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There Are Three Types of Bitcoiners, Here are their Mindsets

A common trope and talking point in bitcoin spaces is how it changes its holders for the better. It certainly is true though! In my experience people can pass through three distinct phases. A common trope and talking point in bitcoin spaces is how it changes its holders for the better. It certainly is true though! In my experience people can pass through three distinct phases.

A common trope and talking point in bitcoin spaces is how it changes its holders for the better. It certainly is true though! In my experience people can pass through three distinct phases.

Level One: NGU (Number Goes Up) Mindset


This is the lowest level of understanding bitcoin and how most people enter this space. They perceive bitcoin as an asset that simply goes up in value and should be sold/traded for a profit like any other stock or commodity. The NGU-man is reliant on dopamine stimulus and checking the fiat price often — classic signs of a high time preference mindset.

There is nothing inherently wrong with being a level 1 NGU-man, as long as you don’t get stuck here, which sadly many altcoiners and crypto-enthusiasts do.
They fail to see bitcoin as a revolutionary tool in this world; instead, they’re merely focused on the fiat exchange rate, having no deeper understanding of what it is and why it’s valuable.

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Once you understand bitcoin better, you realize how strange the fixation is by measuring its value by denominating it in a dying currency. Now don’t get me wrong, as someone who owns bitcoin, I do know that life gets a little better, and a smile does indeed stretch across my face when the fiat price of bitcoin is pumping.

Keep in mind however, that when looking at houses on Zillow, they
aren’t getting more expensive as much as your dollar is getting worse. The crux of the NGU-man is understanding what money actually is and why it is important.

Level Two: The Economic (Freedom Money) Mindset


With greater study and time spent around bitcoin, you can’t help but appreciate its glorious properties. With proper handling and storage, it cannot be confiscated, censored, or inflated away. It’s a bearer asset, with no counter-party risk. It’s the world’s first digital non-sovereign money and is not at the mercy of any institution.

Perhaps you crossed an international borderwith no money in your pocket or even a bank card, just a “brain wallet” of 12 seed words. All you need is internet access and wallet software, and you now have your funds at your disposal. You realize that bitcoin is the most robust form of private property ever devised.

Any person who owns bitcoin achieves a degree of economic freedom that was not possible before its invention. Once you’ve experienced this, you can’t help but wonder what this technology, at large scale and over a long-time horizon, could mean for the world. People come for Level 1 and 2, but they end up staying and becoming fanatics like me for Level 3.

Level Two: The Economic (Freedom Money) Mindset

Level 3: The Transcendental (or Metaphysical) Mindset
“Sound money is a prime factor in determining individual time preference, an enormously important and widely neglected aspect of individual decision making.

Time preference refers to the ratio at which individuals value the present compared to the future. “The Bitcoin Standard” by Saifedean Ammous

Just as hard money and a low time preference transform primitive tribes into high culture, individuals themselves undergo profound evolution. With enough experience and understanding of bitcoin, people tend to develop virtues along the way. They start thinking more about their long-term health, meaningful goals, and their descendants’ well-being.

Bitcoin is a sublime object in the most literal sense. You cannot touch it, yet you also cannot fully comprehend its titanic size and impact. Some describe it as philosophical ideas in mathematical form — a kind of mathematical philosophy.


Bitcoin is an autonomous system that rewires people, brings them into the fold, and makes them work for bitcoin. It is a sort of anthropogenic mutualism—a form of mutualism driven by human activities. A simple plant analogy might help: a human being is a cannabis plant’s way of making more cannabis plants.

Similarly, bitcoin fulfills the primal need for hard money in a world
dominated by fiat currency. This is why humans pay large amounts of money/energy into the proof-of-work protocol and thus maintain the bitcoin network; it is simply worth it.


What is more important than electricity consumption cost is the fact that it enables this immutable, indestructible, transparent protocol/thought virus to colonize the world. A thought virus that over time rewards virtue and brings salvation from fiat demons – no summoning value ex nihilio by money printer, thus indebting future generations. Bitcoin is an idea whose time has
come.


Now, reading this kind of language, many will ask: are these Level 3 bitcoiners part of a religion or a cult? It can certainly look that way to no-coiners and other outsiders. Bitcoin obviously is not God, nor did it create the universe. However, many religious individuals appreciate its near divine-like attributes: an immaculate conception, near invulnerability, and a distinct soteriology
and eschatology.

I tend to think of bitcoin more as a force of nature with a mind of its own,
reminiscent of Nick Land’s writing. It’s like an alien or cyber-mind that uses technology and math to enact a will through humanity and thus the world.
While I wouldn’t call bitcoin a god, it is a good teacher. It teaches patience, a focus on the long term, the value of work, and an appreciation for future generations.

It shows the ugliness of fiat culture: food, art, music, literature, architecture — all are debased in a high time preference, fiat-driven society. “Whether in Rome, Constantinople, Florence, or Venice, history shows that a sound
monetary standard is a necessary prerequisite for human flourishing, without which society stands on the precipice of barbarism and destruction.”
-“ “The Bitcoin Standard” by Saifedean Ammous

Look at the great works of the world and just meditate on what it really took to make them. Gaze upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and ask yourself if modernity could still do it today? Consider the Cologne Cathedral which took 600 years to build! Yes, it suffered multiple delays, and it was more like 112 years of active construction, but that is further testament to what can be
done by a low time preference civilization.

I think people are changed by bitcoin because they are exposed to this civilizational energy that was present before the 20 th century, before the Bretton Woods Agreement and the fiat revolution.

It could not be clearer. Sound/Hard Money → Cathedrals, Great Civilizations, Legendary Men and Eras. Unsound/Soft Money → McDonald’s, Strip Malls, “Bugmen,” and times of decay.


While there is no going back to the gold standard, culture on a bitcoin standard will be like a culture on a gold standard. Bitcoin is not just a way to redeem money but the whole world. We can return to the type of civilization that creates beauty and thinks of the world we leave to our descendants.

This article was written and edited by Sawyer.

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