Sydney Bright

The Greeks called it kleos aphthiton: fame that never wilts. Achilles at Troy was offered two fates: sail home and live long and be forgotten, or die young and become a story sung forever. He chose the story. The body dies, but the tale walks on its own.

Sun Wukong (孫悟空) guided a monk west to bring the sutras to China and fought every demon on the road. When it ended, the Buddha gave him the name Victorious in Strife. Not for the battles he won, but for the enemy he finally beat: the anger and hunger in his own mind. He awakened and became enlightened.

Centuries on, the story chose a new body. Akira Toriyama called him Son Goku, 孫悟空, the same name. The tail and the staff and the cloud went with him. Here, Goku is a tale of a simple lesson: train the body, train the mind, love while you do it. When Goku reaches Ultra Instinct, he stops thinking and lets go. That is the place the monkey also reached.

The name says it in two characters. 悟 is to awaken. 空 is the void. Awake to emptiness.

Hey everyone, please help my wife and me support our friends from Ecuador.

Would love to show them the power of peer to peer electronic cash.

Amphion built the walls of Thebes with a lyre. His brother Zethus hauled stone on his back; Amphion walked ahead and played, and the stones followed the music into place like magic. A city is something you can sing into order.

To spell a word and to cast a spell come from one root, the old word for story. A story does work on the world.

The work cuts both ways. Take the beauty out of order and you get glamour: the word is grammar without the beauty, sister to grimoire, the book of spells that coerce. Plato put manipulative speech in that same family, cosmetics, adornment impersonating order. He also said the soul is cured by charms, and charms are beautiful words.

Be measured. Be beautiful with your words. Build, don't coerce.

Trying out

store front for the first time and this is super cool!

When one fasts, especially in the modern age, it is a practice of learning to not follow the impulses of the mind. With our modern fridges, it is so easy to open one up and indulge, to satisfy the feelings of hunger. The practice of fasting teaches one to be aware of the mind, yet to pursue discipline in resisting the urges, so that one forms a different relationship with the mind.

One thing we all indulge in constantly is our thinking mind itself. Our modern society glorifies it, and indeed it was built because of our ability to perform logic and reason. However, all things require balance, and it is important that we also practice mindfulness: to have a single pointed awareness of the present moment, our body and our breath, so that we can calm the mind in the manner where we can hear the true song of our world.

Modern technology makes this even harder. Social media and now AI are akin to the refrigerator: they provide us a constant outlet to indulge our mind and to feed our ego. However, the computer, which includes both AI and Bitcoin, can be viewed as a tool that can equally liberate us.

For the extent of recorded history, we have been using our intellectual mind to build an ivory tower, this amazing civilization all around us, but the overuse of our mind in this manner is making us sick. AI and Bitcoin can be a means to liberate us from that burden, as they can take the weight of thinking off of our shoulders, to continue to build this ivory tower on our behalf while we return to a more natural way of being.

We all are in a kind of prison, and many of us carry it everywhere we go. We can either use technology to free us from it, or it can enslave us more. What will you choose?

Prometheus made us. He stole fire from the gods and gave it to us. That fire is our ability to reason. Reason made us the dominant species on earth. Zeus chained him to a rock for it, and an eagle forever eats his liver.

While the punishment seems cruel on the surface, it was wisdom. Zeus knew the fire would sever us from the gods. Every other creature experiences the holy directly. Our thinking clouds us from it.

The gift made us powerful. It cost us the divine.

In the ancient Chinese text, the Yijing (《易經》), the first hexagram (gua 卦) is Qian (乾), representing Heaven; the second is Kun (Kun, 坤), representing Earth. In traditional commentaries, the phonetic component 倝 (gàn) has been interpreted to evoke the sun with grass and roots below it, suggesting generative growth under divine light. This connection to vitality is made explicit in the Shuogua zhuan (《說卦傳》, Explaining the Trigrams), which glosses the line: 「乾，健也」, relating Qian to jian (健), meaning vigorous, robust, and healthy.

A parallel structure appears in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European pantheon. The divine father is reconstructed as *Dyēus ph₂tḗr, the root that yields both Zeus (Greek Zeus, gen. Dios) and Jupiter (Latin Iuppiter). As the Sky Father, he represents the luminous life-giving realm above, and is paired with the Earth Mother (*Dʰéǵʰōm).

Later, Apollo, son of Zeus, becomes identified with the Sun in subsequent Hellenistic tradition and is venerated as the deity of healing, truth, and oracular divination.

Across these traditions we see a striking similarity. Sacred teachings in both East and West preserve an apparent understanding of a divine synergy among the sky, the Sun, and the Earth: one that is generative and, most importantly, healing.

By its very nature, the mind's trains of thought are vulnerable to being hijacked by those who seek to manipulate and control.

What cannot be hijacked arises from a truth discovered only in the absence of thought.

We often discuss #Bitcoin and #AI as two different things, but they are both manifestations of the same underlying invention: the computer, Alan Turing's thinking machine. When we think about where this technology is taking us and how we should wield it for good, it is important we keep this unification in mind.

