Bitcoin and psychedelics are simultaneously the most powerful, yet least understood technologies on the planet.

They are complimentary revolutionary technologies that can be leveraged for profound personal growth. They help us to define self-sovereign boundaries in our lives when it comes to questions about who has dominion over the things we think, the software we use, and the actions we take. They can be used to mold the future of the individual, and by extension, the world.  Many are using these tools today to create a better, more productive life. Both psychedelics and Bitcoin induce paradigm shifts in the user. These are not simple changes. These fundamental and lasting changes can completely alter how one interacts with the world. Sovereign individuals can use them to achieve great wealth in ways that are measurable and immeasurable, material and immaterial. As with any tool, there are dangers, but proper use coupled with a healthy sense of respect leads to the best results. 

As with all tools, these are not for everyone.

While both bitcoin and psychedelics are greatly misunderstood, those involved in contemplative study can achieve asymmetric returns. Almost no one fully understands how these things work, even those who own or use them regularly. I can’t emphasize this enough. Even people with experience have trouble fully comprehending the magnitude of these technologies. Jameson Lopp, one of the earliest developers in Bitcoin, says: “Nobody understands bitcoin, and that’s okay”. The same can be said of psychedelics. Choosing to interface with these technologies is a deeply personal choice, and not one to be taken lightly. Taking the time to involve yourself in a deep study of these tools will put you in a tiny percentage of the population who can understand and benefit immensely from them. Each person must decide for themselves, and here more than anywhere else - knowledge is power.

Introduction

There are an astounding number of relationships between bitcoin and psychedelics that arise at many different levels. These similarities give rise to a more profound question:

Are bitcoin and psychedelics tools of self-sovereignty because they have these similarities, or are they similar because they are self-sovereign tools? 

To learn the answer, we must examine the tools individually, and in combination. In this article, we will touch on the many levels of alignment between these technologies, and I encourage you to investigate deeper if anything sparks your interest. These rabbit holes go deep.

Like with bitcoin, the LSD and psilocybin source code is freely available in multiple implementations. The creators of both LSD and bitcoin published instructions for individuals worldwide to read, understand, and use these respective tools. Anyone can freely read the LSD patent with the exact steps to synthesize pure LSD, and anyone can freely read the bitcoin source code and create their own software from scratch. Anyone, anywhere, can spin up their own implementation, and join an already globally interconnected network of peers. The tools are broadly available and can be made from an astounding array of off-the-shelf parts at home by the interested hobbyist. Once in place, the careful and observant individual can use these tools to benefit greatly. Careless use is punished quickly and decisively, and users must self-correct after learning lessons the hard way. Consequences are an inherent part of systems that require responsibility. 

The honest investigator is plagued by disinformation regarding both of these technologies. For psychedelics, there is an unending array of false claims. They range from “chromosome damage causing deformed babies” to “you’ll jump out a window thinking you can fly” or even that you might become “permanently insane from a single dose”. There is also an unending array of false claims about bitcoin, from government interventions, to consuming more energy than country X, to boiling the oceans, or “it’s slow, outdated technology”. Therefore it’s incumbent upon the intrepid traveler to hone their bullshit detectors and become expert at research and deductive reasoning.

The truth is, these walls of propaganda surrounding bitcoin and psychedelics are built to deflect people from seeking self-sovereignty. Compliant, unquestioning people are much easier to control than individuals standing up for their liberty. Much of the anti-psychedelic and anti-bitcoin propaganda comes directly from the government. The misinformation is shrouded in a cloak of respectability, and quickly permeates society. Whenever you are consuming media or content, always look at the source. Who is providing this info, and to what end? Always beware of motivations and incentives. Use the “lens of the skeptic” when investigating these tools. Don’t take any claims (even mine) without proper backup and documentation. Don’t trust, verify.

While both psychedelics and bitcoin have been demonized in mainstream media as dangerous, harmful, and downright evil, I’m here to make the case that these things are wholesome, teach good family values, and are powerful tools for transforming ourselves and our relationships with others and the world.

Even though bitcoin and psychedelics can be valuable tools, they are not antidotes for wrong-think. While some users can leverage these tools to achieve actionable and relevant insights, not all users navigate them so successfully. Those misdirected by wrongthink can find themselves in the back alleys of shitcoinery, New Age woo-woo, and other logical fallacies. Instead of recognizing these as destructive paths, they fool themselves into thinking they are onto something revolutionary. It’s essential to use your best judgment and keep a skeptical mindset when navigating life in general, and these tools in specific.

The benefits of better integrating these technologies into modern society are vast and could change the future of humanity in profound ways.

Bitcoin enables an interconnected world, using one currency. Like using a single language, it brings us together with fluid and dynamic global cohesion. Trade, travel, relocation, taxes, and currency conversion. They are all simplified by one humble technology, available to all.

For psychedelics, integration could take many paths. Still, the most hopeful is one where individuals have legal access to known molecules at known purity, with reliable information on their safe use. Creating safe spaces for psychedelic use (such as Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones) and pairing them with psychedelic crisis centers housed at local universities, would allow society to realize benefits from both sides of the psychedelic experience. The creativity and imagination of autonomous spaces, and the healing and transformation of nurturing someone successfully through a psychedelic crisis, both have boundless potential for benefit. This careful experience management would benefit the user, the caregivers, and society as a whole. The thoughtful integration of these two technologies into modern-day society has the potential to bring benefits to both individuals and the global community.

Brain imaging studies with LSD and psilocybin show interesting evidence that psychedelics increase brain activity, and activate new pathways and connections throughout the brain. If this is what happens to the individual, imagine what happens to the macrocosm of civilization.

Every path has dangers, and there’s no magic remedy. We have the tools; using them with skill, integrity, and purpose is a choice. The tool won’t do the work for you. This is the Proof of Work ethos in action.

A note on psychedelics as referenced here: while there are many psychedelic compounds, I specifically focus on LSD and psilocybin in this article. While LSD tends to be the most widely available psychedelic, it can have a centralizing effect around the chemists who make it. A natural pyramid of distribution forms with the chemist at the top, with the wholesalers, retailers, and finally, the end-users forming the pyramid's base. This pyramid forms because a single gram of LSD contains 10,000 doses. LSD synthesis is not outside the reach of enthusiastic researchers, but not as accessible to the “everyday man” as growing mushrooms. Psilocybe species mushrooms are much more decentralized because they are a tool that can be implemented by almost anyone, anywhere on the planet. No dealer is needed, simply you, some earth, and some spores.

