Bitcoin Culture Is Not Dead. It Just Stopped Being One Culture

See my presentation here: Construyendo el futuro desde el presente [SPA]

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This is something I recorded to myself while I was practicing. I leave the fuck words because it gave more sense of...how I'm thinking.

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There’s this recurring idea that Bitcoin culture1 is dead. I understand where it comes from. Bitcoin used to be fucking weird. It was cypherpunks, cryptographers, mailing lists, privacy nerds, libertarians, open-source developers, and people running strange software on computers in their bedrooms. It was a small enough world that you could almost point at something and say: this is Bitcoin culture. It was nerd money, you can fall in love with something beautiful like that. Then Bitcoin committed the terrible crime of actually working. And when something works, eventually people who don’t give a shit about the culture that created it start using it.

And then... Users came. Exchanges came. Traders came. Merchants came. Companies came. Funds came. Governments came. ETFs came. Eventually, the guy running Bitcoin Core at home and the guy buying an ETF through his brokerage account were both able to say that they owned Bitcoin.

And somewhere along the way, some of us started looking around and asking:

What the fuck happened to Bitcoin culture?

Maybe the answer is simpler than we think.

Nothing.

Bitcoin is still producing blocks. Your node still validates the rules. Your keys still control your coins. The network doesn’t know whether you are a cypherpunk, a libertarian, a socialist, a hedge fund manager, a developer, a shitposter, a merchant, or some random guy who bought fifty dollars of bitcoin because his tech cousin wouldn’t shut up about it at Christmas.

Bitcoin doesn’t care. Bitcoin is a protocol.

We are the ones creating cultures around it. And maybe what we are struggling to accept is not that Bitcoin culture died, but that Bitcoin became too successful to belong to a single culture anymore.

From nerd money to everything money

For years, we basically marketed Bitcoin using two promises.

Get rich.

Or:

Get free.

The get-rich campaign had one hell of a marketing budget. Number go up. Buy now. Few understand. Have fun staying poor. $100K. $1M. Pick whatever number gets the most engagement this cycle.

Of course it fucking worked. Greed might be one of the most effective customer-acquisition strategies humanity has ever invented. Easy to sell pal' but we're out of gas with that because you can only sell someone the dream of getting rich so many times before the promise becomes repetitive, disappointing, or simply irrelevant.

The freedom argument is much more interesting to me.

Self-custody. Censorship resistance. Privacy. Sovereignty. Permissionless money.

Don't trust, verify.

These are incredibly powerful ideas. But even the freedom narrative can become trapped inside our own bubble. We develop our own vocabulary, rituals, assumptions, heroes, enemies, memes, and purity tests. Eventually, we become extremely good at explaining Bitcoin to people who already understand Bitcoin.

Try explaining the philosophical foundations of monetary sovereignty to somebody who just wants to pay another human being.

Maybe Bitcoin needs a third marketing campaign. A much more boring one.

This shit works. and my favorite one: Bitcoin is boring.

And boring might be exactly what we need.

Bitcoin needs to become boring

I increasingly think that the next phase of Bitcoin adoption will be defined by normality. Where Bitcoin is genuinely useful, price prediction becomes less important. If Bitcoin allows you to get paid, save money, move value across borders, preserve purchasing power, leave an inheritance, or transact when another system tells you to fuck off, you don’t necessarily need a philosophical conversion.

You have a use case. And use cases are powerful precisely because they can become boring.

• I want Bitcoin inheritance to become boring.

• I want self-custody to become boring.

• I want Lightning payments to become boring.

• I want running a node to become boring.

• I want someone to use Bitcoin without feeling like they just completed an engineering degree.

For years, we tolerated friction because many of us were nerds, enthusiasts, or ideologues. We were willing to spend hours figuring something out because figuring it out was part of the experience.

Normal people 1 won't do that. And they shouldn't have to.

This doesn't mean sacrificing sovereignty for convenience. It means building better tools around sovereignty. It means thinking seriously about interfaces, education, recovery, security, inheritance, accessibility, and even how AI agents might eventually guide people through complicated processes while helping them detect threats before they make irreversible mistakes.

Even don't trust, verify deserves some maturity in how we explain it. It doesn't mean that human beings should never trust anything.

That's impossible.

It means understanding and verifying where you are placing your trust. The principle survives. The experience improves.

Because adoption should eventually come from normality, not greed or ideology. And when that happens, Bitcoin stops being something you need to believe in.

It becomes something you use.

Communities are not organizations

Thinking about normality also changed the way I think about Bitcoin communities.

I've spent years building, teaching, organizing, attending events, creating projects, and trying to bring people together around Bitcoin. And somewhere along that road, I made a mistake that I think is extremely common. I confused building a community with building an organization.

They are not the same thing.

An organization naturally wants to become stronger. More members. More events. More recognition. More resources. More influence.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. But a healthy community should eventually produce people capable of building things without the organization.

If every meetup needs Nelson, we fucked up. If every project needs Bitcoin Para Todos, we fucked up.

If every decision needs one organization, one personality, or one brand, then congratulations: we rebuilt the exact same shit Bitcoin taught us to question.

A single point of failure.

That realization has changed what success looks like to me. An organization can convene a community.

It can provide resources. It can teach. It can introduce people. It can organize events. It can create opportunities. But an organization cannot own a community.

And if it tries, eventually it stops building community and starts protecting territory.