AI is here to potentially free us from the burden of labor to a degree never before seen in human history. Bitcoin is here to make sure that the wealth generated and the energy utilized is properly managed, and is done so fairly, honestly, without manipulation, central control, or extraction from one group to the other.

AI will bring about wealth generation, but this will only be experienced fairly and equally across all people if we have sound money through Bitcoin. These two heads of the same dragon are working synergistically with each other. We are actively watching AI harden Bitcoin and make the software stack more resilient to cybersecurity threats. Bitcoin will help seek out stranded energy, making it cheaper for the consumer despite the ongoing data center needs of AI.

The computer can either be used as a tool of enslavement or one that brings freedom and abundance. In order for us to wield the sword correctly, let us be sure that we are properly analyzing this tool as a holistic machine.

Alfred North Whitehead once said:

“it is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

Artificial intelligence is that principle extended to a new level. Many raise the concern that it will take away jobs. Serious reflection is needed regarding the degree to which those jobs provide true meaning. Most of us focus on work that feeds and nurtures the intellectual and rational side of the mind. That focus is antithetical to attention directed toward the present moment, the breath, and the whole of experience.

Attention is akin to worship. What we focus our mind, our time, and our energy upon transforms the world around us. The modern world has largely demanded that we worship what feeds the ego rather than that which feeds the soul.

Bitcoin and artificial intelligence, the computer itself, can be used as a tool to enslave or to free. If we are more welcoming and wise to the technology that frees our time, it can lead to a kind of abundance long forgotten. Then we may worship again that which is most good.

Biological life is a dissipative structure, constantly working to achieve alignment with the cosmic flow of energy, and this truly is what life is all about. This is true both at the cellular level, and at the individual human level. Life is centered around the pursuit of that proper energy flow, that alignment with what is most efficient, that balance that optimizes the flourishing of life. This we experience as good, meaningful, and love. It is a kind of journey that involves self-realization through constant discipline and devotion. That self-realization is achieved by constantly reiterating upon our relationships, whether those relationships be with nature, with ourselves, with our family, with our friends, or society: all of which culminate in a relationship with the holy.

Most of the grand questions regarding this holy subject, and the discussions that have happened throughout time, come down to how one should pursue this path. How does one find that self-realization? How do we properly align ourselves with the flow of the divine? What is the proper relationship?

In meditation, which can be articulated as the practice of altering one's relationship with the mind, one works on having a single pointed focus, usually upon the breath, that aims to adjust the relationship one has with their interpretation of their thoughts. Typically, we see the mind as us: all the thoughts that bounce around and present themselves in front of our living experience are interpreted to be our thoughts, but that is the maya. Through attention towards the breath, or some other kind of focal point, one can learn to recognize that the thoughts that appear are simply thoughts. One learns to dereify these thoughts, and slowly but surely a different relationship with the mind forms, a different relationship with the self appears, and the identification of the true Self begins to emerge. Through attention to our own mind-body, we not only help align ourselves with the cosmic order, but in doing so realize who we are. We achieve health, wellness, well-being, and greater clarity all at the same time. Proper alignment and self-realization go hand in hand, and they are achieved through the time and energy of our attention.

In this way, one can notice that attention is akin to worship. What we give our attention and energy to is what becomes of us. Are we attending to our indulgences of the narrative self, or are we attending to our breath and finding the Self underneath it all. Are we attending to our bodies and spending time outside, or are we feeding our desires by being indoors on our devices? Are we giving our attention to aligning ourselves with the flow, or to that which takes us away from it? The disciplinary worship that demands our attention helps us stay on the path. What we pay attention to, day by day, is what we give our energy and time to, and that energy is either directed properly or improperly. Proper worship can lead one towards the light, health, freedom, and prosperity, and improper attention can lead one astray towards disease, disaster, and dismay.

Biological life is a dissipative structure, absorbing the energy of the Sun and transforming it in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. When we hone our minds and heal our bodies, we are aligning ourselves with that cosmic flow. This is why we feel joy in doing so, and when done properly, it can lead to a holy experience.

Our pursuit of alignment is not limited to our bodies. We find it in our social relationships, in our society, and in our economy. Bitcoin and free markets help us properly manage the resources and energy of our Earth, helping us be better aligned. Bitcoin mining helps us be more efficient with our processing of energy, helping us align further.

There is a divine aspect to what we find important. Spending bitcoin, mining bitcoin, loving one another, speaking truth, and pursuing mental and physical health all play a role in us acting in accordance with the divine.

What happened to us building great cathedrals? What happened to us devoting ourselves to something greater?

There does seem to be a spiritual aspect to money.

This is the way

Ancient societies did not build religious and spiritual systems because they lacked scientific understanding. They did so to help us remember a truth about our world that becomes harder to directly experience as our minds fill with intellectual thought and reason, the mental activities that uphold the modern world. What was once a default experience for ancient peoples, as it is for the rest of life on Earth, began to fade from memory as society advanced, so they built ritualistic practices and teachings to help bring us back to that more ancient wisdom.

