of which category you fall into, you’ve already passed the first test.
You’re still reading.
You haven’t dismissed this outright. You haven’t scoffed, rolled your eyes, or walked away. You’re at least curious.
And that’s all it takes.
Curiosity is the only filter that matters.
The rest takes care of itself.
The Essential Role of Memes
Memes won the narrative war - it wasn’t textbooks, research papers, or whitepapers that did it.
Bitcoin spread the same way evolution spreads successful genes - through replication, variation, and selection.
Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in The Selfish Gene, describing it as a unit of cultural transmission – behaving much like a gene. Memes replicate, mutate, and spread through culture. Just as natural selection filters out weak genes, memetic selection filters out weak ideas.
But Bitcoin memes weren’t just jokes.
They were premonitions.
The most powerful ideas are often compact, inarguable, and contagious - and Bitcoin’s memes were all three. They cut through complexity like a scalpel, distilling truths into phrases so simple, so undeniable, that they burrowed into the mind and refused to leave.
“Number Go Up.”
“Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins.”
“There Is No Second Best.”
Each of these statements is more than just a slogan.
They are memetic payloads, compressed packets of truth that can carry everything you need to understand about Bitcoin in just a few words.
They spread through conversations, through tweets, through shitposts, through relentless repetition.
They bypassed the gatekeepers of financial knowledge.
They infected minds before Wall Street even understood what was happening.
And now - they are historical markers of the shift, the fossil record our of our collective consciousness coming to terms with something fundamentally new in the universe.
The old world relied on authority, institutional credibility, and narrative control. Bitcoin broke through with memes, first principles, and lived experience.
This wasn’t just an ideological battle. It was an evolutionary process.
The weaker ideas died. The strongest ones survived.
Once a meme – in other words, an idea - takes hold, there is nothing - no law, no regulation, no institution, no government - that can stop it.
Bitcoin exists. It simply is.
And it will keep producing blocks, every ten minutes, whether you get it or not.
This book isn’t a trading manual. It won’t teach you how to time the market, maximize your gains, or set up a wallet.
This book is a carefully-curated collection of memes-as—mental-scaffolding for the greatest monetary shift in human history.
A shift that has already begun.
Now the only thing left to decide is whether you’re watching from the sidelines, or whether you’re part of it.
The rest is up to you.
How This Book Is Structured: 21 Memes as Mental Scaffolding
Bitcoin spreads like an evolutionary force—through memes. Each chapter in this book isn’t just an idea, it’s a memetic payload, designed to install the concepts that make Bitcoin inevitable. The book is broken into three phases:
I. Foundations → Memes as Mental Antivirus
The first layer cuts through noise and filters out distractions. "Bitcoin Only" is the first test—if you get this one wrong, you waste years chasing ghosts. "Don’t Trust, Verify" rewires how you think about truth. And "Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins"? If you learn it the hard way, it’s already too late.
II. Resilience → Memes as Weapons in the Information War
Here’s where Bitcoin earns its survival. "Shitcoiners Get REKT" is a law, not an opinion. "Fork Around and Find Out" proves that you don’t change Bitcoin—Bitcoin changes you. And "Antifragile, Unstoppable"? Every attack on Bitcoin has only made it stronger.
III. The Peaceful Revolution → Memes as Reality Distortion Fields
By now, Bitcoin isn’t just an asset—it’s a lens. "Separation of Money and State" isn’t a theory; it’s happening in real time. "Fix the Money, Fix the World" isn’t a slogan; it’s a diagnosis. And "Tick Tock, Next Block"? No matter what happens, Bitcoin keeps producing blocks.
These aren’t just memes. They’re scaffolding for a new way of thinking. Each one embeds deeper until you stop asking if Bitcoin will succeed—because you realize it already has.
Next: Chapter 1: Bitcoin Only.
For now, it’s a heuristic - an efficient filter that separates signal from noise, with minimal effort.
But by the time you finish this book, it won’t be a heuristic anymore.
It will be something you know.
Welcome to the rabbit hole.