Audience mix

I understand readers will be approaching this article with different levels of understanding of the topics discussed. I believe readers will fall into one of the following four categories;

• Bitcoiners who have experience with psychedelics

• Bitcoiners who don’t have experience with psychedelics

• People with psychedelic experience who don’t use bitcoin

• People who don’t have experience with either

While most of this article focuses on comparisons and similarities between bitcoin and psychedelics, the following short sections address each individually. I provide brief descriptions of why I believe each to be an important tool of self-sovereignty for those unfamiliar. Both bitcoin and psychedelics are subjects of wild misinformation campaigns, and we’ll discuss this in more detail later. I bring it up now only to say that if you only have a cursory understanding of either subject, the popularly available media on both subjects is confusing and misleading in many ways. Deep study is required to bypass layers of bullshit.

For those new to or inexperienced with psychedelics

LSD and psilocybin are some of the most powerful tools for self-investigation available today. They are also non-toxic and non-habit forming, though they do have dangers. They give you access to yourself at a level not attainable any other way. No amount of yoga or meditation will give you an LSD trip. They are some of the safest molecules on the planet. For example, compare ZERO deaths from LSD and magic mushrooms to over 3,000 deaths each year from something considered safe, like Aspirin.

The importance of psychedelics as a tool for human self-exploration cannot be overstated. Steve jobs described taking LSD as one of the most important things in his life.

Roland Griffith’s work at Johns Hopkins University shows that psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer.

For those new to, or inexperienced with bitcoin

Bitcoin is a zero-to-one invention that takes power from world governments and gives it back to individuals. It’s a never-again-to-be-replicated discovery that has been changing lives for a decade. It is money backed by mathematics, not the promises of politicians.

Have you ever wondered if money is important for human development and growth? How have different forms of money changed the course of human history? Money is exchanged for people’s time. Our time alive is finite. Using an infinite resource to pay for a finite resource is inherently unfair. There is life energy stored in money.

The money we use today is known as fiat, “money by decree“. In other words, “money because we say so”. Fiat money devalues over time, and this is called the “inflation rate”. Money that devalues over time is time-theft. It steals the value you’ve already worked for and spent your time and energy to earn. Bitcoin is money that never devalues over time. Its elegant mathematical distribution is programmed and unchangeable.

While I don’t have any peer-reviewed studies to point to, as a personal anecdote, I’ve noticed an undercurrent of self-actualization running strongly through the bitcoin culture. Many are espousing a back-to-the-land ethic, eating healthy (both in eliminating bad foods like seed oils and fake meat and increasing the use of minimally-or unprocessed natural foods), exercise, arts, family, and wellness.

I believe the personal growth in bitcoiners reflects the ethics programmed into the bitcoin network itself. Here are two examples;

• Proof of Work - bitcoiners realize that value cannot be created without action. This translates into almost every aspect of living. To get the benefits, one has to do the work.

• Don’t Trust, Verify - the aspect of verifying and not just accepting any version of truth offered is more important than ever today.

There are many more, but I hope this quick overview gives insight into why I feel these two technologies are complementary and worth discussing. 

Tools of Self-Sovereignty

When I say that bitcoin and psychedelics are tools of self-sovereignty, it is to say that these are tools available to each of us today that we can use to define, mold, and shape our own answers to questions like:

• What does it mean to be a free and sovereign individual? 

• What is the government allowed to regulate? 

• What are your rights, and what is your property? 

• What are the limits of society and

• What are the boundaries of the individual?

• Do you have the right to modify your own mind? 

• Do you have the right to modify your own computer?

Our answers to questions like this direct the course of our lives. We can use these tools to look deeper within our minds and bodies or reach the edges of understanding. The purposeful individual can leverage these insights to obtain a more prosperous life. 

Bitcoin is a tool of information. LSD is a tool of experience and imagination.

The green fiat paper rectangles have value because the state says so. Bitcoin is the antidote to fiat money. There is much else in this world that is imposed upon us by decree. Bitcoin helps you remove fiat from your life. Psychedelics help you remove fiat from your mind and body. Together, they give you the power to stand tall in your sovereignty and declare ultimate dominion over your inner and outer life.

These are tools we can access privately in our own homes for our own personal use, and they don’t harm anyone. Psychedelics, sometimes called entheogens, awaken a sense of the divine within. They give users direct access to mystical states with no need for third-party intermediaries like organized religions, scriptures, or doctrines. Bitcoin offers users access to money backed by mathematics, not the promises of economists, banks, or politicians. Users are not forced to have mediators between themselves and the direct experience of reality. They are not forced to listen to someone else tell them “what it is” or “how it feels”. They can experience it for themselves.

For bitcoin, the ability of all users to run a full node gives them direct access to a globally connected financial network without mediation or censorship. For psychedelics, users are given direct, unmediated access to their own interconnected neural networks. There are also globally connected social networks that arise to distribute, discuss, and use both technologies, often in combination. These are peer-to-peer networks with no leaders, no one in charge, and no employees. All peers are equal.

Using bitcoin and psychedelics opens one to understanding the interconnectedness of different disciplines and technologies. Politics, technology, economics, chemistry, psychology, game theory, sociology, and philosophy are only a few of the fields that come together to inform our understanding of these tools, and how to best use them. 

Many users of both bitcoin and psychedelics have found that the path to understanding them at a deeper level is education on a broad range of topics. Combining this wisdom gained through education, with the insights gained through using these technologies, brings greater depth and understanding to our lives.

“Bitcoin is amoral and absolutely neutral about whether you join its network or not“, says Mark Maraia. I’d extend that to say LSD is amoral and absolutely neutral. The extreme experiences are attributable to your personal body chemistry, your set, setting, and the entirety of your life’s knowledge and experience. We are the variables, bitcoin and LSD are the constants. You get out of it what you bring into it.

I’ve seen many bitcoiners going down rabbit holes that lead to significant life changes. How they eat, work, exercise, consume media, and more, changes. Deep changes that they often credit to bitcoin and “first principles thinking”. These life changes have little or nothing to do with economics, money, or finances.

Users of psychedelics go through similar lifestyle changes that profoundly change how they interact with the world. These can manifest in the same way as with bitcoin, changes in how people eat, work, exercise, consume media, interact with each other, etc. These significant life changes may never have been actualized without directly using one or both of the technologies discussed in this article.

Like any tool, these can be misused, abused, and lead users down the wrong path. We’ll talk more about the naively misguided, the affinity scammers, the attackers, and the outright bad actors using these technologies and how it all plays out shortly.

