Bitcoin Twitter has been an exciting place over the last year as the Nostr and Ordinals protocols became the new up-and-coming protocols on the scene.
Ordinals exposed a fault line starting to form within the Bitcoin community. The ossifiers class that wants to keep Bitcoin the way it is versus the builders that want to explore and create new use cases for Bitcoin has turned into two distinct camps that will never reconcile their differences.
This has yet to happen with the NOSTR protocol. Capital has been pouring into development from some of the most well-known entities in Bitcoin. Primal, a nostr-focused client, recently secured $1 million in funding from Ten31 and Hivemind. Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, has pledged $10 million to spur the development of the nostr protocol. Despite these positive developments, there hasn’t been a mass exodus of Bitcoiners from X, formerly known as Twitter, to the freedom protocol. Why is that?
I’m shocked that most Bitcoiners have decided to stay behind the barbed wire fence of mass surveillance and have their data continually harvested for the benefit of Elon Musk.
The door to freedom is right before us, yet many decide to stay, but why?
For all the talk about incentives matter, the average Bitcoiner has fallen into the same social media trap that every other nocoiner has found themselves in. Here are a few reasons I believe Bitcoiners on X resist leaving the platform.
Network Effects Are A Hell Of A Drug
This is one of the main reasons why the most prominent voices on Twitter have yet to make the jump to being nostr only. X has been around much longer than the nostr protocol and is used by millions of people around the globe. If you are a Bitcoiner who has spent years building a massive Twitter following, it must be tough to migrate to a new platform with a much smaller user base and requires some technical knowledge to set up. It is easy to understand the rationale for staying on Twitter. There is too much to lose from a business perspective to make the jump.
By making this decision, they are missing an opportunity to introduce their audience to nostr and the idea of freedom tech in general. Staying on Twitter doesn’t advance the mission of hyperbitcoinization because it perpetuates the usage of centralized communications platforms and undermines the message of freedom. Twitter might have a more extensive user base than Nostr, but when you look deeper at the numbers, it doesn’t mean anything.
According to Pew Research, 23 percent of Americans use X, which puts it in the middle of the pack of other social media platforms Americans use. Facebook and YouTube are favored by Americans more than Twitter.
In the same survey, 25 percent of users said they would not be on the platform a year from now. That’s a lot of people who will not learn about Bitcoin from X.
Usage of the app continues to decline year over year with no end in sight. Worldwide visits to Twitter.com dropped 7.3 percent year over year. Monthly active users on Android and iOS are down 15 percent for Android and 14 percent for iOS. X is on a slow-motion decline, so the argument that Bitcoiners should stay on X because it’s more effective for orange pilling nocoiners doesn’t hold water. Nocoiners are fleeing X in droves.
We also know social media companies are used to control and influence society worldwide. How can we advocate for separating money and state when we can’t even leave our Twitter accounts behind? Here are a few examples of the state using centralized social media platforms to its advantage:
- https://therecord.media/ukraine-police-raid-social-media-bot-farm
- https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/despite-western-bans-putins-propaganda-flourishes-spanish-tv-and-social-media
- https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/more-governments-ever-are-using-social-media-push-propaganda-report-n1076301
X certainly doesn’t free humanity from the clutches of the surveillance state in any way; it traps us in a digital panopticon with no escape. If the goal is hyperbitcoinization, we should do everything possible to erode the state’s power. Staying on X empowers the government by giving them unlimited access to our data. You might lose followers and money in the short term, but it’s worth it. Short-term pain for long-term gain should be the priority. We are doing this for the kids, right?
Dopamine Hits Feelz Good
Who doesn’t like posting a tweet and watching it go viral on Bitcoin Twitter? It gives you the massive dopamine rush that social media was designed for. This is why most of us keep coming back to Twitter in the first place. We want that dopamine mang! Think of Twitter as the drug dealer on the corner giving you all the dopamine you want. It’s available on your phone 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
It has been clinically proven that when you receive a notification or retweet, your brain experiences an increased level of dopamine, further positively reinforcing the need to use social media. Did you know nearly 40 percent of those aged 18-22 reported feeling addicted to social media?
The engineers at X clearly understand this issue and have designed their platform to encourage people to stay there as long as possible. They are no fools. This is how they make money. I am guilty of scrolling away on X, but we all should be conscious of what they are trying to do.
Not saying nostr is the panacea to this problem, but the protocol doesn’t have the mind-altering algos that are trying to keep you addicted to the protocol. Is it fair to say that nostr is better for your mental health? Just throwing that out there.
We Need To Live Our Values
This picture is the one that hit me the most and inspired me to write this article. As Bitcoiners, how can we rail against big tech and the surveillance state if we continue to use the tools the state uses to suppress free speech? How will we rally people to the cause of Bitcoin if we don’t live by the very ideas we espouse to the world?
Using Twitter is, but one compromise, but one leads to another and another. We all live in a world of trade-offs. We should all strive for a world where freedom tech is the norm and not an exception. In general, Bitcoin and freedom tech have allowed us to remake the world and orient it towards peace and cooperation and away from the war, death, and destruction that the psychopaths in political office want to inflict on the common man.
Remember that the rich and powerful are not on our side. I urge all Bitcoiners to use nostr and slowly transition away from big tech because you never know when you will lose access to your data and all your hard work.
Here is my pubkey if you want to chat using freedom tech! I look forward to seeing you over there! Escape to freedom.
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