We are using our minds to construct an ivory tower, but in doing so we are becoming mentally, physically, and spiritually unwell. The computer is an opportunity to free us from this burden. Bitcoin and A.I. are part of this thinking machine so that it can continue to build this tower for us, so we can return to our more ancient way of being.

The more I learn, the more devout I become.

Embrace the sun

Embrace the creation of life

Embrace love.

Meditation is not simply stress reduction; it is an inquiry into the true Self.

The self you habitually claim is a fiction woven from memory and social identity. Beneath it flows a signal older than language, which cannot be heard while you are busy telling narratives about yourself.

Stillness lets the fiction settle so something prior can be felt.

Agamemnon is the representation of human hubris. Ten years of war had convinced him he was great: a king of kings, a conqueror of the world, and a man no mortal enemy could touch. His wife, Clytemnestra, laid purple cloth across his path into the palace, an honor owed only to gods, and he walked over it anyway, certain he had earned it. That single walk revealed the whole of his character: a mind so blinded by his ego that he had stopped checking the ground beneath it.

We continue to see this kind of hubris today.

The Greeks warned us against this kind of mind. That night, after returning home, he was killed by his own wife in his bath: the most undignified way a self-proclaimed conqueror of the world could die. This is a warning: hubris, and the refusal to stay humble, invites some of the worst kinds of fate.

Perhaps we can now explore the feasibility of a soft fork that removes the witness discount.

We brought nature into the digital world with Bitcoin. Nature is a humbling force.

We don’t tell nature what it is, it tells us who we are.

Bitcoin is a discovery, and through it we may discover ourselves.

As the winds of time propel our sails forward, the cultures that endured were those that tied themselves to the mast. They knew the siren song was never a creature upon the rocks, but the pollution of the mind itself, promising truth while scattering the signal. Meditation, ritual, and sacred practice were not ornaments. They were ballast against the amnesia that follows prosperity.

A civilization is not refined by what it builds, but by what it remembers to preserve in the quiet between the waves. The work of culture is to make the stillness repeat, so the vessel does not lose its way.

The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao. This warning opens the foundational text of Daoism because its author understood that language corrupts the subject it tries to capture. The same understanding appears in the tetragrammaton, where the name of the divine is deliberately a placeholder, and in the Zen insistence that the Buddha nature is already present, not earned.

In my book, I trace a common arc across cultures. The original instruction was always interior: quiet the mind, dissolve the experienced self, and know the true Self through direct encounter. The rituals, whether incubation in Greek caves or the carefully measured kykeon at Eleusis, were not pageants. They were calibrated alterations of consciousness designed to make the individual feel the wholeness that underlies all reality.

When a civilization must transmit wisdom through text and sermon, the ineffable hardens into doctrine. The kingdom of heaven, once described as within you and before your eyes, becomes a destination after death. Jihad, once the internal struggle of self-knowing, becomes a call to external conquest. The pursuit of immortality shifts from an altered attitude toward death to a medical project of bodily preservation.

The experienced self is a creature of language; it builds identity from story. When the story replaces the silence, we inevitably mistake the map for the territory.

The quiet that ancient practices cultivated was the condition under which the mind could stop manufacturing the self and begin perceiving what is underneath. That perception has no need of belief. It only needs a pond calm enough to receive the signal.

The brain constructs our mental experience through predictive modeling. It does not perceive the world directly; it interprets a deluge of internal and external signals and generates a helpful fiction of what is occurring.

The problem is that the Default Mode Network, largely responsible for self-referential narrative and temporal abstraction, generates continuous activity that can act as interference with these signals if overused. The more the mind ruminates, the more the predictive model must operate through noise.

In my book I frame this as the Calm Pond Hypothesis. A single raindrop upon still water produces a clear ripple; in a rainstorm, the ripples collide and the signal becomes illegible. A calm mind does not imply an empty mind. It implies a mind whose surface is sufficiently still so that signals are coherent and the information it receives is received with fidelity.

Ancient meditative practices understood this not as a pursuit of happiness, but as a prerequisite for understanding what is true. The neuroscience now shows they were correct: stillness enhances interoception, reduces sympathetic overload, and restores the accuracy of the brain's models. We do not need less thought. We need the quiet that allows thought to correspond to reality.

I wrote this article when reflecting on the work of

.

Hopefully it can stimulate discussion that leads to more peace, civility, harmony, cohesion, and resolution in the Bitcoin community.

How many blocks does it take?

Just listened to “The Last Honest Market”

Much respect to you

Good morning!

I would differentiate mythology and religion.

Mythology are stories we create to help propagate cultural memory: concepts, lessons, teachings, etc.

Religion is our attempt to describe the ineffable truth of our existence. Words always fail to do so. Yet we try to articulate these concepts through words nonetheless because that is easier and more scalable than teaching everyone the necessary mental/physical practices to return to that way of being which grants awareness of it.

Ancient wisdom is the cure for the modern disease.