Combining Bitcoin and Psychedelics

While each of these technologies can be life-changingly powerful on their own, combining them opens up unique possibilities for the individual and humanity as a whole. Bitcoin and psychedelics are like musical instruments, each vibrating with their own unique frequency. Each instrument can play a song by itself, but together the symphonic opportunities multiply exponentially. When played together, the frequencies of the instruments resonate seamlessly and are changed forever into deeper, richer songs.

In my own life, I credit psychedelics with directly influencing the art I make. Without psychedelics, I may have created art in some form, but it would not look the same or be informed by the same design decisions and motivations. My entire art portfolio is a direct and unambiguous result of deep personal study of revolutionary psychedelic technology like LSD and bitcoin. My introduction to bitcoin happened through a combination of art, psychedelics, and of course, bitcoin. I used to make LSD blotter art designs, art perforated into tiny squares and then soaked with LSD by the chemists. I also created the LSD Mandala, that encodes the social history, chemistry, and secrets of LSD distribution in a graphical codex.

An anonymous bitcoiner from Brazil reached out to me in 2015 and asked if I would take bitcoin for my art, since it was the easiest way for him to transact internationally. I had heard of bitcoin but had no idea how to accept it. I told him, “Sure thing, but you have to tell me how to set this up”. This anonymous stranger helped me set up my first bitcoin wallet, sent me 3.1 bitcoin for my art, and then promptly disappeared back into the internet, never to be heard from again. I forgot about bitcoin, but a few more “touch points” with it over the years were like a set of neon arrows pointing out an important message from the universe.

In December 2017, I made my first bitcoin art. This change in subject matter was significant for me as I view my art as a method to spread my message to the world. When I get into something, it takes over my whole life. Psychedelics had been my subject for over a decade, so this shift was monumental for me.

I quickly got tricked into shitcoining, and for about a year and a half I believed ridiculous things like “Ethereum is the future of art” and other equally dubious things. But as I said, when I get into something, I become consumed by it. I investigate it as thoroughly as I can.

I began investigating NFTs, learning how they were coded, how they worked, and the more I learned, the more disillusioned I became. Through using an array of shitcoins in combination with psychedelics, I quickly saw that I was on the wrong path. I could also clearly see the right path. One path leads me to darkness and destruction, lies and deceit, but the other leads to truth and stability. My path is bitcoin-only. No longer can I be distracted by the false promises and dead-end tech of this wasteland of shitcoinery. 

There was a hard line, a threshold, and I crossed it in June of 2019. While working on a hackathon project for the Bitcoin 2019 conference, I went through a psychedelic experience that drew a line in the sand. While working on a (really cheesy) “Super Bowl Commercial for bitcoin”, the resolve hit me all at once; I logged onto the exchange and dumped all my shitcoins for bitcoin. And my art was going to be bitcoin-only from here on out.

The following month I flew out to San Francisco for the Bitcoin 2019 conference. That Friday, during the conference, I heard someone mention bitcoin's clock and calendar-like nature. I took some LSD that evening and went to a bitcoin developers meetup a few blocks away from my hotel. After a full day and evening consuming LSD and bitcoin content, I spent the night sketching out the very first concept designs for the Bitcoin Full Node Sculpture. I spent the next seven months working tirelessly, avoiding friends, TV, Twitter, and sleeping, in an endless quest to create.

Here I directly combined bitcoin and psychedelics with the intended desire of creating an art piece that mapped bitcoin over time, space, mind, and the people making up the network. This process stretched out the entire seven months, and I used LSD in different ways during this time. I found it especially helpful in two distinct endeavors:

• For holistic, big-picture thinking. Obtaining and capturing the visions I wanted to translate from idea into form. These are usually higher doses, and I’m not working on art during the experience. I am turning the project over in my mind and seeing it come together. I take notes and do simple sketches, no pressure, capture everything.

• For working in a flow state. Here you can access the creative flow directly while working on the art. Time dissolves, and everything falls away. It is you and the creative process burning brightly in concert. During these periods, a fantastic amount of work can be completed in a short time.

Combining the two doesn’t always mean using them at the same time. I have a saying, “Create high, edit sober”. Bring your ideas, skills, and passions into the psychedelic experience, and focus all that on a specific mission, a goal. Use this raw uncut inspiration, and form it with a quiet mind. Capturing the benefit from each of these states was critical to creating the Bitcoin Full Node Sculpture.

During the process, I learned a great deal about bitcoin and how it worked, by trying to describe it visually. You cannot describe what you do not understand. I also obtained many insights by visualizing different aspects of bitcoin. I could see how key parts fit together in new ways, and my understanding deepened through the ability to visualize concepts geometrically.

Every trip has three distinct parts, lasting a few hours each. The come up, the peak, and the comedown. Any or all (or none) of these may be leveraged for creativity. The comedown period, as the intensity decreases, can be an extremely productive period for me.

I’ll share one of my methods for using LSD for creativity, understanding that what works for me may not work for you. The method is very simple. As a prerequisite, this assumes you have good LSD of a known dosage on paper. (And you know how much one dose affects you reliably). 

• Cut your LSD into 3rds or 4ths depending on the potency. You want this amount to be enough to feel. It should not be a sub-threshold dose.

• Start by taking one-fourth of a standard dose. Sometimes this can be enough, and you can stop here.

• After waiting 60 minutes, take another quarter dose. You can continue taking quarter doses every hour. I haven’t found a hard limit to how long this can go on.

• Go into the experience with a focus on a specific project or problem.

• Set a time and space where you won’t be bothered or distracted.

• Have all the tools of your trade handy.

By splitting the dose over time, you avoid the intensity of a crashing wave of LSD hitting you all at once. By spreading out the dose, it becomes easier to get into and navigate the psychedelic space. There’s less of a jolt between ordinary waking consciousness and the LSD mindscape, because one seems to flow into the other easily. It also tones down the overall intensity of the experience, while prolonging it and making it more manageable. 

At a deeper level, combining psychedelics and computer science has been going on for decades, and I found many fascinating examples of people successfully doing this.

A computer programmer on Reddit seems to be using a similar technique to what I described above.

Simply taking a psychedelic and thinking about a subject you’re curious about can lead to new and novel ideas and solutions. Like when Nobel prize-winning scientist Kary Mullis invented PCR, he directly credited the Nobel-winning idea to his experiences with LSD.

Another excellent example of a scientific study of the creativity-enhancing properties of combining psychedelics with specific areas of interest or inquiry, comes from a study done before the illegalization of LSD. This is important because the public didn’t yet have the negative stigmas of “illegality” or “immorality” attached to LSD, since there weren’t any laws against using it.

