Just an hour ago, I’ve sent my new song to THNDR Games developer Jack Everitt. He said he would include it in the soundtrack of his Lightning-Network-daily sat-stacking hit Bitcoin Bounce, which makes me really happy.

Earlier today, I’ve spoken with Czino about potentially contributing with a couple of tracks to his upcoming 8-bit Bitcoin game. If given the opportunity, I may also contribute to Satoshi’s Games and Lightnite.

So how did I, a guy who is mostly known in the space for writing articles and doing an obscure yet somehow pretty successful podcast, end up composing music Bitcoin projects?

Well, all it took was a series of uploads on Soundcloud (that I’m still planning to continue)… after spending years playing guitar all alone in my room, recording songs that nobody ever heard… and after spending millions and millions of satoshis at various points of my teenagehood and adult life to buy music gears (guitars, effect pedals, audio interfaces, analog-digital converters, and microphones).

However, music is the kind of element that nobody appreciates until they have to deal with the off-putting silence. We don’t notice the music that surrounds us and we often take it for granted. We don’t mind the songbirds in the morning, we try to ignore elevator songs, and we watch our favorite shows thinking that it’s normal for theme songs to be there. Maybe that it’s the abundance of sounds and the multiplicity of ways to experience them that makes us so numb to this myriad of auditory sensations.

But then you deal with some Bitcoin projects and you realize that something’s missing. And it’s not like the developers want it to not be there, there is shortage of creative people who are willing to help. This is where I step in and try to describe the way that something makes me feel – but instead of writing down thoughts or voicing my opinion, I record music and hope that others will understand it.

It’s a universal language which, instead of dealing with concepts and ideas, it seeks to instil moods and emotions.

Just like a C++ or Rust developer steps out to handle pull requests on the GitHub repositories of Bitcoin projects, I want to be able to create music for projects that need it. Now that the Bitcoin space is enlarging thanks to the layers that help it scale and cover other use cases, there is a lot of potential for new ideas to get built. And to me, Lightning is by far the most promising – it can do advanced smart contracts, it effortlessly handles microtransactions, and it incentivizes more people to run a full node.

Even some silly ideas that went into Ethereum and other altcoins are returning to Bitcoin (RGB tokens, monetized, decentralized, and permissionless cloud storage, and much more). It’s going to be interesting to see all the applications that get built around this ecosystem. And for lots of these use cases, there’s going to be demand for music and other arts that help humanize the otherwise sterile technology that will not be appealing to end-users.

Will I give up on writing to pursue a full-time career as composer? That’s very unlikely, as music is not as valued due to the nature of the internet – since search engines index text, it’s the written content that brings more traffic, sells more products, and explains difficult concepts in simple terms. Unfortunately for music and musicians, there is very little monetary appreciation for songs and there are entire libraries of free songs that anyone can download for free.

But as someone who enjoys originality and likes the challenge of creating something new, I will keep on writing music and see if I can give it a practical in the Bitcoin space. There are lots of projects that can benefit from my work and there is nothing like the feeling of helping the space grow. Of course, I’m not going to refuse payments or donations – but I won’t refuse to offer a song for free either.

So if you know someone who could use a song or two for their projects, let me know. If you think that you can find purpose for the songs that I posted on the SoundCloud and YouTube channels that I created for Bitcoin Takeover, then feel free to share them. And if you are an artist of any kind and you have the ability to help a project grow, then don’t hesitate.

As an internet community, the walls of our citadel are only as strong as our willingness to support each other’s efforts.