bitcoincowboy
bitcoin cowboy

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.
- Terence McKenna

2023-04-15 00:38:42 UTC

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Fiction rescues history from its confusions.
- Don DeLillo

2023-04-10 02:31:28 UTC

https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_7fa7e2ecbeaa2bce2b6e82b5d7a830e6628e06d1373079c774dbecae4abf28a0.jpg

2023-04-09 05:39:50 UTC

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Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.
-Archimedes

2023-04-07 05:57:59 UTC

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Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship
-be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
-David Foster Wallace, This Is Water

2023-04-04 15:10:00 UTC

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Question everything.
Learn something.
Answer nothing.
-Euripides

2023-04-03 14:30:57 UTC

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We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us
- Churchill

2023-04-03 04:12:25 UTC

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To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.
- Alan Wilson Watts

2023-04-02 00:02:24 UTC

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Revolutions are not always brought about by a gradual decline from bad to worse. Nations that have endured patiently and almost unconsciously the most overwhelming oppression, often burst into rebellion against the yoke the moment it begins to grow lighter. The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.
- Alexis de Tocqueville

2023-03-31 05:31:20 UTC

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Wisdom is a harbinger of death
- Will Durant

2023-03-29 15:31:15 UTC

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Everything is in flux, and nothing is at rest
- Heraclitus

2023-03-27 15:29:19 UTC

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The skills you automate, you lose
- Margaret Hefferman

2023-03-27 00:37:38 UTC

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Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
- Keats

2023-03-25 23:00:33 UTC

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Truth is revealed by removing things that stand in it’s light ... the artist creates not by building, but by hacking away
- alan watts, the wisdom of insecurity

2023-03-24 20:23:02 UTC

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Not “how” the world is, but “that it is”, is the mystery.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein

2023-03-24 01:41:51 UTC

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green peace’ official stance on bitcoin:
“it’s super badass and pairs well with zero-emission nuclear power”
i feel so heard.

2023-03-23 16:28:50 UTC

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“The artist's work proceeds not from a finished imaginative experience to which the work of art corresponds, but from passionate excitement about the subject matter. ... The poet's poem is wrung from him by the subject which excites him."
- Samuel Alexander

2023-03-22 14:16:32 UTC

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The greatest use of life is to spend it on something that will out last it.
- William James

2023-03-21 16:05:27 UTC

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i used to seek power
i collected seats with the cantillionaires
now i am free
because i stack sats with the plebs
#bitcoinpoem

2023-03-21 15:09:37 UTC

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God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
- Friedrich Nietzsche

2023-03-20 17:00:16 UTC

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Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of a party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently. Not because of the fanaticism of "justice", but rather because all that is instructive, wholesome, and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effects cease to work when "freedom" becomes a privilege.
- Rosa Luxemburg

2023-03-20 16:59:55 UTC

🧵 quotes that inspire me

2023-03-09 15:15:04 UTC

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as an ex-fundamentalist christian, who is now an atheist, i stared into the void and definitely experienced an existential crisis. removing the belief that a force is in charge, that there is intrinsic meaning, is a huge burden, and it’s scary. but having done so i (and this is definitely an “n of 1” experiment) have experienced love, compassion, meaning, and transcendence. it takes work.

2023-03-07 02:35:16 UTC

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i just had to send a wire transfer. get me out of the cage.

2023-03-06 02:20:28 UTC

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IYKYK. david foster wallace died before bitcoin, but he had bitcoin vibes.
“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship
-be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”

2023-03-05 07:26:19 UTC

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awesome. full disclosure: some time in the next 20 years my goal is to develop a bitcoin philosophers conference to be held in my family’s forest. good news, it’s within a podcast drive from troy cross so i feel confident i can eventually convince him to come down, bad news… it will take me 20 years to build the cabins, infrastructure, etc.✌️🍻😂

2023-03-05 06:48:30 UTC

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become a hospice chaplain my dude, you’d be great!

2023-03-05 06:38:35 UTC

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and then you add in a wild dynamic with regards to physician assisted suicided.

2023-03-05 06:36:46 UTC

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so much about identity. and meaning. and motivated reasoning to justify life choices, suffering, opportunity cost etc.

2023-03-05 06:33:42 UTC

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yeah, that’d be cool. i really wish i had mysterious secret knowledge about death. the fact that i don’t, even though i’m around it a lot, makes me feel a little sheepish. it really seems pretty mechanical. death (for me) tends to be much less illuminating to the human condition than observing people taking care of their dying loved ones. now THAT is an education.

