Sunday Summary, JUN29
A week in review from the Editor
I recently caught myself…
in a familiar loop. Twitter tabs open, price chart, real time in the background, a podcast dissecting the latest ETF inflows buzzing in the background.
In theory, I was “staying informed.” In practice, I was deep in a dopamine seeking stress-scroll of SEC rumors, halving projections, and recycled macro panic.
An hour passed and I hadn’t really thought about Bitcoin at all.
This isn’t unusual. If you’re even loosely tethered to the industry, it’s easy to slip into a state of perpetual hyperawareness. The news cycle pushes us toward vigilance disguised as education—each dip in price becomes a referendum on the network’s future, every regulatory ripple morphs into an existential threat.
Hashrate down? Iran! Hashrate up? Also, Iran!
Meanwhile, the deeper current—the steady progress of builders on an open, permissionless monetary network—moves quietly on (we like the em dash, please don’t call us AI).
The urge to seek crisis mode dopamine hits is strong, but the wiser posture, especially for those of us navigating Bitcoin's early arc, is to embrace the principle of default optimism.
Default Optimism
That phrase doesn’t mean ignoring real challenges or retreating into techno-utopian fantasy. It means resisting the gravitational pull of fear-driven narratives that obscure the fundamental question: Why are we here in the first place? If your Bitcoin conviction is tied to daily headlines, it’s on shaky ground. If it’s rooted in the first principles of censorship resistance, decentralization, monetary predictability, then the noise becomes just that: noise.
We are still, as they say in baseball, in the first inning.
It’s worth remembering how far we’ve come. Twelve years ago, a Silk Road scandal and Mt. Gox collapse nearly buried the project. Yet out of each seeming catastrophe, the network grew more resilient. “Bitcoin is antifragile,” people say, invoking Taleb’s concept.
But it’s not just the protocol that benefits from disorder; it’s the culture. Every wave of panic tends to wash out the tourists, sharpen the builders, and remind the rest of us why this thing matters.
The optimism worth cultivating isn’t blind. It’s born of studied patience, the recognition that building a parallel financial system takes time and that many of the forces opposing it are running on borrowed credibility.
The fiat world, as we already know it, is itself a drama of permanent crisis: rate hikes, debt ceilings, currency debasement and the occasional prime-time Jim Cramer speculation-fest.
Compared to that, a network that issues blocks every ten minutes, no matter what, is a small (and maybe boring) miracle.
Worry is a misuse of scarce bandwidth on the timechain. Every unit of attention spent chasing ephemeral price action or regulatory hand-wringing is a unit not spent onboarding your neighbor, running a node, or teaching your kids about sound money. If the dream is global, sovereign adoption, it can’t be achieved through doomscrolling.
Optimism by default doesn't mean complacency—it means alignment.
It asks: Am I working toward a future I actually want to live in? Am I participating in a system I believe to be fairer, sturdier, more humane? The optimism is not naive. It is radical because it dares to imagine Bitcoin not just surviving, but eventually winning.
We would do well to unplug from the minute-by-minute melodrama and reconnect with that vision.
Years from now, when the early innings are long behind us and the game is being played at a global scale, the real question won’t be, “What was the hashprice in June 2025?” It’ll be, “Did you believe and work for this possibility when it still felt improbable?”