The study was comprised of 27 participants “including engineers, physicists, mathematicians, architects, a furniture designer, and a commercial artist. Subjects were instructed to select one or more problems that required a creative solution and that subjects had worked for weeks or months without being able to find a satisfactory solution.”

And here's the clincher: months after the effects wore off, participants remained firm: LSD had absolutely helped them solve their complex, seemingly intractable problems. And the establishment agreed.

Shortly after their LSD experiences, the 27 men unleashed a slew of widely embraced innovations, including:

• a mathematical theorem for NOR gate circuits

• a conceptual model of a photon

• a linear electron accelerator beam-steering device

• a new design for the vibratory microtome

• a technical improvement of the magnetic tape recorder

• blueprints for a private residency and an arts-and-crafts shopping plaza

• a space probe experiment designed to measure solar properties

Because of the illegal nature of LSD, we may never know how many discoveries and inventions came about as a direct result of combining psychedelics with someone’s passion and skillset. Many professionals have been, and continue to be, too scared of professional or social repercussions due to their use of psychedelics. Luckily, not everyone is silent on this matter. Dennis Wier, a computer programmer, shared this story:

"Here is a way I used LSD-25 for a complex programming project in 1975. I was working in New York developing a compiler for an application language called “MARLAN.” At one point in the project, I could not get an overall viewpoint of the operation of the entire system. It really was too much for my brain to keep all the subtle aspects and processing nuances clear so I could get a processing and design overview. After struggling with this problem for a few weeks, I decided to use a little acid to see if it would enable a breakthrough.

I used only seventy-five micrograms because I was not interested in tripping, as I had a specific, limited, and definite purpose for the use of LSD. While stimulated by the LSD, I was able to get the entire system wholly in my mind at the same time. I spent some time mentally visualizing various aspects of the compiler, the language, and the processing which would take place. I did discover three or four design inconsistencies while being stimulated by the effect of the LSD, and I made notes for later checking.

Once all the changes were made, I was able to successfully complete the programming of this huge system. The design changes I made reduced future program modification errors and contributed to the elegance of the design. The system was a commercial success for my employer and was used for many years by them. Although the use of LSD was an important component of the success of the system, no one knew of its use except me."

Bill Atkinson, the inventor of HyperCard, publicly disclosed for the first time that the entire idea for his software invention came from an LSD trip he vividly describes at 1:03:45 in this video.

In 1987, Apple revolutionized how people interacted with their computers by packaging HyperCard free with every PC sold. The program was credited with "putting the power of computer programming and database design into the hands of non-programmers." It became one of the earliest vehicles for electronic publishing. HyperCard itself was a tool for self-sovereignty, developed by a programmer using two other tools of self-sovereignty. This is a very “meta” situation, where the tools spawn new tools made by the people using them, and the new tools are focused on the same goal as the original tools — increasing self-sovereignty.

I’ll use one final example of a computer programmer that used LSD and decentralized networks in his quest for self-sovereignty. Kevin Paul Herbert, a self-taught computer programmer and software designer who developed software that now runs on millions of Internet routers worldwide, gave this interview in 2008.

A final quote from Kevin Herbert really gets into the deep questions underlying self-sovereign technologies. Remember, he was thinking about all this in 2008.

Be mindful that these experiences are colored by the life journey of the individual. The more you know and the more skills you have, the more they will inform the content of your psychedelic experiences. Whatever your interest, passion, or craft, if you use these technologies to inform your creations, they will undoubtedly change and evolve. In what manner, I cannot say — that is up to you.

I believe we are all capable of creating masterpieces. A car mechanic can be so good that he is considered an artist. The same applies to a chef, a lawyer, or a teacher — all these crafts can be honed to a level of mastery. Find your passion, follow it, and create your masterpieces.

Using these tools of self-sovereignty, I believe we can grow as individuals, and cultivate the opportunity to impact the world around us in more profounds ways.

Origin Stories

A mysterious cypherpunk anonymously dropped a white paper on an obscure cryptography forum on Halloween 2008. He or she stays around long enough to nurture the world’s most revolutionary monetary system through its infancy, and then disappears. There is much debate over whether Satoshi is one person or many, male or female, alive or dead. Everything is shrouded in mystery.

The origins of psychedelics are equally debated. Terence McKenna popularized the “Stoned Ape Theory”, where unthinking monkeys evolved into humans by consuming psychedelic mushrooms on the African plains. Accurate or not, the origins of this relationship undoubtedly go back to a time before recorded history.

Even more mysterious is the origin story of LSD. The famous “Bicycle Day” story is most likely a fabrication. Any deep investigation into the claims of this story necessarily leads to the conclusion that things cannot possibly add up. We’re expected to believe a cascade of “accidents” led to the unexpected discovery of the most powerful substance known to man.

Don’t trust, verify. Without taking you too far down this rabbit hole, I’ll provide you with this presentation by LSD Chemist Dave Nichols from the 2004 Mind States conference, and you can begin to DYOR here. Dr. Nichols is far more kind in his conclusions than I am, and I have a separate article going into much more depth about the real history behind Bicycle Day. The origins of both LSD and bitcoin are shrouded in mystery and legend in similar ways.

There are three forks in both the bitcoin and LSD origin stories:

• What actually happened

• What we’re told happened

• Complete fabrications and misinformation about what happened

However they originally came to be, the immovable fact of their existence today forces us to come to terms with how these technologies apply to each of us individually, and as a worldwide collective.

The Creator and Intelligence Agencies

Even if they are controversial, there are alleged connections between Satoshi Nakamoto and Albert Hoffman, the creators of bitcoin and LSD, and three-letter intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA. With Satoshi, there are both allegations that he arrived upon, and exited the bitcoin community because of the CIA. He famously disappeared once-and-for-all when bitcoin developer Gavin Andreson decided to meet with the CIA to educate them about bitcoin. The NSA created the SHA-256 algorithm used by bitcoin, leading to more Satoshi conspiracy theories.

There are also allegations that Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD, was or became a CIA asset, and was linked to the 1951 St. Anthony’s Fire episode in Port Saint Esprit, France. There are many more allegations of intelligence community connections to the creators of LSD and bitcoin, with varying degrees of believability. While these claims are entertaining, they are impossible to prove or disprove in most cases, so rational investigation can only take us so far.

The Early Compute Revolution

An undeniable connection threads through the individual revolutions of computing, psychedelics, cryptography, and bitcoin. They are all connected in a complex tapestry of self-actualization. Amazingly, the Early Compute, Public Cryptography, and Psychedelic Revolutions, all trace their roots to the same nexus in place and time.

