Sunday Summary, OCT26
A week in review from the Editor
There’s a peculiar thing…
that happens to people who “get into Bitcoin.” At first, it’s all motion, price charts, podcasts, debates, new apps, and a constant stream of noise. Then, inevitably, the dopamine fades. The excitement slows. The price goes sideways.
The world gets a little quiet.
A strange thought creeps in: Is this it? The bored Bitcoiner emerges, restless, waiting for the next bull run, the next headline, checking the price 15 times a day, looking for the next thing to happen to Bitcoin, eagerly chasing another hit of dopamine.
That’s wrong.
Bitcoin, at its core, isn’t a spectator sport, it’s a frontier.
And frontiers are not boring places. They’re wild, restless, imperfect, and alive with possibility. The pioneers who thrive on frontiers don’t wait for others to build; they start digging, experimenting, stacking, connecting, creating.
Their focus moves from the surface of the space to the edges, and the edges are where real magic happens. Hype cycles attract attention, but it’s the quiet cycles, the bear markets, the lulls, consolidations, and times when no one is watching, where the frontiersmen and women are moving bitcoin outwards.
Early Lightning developers experimenting with microtransactions before ay businesses cared, they bootstrapped a node network in Telegram chats and educated each other on management techniques we take for granted today.
Privacy tools like Samourai or Mutiny built ceaselessly, when everyone else was chasing NFTs. During 2018’s “crypto winter,” most headlines declared Bitcoin dead. Yet, behind the scenes, the infrastructure that powers today’s payment rails, multisig custody, and open-source wallets was being quietly forged.
No hype cycle. Just pioneering.
Every day that we keep Bitcoin running is a success. It sounds humble until you realize how radical it is. It’s about execution, not waiting for permission or action from afar.
Progress in Bitcoin often looks like nothing is happening, because nothing breaking is the achievement. When the network hums quietly, when transactions settle globally without permission, that’s proof of life, proof of another small victory over the imminent forces of entropy.
The irony is that the people who claim Bitcoin is boring misunderstand the kind of game they’re playing. They’re here for speculation, excitement, a hit of dopamine.
But, Bitcoin is participation.
Sovereignty wins over spectacle on the peer to peer network.
So, the boredom problem is not a Bitcoin problem; it’s an attention problem, an incentive problem—an intrinsic motivation issue, and a reminder to get to the pioneering edges, where the action is happening.
The boredom is a quiet voice, asking you, why are you here?