2023-03-05 05:15:24 UTC

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well now you have me curious, do you have any worries of existential risks?
this perhaps makes me a bad person or a psychopath (or, and this is the actual reason: i am very privileged), but i think i can honestly say i do not worry… about anything.
i CAN make a hierarchy of things that will kill me. and thinking about being dead kinda sucks because i dig this life and have a lot of things on my list to do, and i experience anticipatory grief for my children not having a father. but if i’m being honest, that’s mostly counterbalanced with my curiosity re: there being an afterlife + the fact that in the absence of an afterlife i’m not going to even care about the above…
so i ask, do people ACTUALLY worry about this stuff?
i hypothesize no. and this is informed by my experience with working with tons of dead/dying people and their families. i have a strong suspicion that what we call existential dread is mostly a performative signal to our tribe. it allows us to say, “hey look at me, i know the stuff that will kill us, so put me in a position of power within the tribe.”
or simply competitive victimization. or perhaps the ennui of a westerworldian epiphany where we get to the center of the maze and realize we were deluding ourselves into believing there’s actually a meaning to our sacrifice.
just a thought.

2023-03-05 04:40:59 UTC

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so this is this billionaire trad-fi equivalent of a bitcoin boating accident? gotcha, well done player!

2023-03-04 06:02:28 UTC

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i’m way ahead of you. all salamanders welcome in my forest.
https://youtu.be/N3FupF_T8aE

2023-03-03 00:59:11 UTC

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the hedonic treadmill strikes again

2023-02-28 17:08:30 UTC

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sports center

2023-02-28 16:33:15 UTC

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this is fantastic. have you read “Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World” by Nozick i keep looking for a trusted voice to give me a take on it.
🍻

2023-02-28 14:49:11 UTC

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you go through life feeling like “nobody gets me”, because you look around at others and see a purposeful and consistent worldview that many other people share, and then you introspect and take inventory of your own worldview and find a set of inconsistent and sometimes hypocritical beliefs that change with the seasons, and then you see a video like this and say, “how is it possible that there is another person on earth that sees the world the way i do?”
😂 so cool 🍻

2023-02-28 14:30:52 UTC

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i have never felt so seen 😂

2023-02-24 12:40:22 UTC

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dude thinks he can print a victory

2023-02-23 17:22:46 UTC

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the best thing about living up the road in the willamette valley is you get to feel like this on snow days:
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_5293140f1a0e7c9a2f39e84ab13f4acb6df380a77faaa910735ed8197315a112.jpeg

2023-02-23 17:16:09 UTC

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this picture is the dictionary definition of late-stage leviathan.
it is impossible to see past the math that put you into power.

2023-02-23 17:05:34 UTC

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i knew the greeks influenced medieval christianity, but this book really brought it home in an interesting way. as a bitcoiner it’s also fascinating to consider why eastern philosophy was totally cool with the concept of “zero” and western philosophy was like “🤯”
https://www.audible.com/pd?asin=1705270409&source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=library_overflow

2023-02-23 15:45:49 UTC

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survival of the fittest / darwin
love and sacrifice / christianity
beauty and joy / aesthetics

2023-02-21 17:37:51 UTC

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restore oregon white oak prairie
(rakes, saws, picks, pruners)
https://postimg.cc/8sdQVGLR

2023-02-21 15:19:24 UTC

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the older i get the more i view happiness as- slightly more wins than losses, good days than bad days, success than failures, love than hate, delight than pain, excitement than boredom, friends than enemies- all in the setting of approaching my inevitable death.
perhaps i’m missing something, but i just don’t know how to get the good things above without resistance (gravity, competition, resistance… work).
so i guess that’s the recipe: freedom/happiness through overcoming resistance/scarcity. or to put it in contemporary terms: abundance is a shitcoin.

2023-02-20 04:05:08 UTC

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11 y/o boy, 12 y/o girl. girl has a phone, boy doesn’t.
i have very similar sentiments to what you describe.
you can be incredibly precise with screen limits within ios, so i feel ok with allowing snapchat… for 20 minutes a day, basically to a least feel collegial with her peers.
activity has always been super important to us (academics too, but you can learn stuff your whole life and it’s really hard to undo the effects of a sedentary childhood), thankfully they are cool with sports. so far they haven’t given too much pushback to the “pick an activity to participate in each season” rule.
it seems increasingly likely that poor childhood screen hygiene will be our generation of parents lasting sin. good luck!

2023-02-20 03:41:37 UTC

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the last block.
…or maybe lyn alden.