The period from the early 1950s through 1965, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, became a mixing pot of homebrew computers, mathematicians, and LSD. Then the period from 1966 through 1976 saw the rise of both LSD and the personal computer as tools for revolution and personal growth. To get to the beginning of the connections between LSD and bitcoin, we must go back to this era and trace the threads that wove a tapestry of transformation through these two communities, binding them forever.

LSD was not illegal until 1966 in California, so there was a period spanning over a decade where computer science and psychedelic science coexisted in academic circles.

Between 1950 and the mid-1960s, more than a thousand clinical papers, several dozen books, and six international conferences, discussed psychedelic drug therapy. This story from that time connects the early computer science crowd with the early use of LSD in the Bay Area:

“From 1961 to 1965, the Bay Area-based International Foundation for Advanced Study led more than 350 people through LSD trips for research purposes. Some of them were important pioneers in the development of computing, such as Doug Engelbart, the father of the computer mouse.”

LSD was used at many of the top computer companies of the 1950s and 60s for everything from systems design to the design of computer circuitry:

“Several of the early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips, especially in the years before they could be designed on computers, because “you had to be able to visualize a staggering complexity in three dimensions, hold it all in your head. And they found that LSD could help.”

Timothy Leary, Harvard professor and well-known psychedelic evangelist, became an outspoken proponent of the power of personal computing as a tool for personal growth. He saw the personal computer as a technology that could open the mind in many of the same ways as LSD.

LSD was everywhere in 1960s silicon valley. Computer scientists, programmers, and designers from all the major companies were involved. This story from Wired Magazine goes into the connections between psychedelics, the internet, and the Grateful Dead. Even though this story is from 25 years before bitcoin’s birth, the following paragraph below sounds very bitcoin-like:

“One part of that transaction's magic is the achievement of sharing useful content through the network over decades in time. But another even more astonishing fact is the resilience of the data, that it held from machine to machine with some kind of life force of its own. Something inside of it made it self-replicating and alive, something begging to be copied and shared and listened to and sung.”

We can see that the beginnings of the computer and psychedelic revolutions both trace their roots back to this focused nexus of location and time. These rivers seem to flow into the same oceans and arise from the same sources. There are overlapping ripples between the seemingly separate subcultures brewing in the early compute and psychedelic communities. Many thinkers, authors, scientists, and researchers of the times came in close contact through social circumstances, or through their occupations.

The path from building tools of control for corporations, to building tools for people to resist control, came about over decades.

We are all beneficiaries of the work done by psychedelic computer scientists of the not-so-distant past.

We’ve seen this clear connection between the psychedelic and computing revolutions, and now we can also tie the public cryptography revolution directly to both. Cryptography was a closely guarded secret of government intelligence agencies, until Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman wrestled the secret knowledge free, and gave it to the everyday man.

This insolence was not without consequences. The government tried to ban encryption by labeling it as a munition of war, and making it illegal to write and publish cryptographic code. Using cryptography would be the same as being a weapons dealer. This led to the encryption wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

Here again, we find ourselves in this pinpoint nexus of time and place. The hero of our story joins the battle, changing the course of human history forever. In 1965 after leaving MIT, Whit Diffie got a job through his knowledge of psychedelics, and in 1969 traveled to (you guessed it) the San Francisco Bay area.

In 1975 he published his work on Public-Private Key cryptography that underpins the entire bitcoin system.

John Markoff described this psychedelic connection in his book, “What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.”:

“Diffie’s job interview at the MITRE Corporation was with a distinguished mathematician and software designer named Roland Silver, who became his mentor. It was an unusual interview by military-contractor standards. It took place at Silver’s home, and almost the entire conversation concerned psychedelic drugs: how to prepare them, where to acquire them, etc. Diffie passed with flying colors.”

Diffie was also a major proponent of personal liberty and self-sovereignty. When he learned that government intelligence agencies were hiding knowledge of cryptographic mathematics, he is quoted as saying:

After Whitfield and Hellmann published their landmark paper on public-private key cryptography, another Bay Area resident reached out to them to see if they’d be interested in working together. This researcher was Ralph Merkle, creator of another major underpinning technology of bitcoin, the Merkle Tree.

During a very small moment in history, this very small geographic area sits glowing like a magical egg as it birthed technologies of change and hope. 

The deeply interwoven connections between the genesis of the revolutions of psychedelics, personal computing, and cryptography is truly remarkable. These three sciences converge over the next few decades, in expressions of self-sovereignty through digital privacy, digital money, and digital philosophy, made real through “cypherpunks writing code.”

Before we move on from the historical connections, I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road. One of the most visible aspects of early bitcoin history was the relationship between online peer-to-peer marketplaces, bitcoin, and psychedelics. In 2011, the world was confronted with a new kind of “drug market.” This new online marketplace offered unique benefits to both buyers and sellers.

Many people don’t know this, but Ross grew his own psychedelic mushrooms, to be the very first product on the Silk Road site. Before there was anything else, there was bitcoin and psilocybe cubensis. So aside from Lazlo’s pizza, psychedelic mushrooms are arguably one of the earliest recorded peer-to-peer exchanges of bitcoin for goods/services. While there may be some paper towels, cups, and other mundane and forgotten items, the connection between the online/P2P/psychedelic/cypherpunk community is undeniable.

Also of note, the first place Ross advertised the Silk Road was on a psychedelic mushroom online forum, The Shroomery, under the username “altoid.” You can still read his one and only post here.

The Implementation Level

The next level to investigate for interesting parallels would be to look at the base primitives of the individual implementations. Bitcoin is a protocol, a set of rules, instructions and parameters, and there are different implementations of bitcoin that are compatible with the protocol. The implementations would be the software you run, that allows you to interact with the network. While there is a standard “reference implementation” of bitcoin, users have total freedom to use different programming languages, features, and architecture to interact with the same bitcoin network as everyone else.

For most bitcoin users, while we appreciate the ability to do so, we will not code our own bitcoin implementation from scratch. We will choose from the many available implementations, and decide whether to run open-source or closed-source code.

This is a topic too broad for this article, but I firmly believe that one should never use bitcoin with closed-source code. If you choose to use open-source code, you can both verify and compile the software from its source code.

There is a lot of nuance here. At this level, the “tools” of bitcoin can be as interchangeable as what car you drive, and there's almost the same amount of choice available to the end-user. This choice is an important one and should be considered carefully. The car you drive may not be significant most days, but one day it might save your family because of certain features.

The important thing to note is that regardless of the implementation a user chooses, their ability to “Run Their Own Node” is the democratizing, and arguably most important factor. Everyone should be able to run their own node, cutting out middlemen and uncertainty along the way.

