My Journey From Mount Stupid to Bitcoiner

This is my journey from altcoins to Bitcoin.

Ben Wehrman

Mar 29, 2023March 29, 20234 min read4 minutes read

A lot of people point out that I seem to make everything about shitting on ETH/crypto, and promoting Bitcoin. I have no pushback on this. Drawing a hard line here has clearly become a crusade for me. Let me provide a bit of extra background on why I care so deeply about this.

I’ve shared my general crypto-to-Bitcoin story before here, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever emphasized how deeply convicted I was that crypto was the future, and Bitcoin was just a slow boomer coin whose evangelists were toxic and closed-minded.

From 2017-2021, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that crypto was a core pillar of my life. I was backpacking for much of that time, through Australia/New Zealand mostly. There was a year-long period in there where I did not sway a single day from a very particular routine: I would wake up, fill my yeti cup full of shitty instant coffee, and spend the entire day in my hostel bed pumping out altcoin research articles for my crypto blog.

Sunrise to sundown, every day, without fail. (I’ve kept the blog alive for the lolz, you can see it for yourself here). Over the course of this grinding period, I built one of the largest followings on that platform at the time (essentially a “Medium for crypto”).

I regularly chatted with the CEO/devs, got offers to go on podcasts, and was always on the top featured bar. I had ossified a sense of identity as a relatively big-time “crypto guy” on this emerging platform.

Needless to say, I ignored, scoffed at, or blocked all Bitcoin maximalists during this stretch of *years*; people like Saifedean, Jimmy Song, Stephan Livera, Giacomo Zucco, Guy Swann, etc.

“They’re so closed-minded. They don’t understand the opportunity of blockchain…” I thought.

I carried on my merry way, shilling the travel friends I was making to join this blogging platform for referral bonuses. I was also simultaneously propagating countless articles and noise-maker podcasts that I didn’t comprehend at the time. It all traced directly back to the fiat overlords who I thought I was fighting against. You can read my other threads here and here for the specifics of my Bitcoin enlightenment transition.

The point I want to leave you with is this: When you’ve been through the depths of the crypto hole, built an identity around it, and surrounded yourself with a community of people who tell you you’re amazing for “being so open-minded and dunking on those mean maxis”…it is NOT easy to see anything else but confirmation bias.

As Alyse Killeen has eloquently explained in her many podcast appearances, there is a lot of money to be made, and internet clout to be gained in the world of capitalizing on people’s shiny-object gambling tendencies. Whether you are being intentionally malevolent, or are just a cog in the shitcoin machine. I have been there, .eth friend.

I was you on steroids. Dismissing Bitcoiners because they’re “just shilling their BTC bags”, or “salty that x coin went up a million percent more in the last 12 hours”, or whatever else. There is not a single reply you can give me that I haven’t said with even more sass myself.

When you’ve been through this path, it gives you a whole new level of understanding of how rotten the fiat system is, and how all of these new Proof-of-Stake crypto coins are not part of the solution. They are simply the latest iteration of fiat ponzinomics where a leader rules you and has every reason to keep you distracted from the real signal that is Bitcoin.

So yes, I’m going to keep going hard as fuck against the latest iteration of scammers pretending to be your friend and the sheep who are making the same bonehead mistakes as I once did. There is no more time for fiat games. Turn off the crypto YouTubers, turn off the altcoin CEO Reddit AMAs, and listen to the toxic Bitcoiners who have already completed their Mt. Stupid expedition.

#TrustMeBro.