The objective shouldn't be to create one gigantic Bitcoin organization with everyone underneath it.

The objective should be more organizers.

• More teachers.

• More writers.

• More developers.

• More merchants.

• More meetups.

• More experiments.

• More communities.

And those communities should be able to communicate and cooperate without asking permission from some central authority. In other words, perhaps we need to start thinking about social nodes.

Bitcoin decentralized money. What about us?

• A university can be a social node.

• A meetup can be one.

• A mining community can be one.

• A group of merchants can be one.

• A neighborhood can be one.

• A conference can be one.

• A group of three nerds drinking beer and arguing about multisig can absolutely be one.

You don't need ten thousand people, foundations, Head of Community.

You need people and a purpose. And something worth building.

This is particularly important when thinking about Bitcoin in Latin America. We spend far too much time asking which country is the Bitcoin country.

El Salvador? Argentina? Brazil? Paraguay? Guatemala?

Who gives a shit?

I don't want a ranking. I want a network.

Different places are good at different things because their histories, institutions, economies, resources, and communities are different.

Some places become sanctuaries of adoption.

• Others become hubs of capital.

• Others build circular economies.

• Others become centers for mining and infrastructure.

• Others develop education.

• Others become places of resilience.

And some places might simply become very good at connecting all of the others. That's where I think Paraguay becomes interesting.

Paraguay already appears on the Bitcoin map because of energy.

We have Itaipú. We have mining. We have infrastructure. We have an extraordinary geographical position in South America. That's great. But I don't want Paraguay to just produce blocks. I want Paraguay to produce knowledge, communities, projects, and connections. And I don't want Paraguay to become the center of Bitcoin in Latin America.

Fuck the center.

The entire point is the network.

I want Paraguay to become a node.

A place where a Brazilian meets an Argentine. Where a Mexican developer meets a Paraguayan educator. Where miners meet merchants. Where builders meet capital. Where somebody who knows absolutely nothing about Bitcoin finds somebody willing to sit down and explain it.

A place where people don't necessarily come because Paraguay has the biggest Bitcoin company, the biggest conference, or the biggest community.

They come because things connect here. A network doesn't need another center. It needs more nodes.

Education as infrastructure

None of this works without education. And I increasingly think education itself needs to be understood as infrastructure for Bitcoin communities.

Knowledge cannot remain a privilege for the people who already understand Bitcoin.

If all the good information remains trapped inside technical circles, English-language discussions, expensive conferences, private groups, or communities where beginners feel stupid for asking basic questions, then we shouldn't be surprised when adoption gets stuck.

We need less gatekeeping.

• Less intellectual masturbation.

• Less arguing about who understood Satoshi correctly.

• More building.

Teach someone. Run a workshop. Translate something. Write something. Start a meetup. Help a merchant. Run a node. Build a tool.

Try something stupid and fail. Document why it failed and then try again.

Community is built through development and practice, not endless theorizing about community. And for those of us working in Spanish, this is especially exciting because there is still so much shit left to write. One idea I heard recently stuck with me: just because someone published something doesn't mean it's written in stone.

Good. It shouldn't be.

Write another interpretation. Challenge it. Improve it. Translate the idea into your own context. Build something around it.

There is still an enormous intellectual and cultural space for Bitcoin in Spanish that simply hasn't been filled yet. That isn't a weakness. That's an opportunity.

Maybe Bitcoin culture really did die

So maybe the people saying Bitcoin culture is dead are right. Maybe the singular version of Bitcoin culture did die. And maybe that's fine.

Because what replaced it is much more interesting:

• Cypherpunks.

• Hodlers.

• Builders.

• Miners.

• Plebs.

• Merchants.

• Privacy freaks.

• Institutional investors.

• Educators.

• Nostr weirdos.

• Lightning nerds.

• People building circular economies.

• People building wallets

• People writing code.

• People writing essays.

• People who simply want to save twenty dollars without somebody fucking with their money.

These people don't need to agree on everything. They don't even have to like each other. They don't need the same politics, the same motivations, the same heroes, or the same definition of what makes somebody a “real bitcoiner.”

They need to be capable of coexisting around the same protocol. Because Bitcoin doesn't need one culture. It needs an ecosystem of cultures capable of building without asking permission.

And that changes what I think our job is. Our job isn't to convert everyone. Our job isn't to make everyone think like us. Our job isn't to create the largest organization and put our logo on every meetup. Our job is to make it easier for the next person to build.

So go back to your city. Find two or three people. Ask yourselves what your community actually needs.

Then decide what success means. Maybe success is ten people learning self-custody. Maybe it's five merchants accepting Bitcoin. Maybe it's one monthly meetup that survives for a year. Maybe it's running a node.

Maybe it's teaching Bitcoin at a university. Maybe it's helping one family understand inheritance. Maybe it's one fucking good article in Spanish that didn't exist yesterday.

Whatever it is, build it. Then make it possible for someone else to build something without you.

Because perhaps the ultimate sign of Bitcoin adoption won't be everyone saying:

“I believe in Bitcoin.”

It probably won't even be everyone understanding every philosophical argument we've spent fifteen years debating. Maybe the best possible answer will be much simpler.

Someone asks:

Why do you use Bitcoin?

And the answer is:

“Because it works.”

Bitcoin decentralized money.

Now let's decentralize the fucking community.

Thanks

https://stacker.news/items/1549719

Footnotes

1. There's nothing more subjective than the word culture, ↩ ↩2