A bitcoin node is a source of truth — a complete history from the now, all the way back to the Genesis. By running your own node, you empower yourself to obtain your own direct source of truth, unmediated by banks, politicians, or priests. For bitcoin, this allows users to know with certainty that their own transactions are valid and real — no need to melt down a gold bar to verify, using expensive equipment and time. If the bitcoin arrives in my wallet, I know it’s 100% real. It’s not counterfeit; it’s not debased. It is pure unadulterated bitcoin.

With psychedelics, you can similarly grow, synthesize, and/or extract your own, removing the need for middlemen, or concerns over purity, weight, and misidentification. 

Psychedelics allow you to, as Sama Katharo coined it: “connect to your own inner node”. The software running the wetware of the most complex and densely ramified processing machine known to man, your mind. You can use them to distill your own source of inner truth. You can explore the vast mindscapes within your head, without any need for a psychiatrist or other “trusted 3rd party” to interfere or project their frame of reference onto you. Psychedelics give you the keys to your own inner palace.

Psychedelics, like bitcoin, have many different implementations, such as LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, DMT, mescaline, or cannabis. There has also been a boom of experimental psychedelic “research chemicals”, that have proliferated through dark net markets (and by extension, bitcoin). And while running a full-scale psychedelic laboratory is outside the abilities and desires of most of the population, almost all adults can take control over their psychedelic path and grow their own mushrooms, cacti, and cannabis. This may have different potential legal ramifications in various jurisdictions, and each user has to decide accordingly.

The path to growing your own psychedelics entails a hero’s quest of self-education, preparation, growth, and patience. Taking the time to understand, cultivate, nurture, and bring forth the proper materials has immeasurable benefits. This preparation and contemplation over time, give the seeker control to adjust what happens within the borders of our bodies.

There is a similar hero’s quest along the path of the bitcoiner, who seeks to control their future within the fiat debt spiral occurring all around us.

Learn By Doing

Both Bitcoin and psychedelics require you to actually USE them before you can begin to understand them properly. You can read a book about how they work, what they do, and how to use them properly, but your understanding is incomplete until you get direct personal exposure. No amount of preparation or reading can prepare you for the world-shattering cyclone of experience within the heart of the psychedelic experience. No amount of reading can prepare you for the feeling you get when sending bitcoin, a costly and irreversible action.

The more you use them, the better acquainted you become with them. The more familiar you become, the deeper you can go in the experience. This is wisdom born from experience, not knowledge gained from reading.

Finality

There is a “point of no return” with both psychedelics and bitcoin. Once you send a bitcoin transaction, there’s no taking it back. Once you click send and it is confirmed by the network, no action you take can stop that bitcoin from moving once. When you place a hit of LSD on your tongue, or eat a few grams of mushrooms, you are committed to the experience for the next several hours. There is no CTRL Z, do-overs or take-backs. There is no way out but through.

There is a threshold that, once crossed, things are never the same. This finality gives the user pause to consider their actions. A mistake or misstep here has immediate consequences, so proceeding with care is wise and prudent. Carefully making your decisions while using these technologies is of the utmost importance. With practice comes familiarity. With familiarity comes confidence. These technologies build conscious action leading to conviction, when approached with diligence and respect.

The Experiences

The experience of using psychedelics and bitcoin bring us to the same fundamental questions about what it is to be human, and how we interact with the universe around us.

• What is time?

• What is money?

• What is real?

• What is language?

• What is work?

• What is energy?

• Is using energy good or bad?

• Where do I fit in among my peers?

Why do these two different technologies bring us to the same fundamental questions about reality and what it is to be human? Why do they inspire us to ask the big questions?

The concept of time is deeply enmeshed in bitcoin and psychedelics on multiple levels. Bitcoin has reimagined timekeeping, and the implications of this are yet to be understood. The human experience of time is variable. We interpret time through a lens of other perceptions (if you’re having fun, time may seem to go fast, while when you’re desperately waiting for something, it can feel like every second is an eternity).

This is magnified on psychedelics, where the concept of time becomes stretchy and amorphous, with novelty and randomness playing with the everyday experience of time like a funhouse mirror. Compare this to bitcoin block times. Blocks are supposed to come every 10 minutes, but sometimes they’re faster, sometimes slower. Like waves in the ocean, each tick of the bitcoin clock moves to its own rhythm but is endless, like time itself.

Both bitcoin and psychedelics have their own inner rhythm of time that is not affected or changed by the rhythm of clock time.

Integration: Inexperienced vs. Experienced Use

With bitcoin and psychedelics, there exists a spectrum of familiarity that is directly correlated to the amount of time and work the user puts into learning and using the technologies. This spectrum ranges from inexperienced, to experienced users. The benefits of both technologies are best leveraged by experienced users. People who are able to take the insights from their experiences and successfully apply them to their lives reap the most benefits.

This ability to identify, harvest, and translate insight into action is what I would consider advanced use of psychedelics, so I think it’s worth exploring here. Many users take psychedelics and access profound insights with deep personal meaning. However, after the effects wear off, inexperienced users don’t take action on the insights.

Benefits, discoveries, and inventions can manifest in a spark of inspiration, only to be forgotten and lost forever just moments later.  Some users experience changes after a psychedelic experience, but they are short-lived. They’ll gain insight and make changes, but like many New Year's Resolutions, these quickly fade into entropy. The changes last a few weeks, maybe a month, but soon users find themselves falling back into the routine of daily life, and bad habits that were identified and addressed come back.

The return of the mundane and the imposition of the world on our habits, can be a powerful force. Psychedelics, and the insights from bitcoin's first principles thinking can be powerful, but need to be reinforced. This reinforcement can take the form of direct action, deep study, or force of will, but I believe that returning to the source of the experience is also essential.

For bitcoin, this means listening to podcasts, learning, coding, building, and sharing. For psychedelics, this means you need to revisit the psychedelic experience periodically. There is no magic bullet. You would not expect a single dose of aspirin to give a lifetime of pain relief, and psychedelics are the same. They work for a while but should be administered “as needed.” 

Addressing the need to properly integrate lessons learned or insights gained during a psychedelic experience, should be of the utmost importance. If you are given something of value during the experience, treat it as you would any item of great value. You may not get insights or life lessons in every experience, and that’s okay. But it’s good to be prepared for when they arise, so you can maximize their value to your life.

Confidence Building

Both bitcoin and psychedelics can build an inner sense of deep confidence. Psychedelics can be very challenging. Going through the psychedelic experience can be compared in some ways to an initiation. Some people experience a death-rebirth experience on psychedelics, and there is no more life-affirming experience than that of near-death.

Psychedelics can also be deeply terrifying when used without proper care and respect. But even the most frightening experiences don’t kill us, and this builds a sense of empowerment. Even without the drama of ego-death, or scary psychedelic experience, many people would still classify some portion of their psychedelic experience as “challenging.” Going through these profound internal challenges can be a huge confidence builder. 

The psychedelic experience is also a modern-day analogy to an internal “Hero’s Quest.” It is not something taken lightly, and is a path of great personal challenge and drama. The quest can lead to a direct divine mystical experience, a treasure, before the hero returns home.

Bitcoin also builds confidence that can only be gained through experience. Those who have been around bitcoin for more than a year, have come across multiple media articles loudly and proudly proclaiming, “Bitcoin is Dead!” Over 450 of these articles have been published over the past decade, yet bitcoin never dies. It endures an unending stream of technological, political, and ideological attacks, yet every 10 minutes on average, a new bitcoin block is produced on the network. The clock keeps ticking. This resilience builds confidence in bitcoiners, and this confidence grows and deepens with time.

Effects on Long-Term Thinking and Planning

The concept of “Time-preference,” popularized by Saifedean Ammous, is based on choices we all make, and their relationship to time. Do you want one bitcoin today, or ten next year?

Time preference comes in two flavors, high and low. High-time preference thinking optimizes for the immediate future (today, tomorrow), while low-time preference thinking optimizes for the long term (years, decades, generations). Low Time Preference thinking is a luxury afforded to those who have secured their immediate future. One cannot plan for the future when unsure where the next meal comes from, or where to sleep for the night. 

Low-time preference thinking includes saving for the future and securing personal wealth through great personal responsibility and education. Those who save in bitcoin and hold it for the long term find their wealth increasing by orders of magnitude. No one has ever bought bitcoin, held it for four years, and lost money. Ever. It just doesn’t happen. If you buy it for the short term, anything can happen, and most likely, you’ll lose your money. Buy, hold, accumulate, and spend frugally.

These lessons from bitcoin begin to permeate the user’s life, and soon, this type of thinking is applied to all aspects of life. Users begin to educate themselves on related disciplines, start exercising and eating better, because they now have a more optimistic view of the future.

A bleak future, once filled with uncertainty, is transformed by individual personal action into a vision of hope, and it is empowering beyond words.

No one is coming to save you. You have to be the hero in this journey.

Psychedelics affect both low and high-time preference thinking, and are deeply individual for each person. I find that psychedelics can be used as a personal barometer — a tool to forecast the course of my future. By using the past to look into the future, from unique and unrealized perspectives, we can use this tool to map out plans for personal growth. By journeying outside my everyday experience of myself, I can see myself from a whole new vantage point.

Many of us can quickly see faults in others but not our own? Psychedelics give us the perspective shift that allows us to view ourselves and our lives from a new vantage point, one you can easily and clearly see faults you ignored, missed, or suppressed.

I can see the goal and the path to it. I can see what’s right for me, and I can also see other paths I might take and where they might lead me astray. The true power of psychedelics is identifying these insights, and acting on them consistently. Many people take psychedelics and have a grand vision, but then two weeks later are caught in the same personal and emotional life ruts they were before the experience. This is because there is almost no good information on properly integrating psychedelic experiences. Your best teacher will be doing the work, paying attention, adjusting accordingly, and monitoring results. The fact is, many people are making long-term positive changes in their life as a direct result of their use of bitcoin and/or psychedelics.

The effects of psychedelics are not just in the mind. Science has shown that these molecules physically alter the structure of our brains. This image illustrates how psychedelics can boost the growth of brain cells and form new neural pathways in the brain. You think differently because you are different.

Altcoins, Research Chemicals, and Harm Reduction

Both bitcoin and psychedelics have predatory “imposters” and affinity scams that arise to exploit the community. Both cultures have a dishonest population that benefits from promoting these scams, and an honest population that acts as an immune system to identify, expose, and exile these toxins. In bitcoin, there is an active culture of calling out the affinity scams quickly, loudly, and forcefully. In psychedelics, there is a similar culture called “Harm Reduction”, where vocal members act to shield the greater community against the attacks of bad actors.

There is an entire galaxy of “altcoins” that claim they are better than bitcoin, for some reason or another. While some of the altcoin projects may be legitimate experiments into digital assets, the vast majority are dangerous affinity scams, trying to steal your money through false promises and technobabble.

These altcoins take many forms: Defi, Proof-of-Stake, algorithmic stablecoins, NFTs, and many other word salads that, upon investigation, are not what they advertise. Many of these projects and alt-coins will say they are “decentralized”, while actually hiding direct centralizing factors that defeat the entire point of the project. In bitcoin, we have a colloquialism for these non-bitcoin crypto-assets: shitcoins.

A galaxy of Frankensteinian psychedelic molecules find their way out of sketchy overseas laboratories, into the global psychedelic markets. Things like 2C-I, DOB, aMT, 25i-NBOMe, Bromo-Dragonfly, and JWH-018 are just a few of the alphabet-soup of chemicals currently available on the global market.

Because these chemicals are so rare, there’s very little data on their safety profiles. Unscrupulous dealers will buy these cheap imitations and sell them as LSD, MDMA, or Mescaline to unsuspecting customers. 25i-NBOME is often falsely sold as LSD, but this substance is highly toxic and has killed multiple users, unlike LSD, which has never killed anyone.

I made some “harm reduction” blotter art to help combat this deceptive technique. This is an example of how harm reduction activism has parallels to “toxic bitcoin maximalism.”

While scammers and frauds are everywhere in both communities, not everyone involved in altcoins or research chemicals is dishonest, or out to harm you. Many are earnestly investigating the merits and pitfalls in these untravelled paths, and I have no issue with their right to do that. These people are not dangerous to the community, mostly only dangerous to themselves.

While I feel they may be misguided, their honest explorations do not harm anyone else. Some people may invest significant portions of their life into exploring these paths, and may never find their way out. Though for most, I think this is a transitional state, as people experience the consequences of wrongthink and self-correct.

When self exploration becomes shilling, we’ve crossed a line. I do take issue when people make false claims with dangerous implications to anyone who listens, especially when they do this solely because they stand to profit.

In both bitcoin and psychedelics, we have well-traveled paths that are reliable and predictable. Other paths are less-traveled or even unknown, with new and unique dangers. The classic psychedelics, like LSD, mushrooms, DMT, mescaline, and cannabis, are well-traveled, well-documented, and appropriately marked paths. By this, I mean millions of people have used these substances over decades, or even centuries. We know a lot about their safety, efficacy, and dosing because of their widespread, long-term use. These psychedelics are incredibly safe in a wide range of environments. 

Bitcoin is also a well-traveled path. It’s had millions of users, and over a decade of battle-tested real-world use. Bitcoin waves a trillion-dollar prize in the face of the world every day, for anyone who can crack it, yet no one ever has. The opposite is true in the world of non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies. You’ll see another Defi or Smart contract exploit or hack almost weekly. The summer of 2022 has also shown us the dangers of trusting third parties and taking on counterparty risk.

The most important takeaway from this section, if not the whole article, is to keep your focus on bitcoin in the world of “cryptocurrencies”, and LSD and psilocybin in the world of psychedelics.

There are many distractions and wrong paths to lead you astray. Don’t fall for them. Both psychedelics and bitcoin show us that time is our most precious commodity. If you lose focus, it’s easy to go off-mission and become distracted. By focusing your attention and energy, you spend more time on paths that can have deep and measurable benefits in your life. You can’t win unless you play. Distractions keep you entirely off the court.

There’s no “magic bullet” for wrongthink

Many psychedelic users believe that if everyone in the world took LSD, everything would change in an afternoon. In bitcoin, there’s a saying, “Bitcoin Fixes This,” whereby bitcoin can magically fix almost any problem in the world. Unfortunately, in my experience thus far, there appears to be no magic bullet for wrongthink. 

Bitcoin doesn’t stop shitcoinery. Psychedelics don’t automatically make you a good person.

Just because you become interested in bitcoin, doesn’t mean you will be immune to fiat thinking or shitcoinery. And just because you take psychedelics doesn’t mean you won’t end up in a maze of fantastic thinking. It also doesn’t mean you will successfully integrate your psychedelic insights to enhance your life.

When I first got into bitcoin, I had no idea about the vast world of cryptocurrencies. I thought bitcoin was the only digital currency. I quickly found out there were over a thousand different “altcoins.” I began researching, but the sources available were not reliable. I kept seeing altcoin promoters say, “bitcoin is old, outdated tech”, “bitcoin is slow and expensive,” and “this new coin fixes all that”.

More importantly, these scammers thrive off the pipe dream that this new coin can experience the same growth as bitcoin, possibly surpassing bitcoin's usefulness and price. Often, these coins cost pennies apiece, so the allure of turning a few cents into tens of thousands is a siren song to our sense of greed.

I fell for it, and spent over a year learning the hard (and expensive) way that I wasted my time and money on a bunch of shitcoins. This was a valuable but costly lesson. I took it to heart, and now focus solely on bitcoin. Doing this has changed my life in so many ways, and I’m forever thankful.

This speaks to the fact that some of us have to learn things the hard way. You cannot gain the insight without having had the experience of losing that time, energy, and money. For some, it is the cost of tuition. My hope is that you can learn from my mistakes. I can recommend browsing the Twitter page of @CoinFessions if you’re interested in learning from others’ mistakes. Today I am very quick to focus my time and attention on my specific mission, to the exclusion of as many distractions as I can fend off.

Beware of “Tourist” Culture

The paid crypto “TA” group leader, and the ayahuasca shaman, should be treated with the utmost skepticism. In almost all cases, these people are to be avoided. This includes ayahuasca tourism, psychedelic retreats, medicalized psychedelic treatments, and any situation where you absolve your sovereignty, set, and setting to another.

I do not want to be observed, guided, chanted to, or have others' protocols, beliefs, or rituals projected onto me while I am in a psychedelic state. I want to be in control of directing my own experience; I don’t want to absolve this responsibility to a trusted third party. The same goes for trusting a YouTube crypto trader to make financial decisions affecting myself and my family. Not gonna happen.

If you travel anywhere on vacation, we all know there’s a “tourist version” and a “real version” of the places we visit. There’s the beach you traveled to with the glorious sand, sun, and skies, and then there’s the shop trying to sell you t-shirts, shells, keychains, and a trip in the short bus to see the local sights.

Go to the beach, stay out of the tourist shops. In any culture, you will have elements that are “true and pure” to the movement's ideologies. You will also have predatory hangers-on, looking for opportunities to exploit newcomers' ignorance of nuance.

In bitcoin culture, there is a concept of “Orangewashing” oneself to seem like a bitcoiner, but in reality, they’re a shitcoiner or scammer pretending to walk the walk and talk the talk. Others don’t bother with orangewashing, and proudly proclaim bitcoin to be old, slow, boomer-tech, and clearly inferior to their most recent version of snake oil.

In psychedelic culture, an ever-growing number of people are more than happy to take your money, in exchange for providing you with psychedelic services, molecules, and even investment stocks. Some have deeper and darker motivations on your mind and body. My advice would be to steer clear of all of this, or at least view it through a lens of deep skepticism. I am not saying that all manifestations of these aspects of the cultures are inherently harmful, but that one must always look at the incentives. If you do involve yourself with any kind of retreat, or “shaman”, or psychedelic medical doctor or professional — do an abundance of research on that person/business. 

Take the time to seek out authentic culture. Nurture the real, reject the fake.

You will be rewarded many times over in ways that are impossible to predict.

Alchemy

I’d like to touch on the links to the ancient alchemical desire to transmute lead into gold. With bitcoin, we transmute the fiat structures of the world into a digital cryptographic treasure that can teleport anywhere on the planet. This is performed like a magic spell, by using specific words in the correct order. If you run the code, it works. By using the right words in the right sequence, we can make material changes in the world.

These aren’t just changes in our minds. These are changes others can see, feel,  and independently verify. The right computer code can lift a drawbridge or change all the city’s traffic lights in perfect timing, to ensure drivers can safely transit roads. Bitcoiners are magicians and wizards using computer code, rather than spellbooks. Psychedelic chemists are wizards, casting their spells in the language of atoms. Like letters forming words in code or a magic spell, atoms are arranged to form molecules.

Psychedelics transmute fiat thinking and living into new perspectives and mystical experiences. Mushrooms are like nature’s alchemist — transforming dead and decaying matter, literal trash, into psychedelic mushrooms, one of nature’s most elegant manifestations.

Bitcoin can also transmute waste into treasure. Stranded energy, once a burden, is transformed into a digital gold mine through bitcoin. Bitcoin can even transform our landfills into valuable bitcoin mines, turning trash into treasure. The alchemical dream is coming true, in ways our ancestors could never have imagined. 

The ancient science and chemistry that is alchemy finds new form in the digital age. By studying and using these tools, you can make real and lasting changes to your life and the world around you.