EVERYONE knows Finland is the happiest nation in the world. They have the best school system, health care and the only functioning socialist political system in the whole wide world.

Everyone “knows” this because almost no-one is Finnish.

I’m a Finn, and I’m here to share with you a story that goes through my journey from socialist soy-boy to hard line anarcho-capitalist in a matter of a few years.

I attribute most of my transformation to Bitcoin. 

I would say I learned about Bitcoin fairly early, in 2010. From my mother, nonetheless. She was a student at a technical university in my home town back in her day, and through her network she somehow learned about this magical internet money.

I was just thinking out loud ”what the hell is Bitcoin”, when I got a small schooling session from my mother. Of course neither she, nor I, knew what it really stood for at that time, but I have always been interested in new tech and, in short, a huge nerd.

Ever since that time, Bitcoin would haunt my thoughts from time to time, and I even ran the Bitcoin client briefly in the summer of 2010 just to test it out. For me, it was on-par with Napster, mIRC and other p2p software I was into late 90’s and early 00’s. I still had no idea about money or economics, which was kind of ironic because it was also around 2010 when I first watched a movie called Zeitgeist. That movie blew me away and caused severe anxiety due to the hopelessness I perceived in the world: we had no realistic options. I felt self-destructive, and what led me away from Bitcoin was me deciding to comply like a good little boy, finish my second formal degree and to proceed with my ”real job” as a construction engineer.

I thought that was how life was supposed to be. 

I paid more taxes than I care to admit, and what made matters worse, I truly believed they were necessary, a sacred duty even.

This caused severe cognitive dissonance, and I finally had enough in 2011 when my tax percentage reached an ATH of 60%. I just stopped working. I had burned myself out and had nothing to show for it. I was giving away most of my income to someone else.

In retrospective it was the best decision I ever made, as I learned there are so many wonderful places and people in the world. And most importantly, I realized what we have in Finland is far from optimal. I felt free for the first time in my life. I would never give it up again. In other words, I was no longer crippled by the fear of losing anything.

After the trip I started my first company, as I was done working for others and letting them reap most of the benefits. Bitcoin had been firmly placed in the back burner of my brain, but in 2013 it popped up again due to MtGox making waves.

I was stunned at how the price of Bitcoin had developed and that people were using it to make purchases online. 

However, it seemed too scammy and risky, so I forgot about it again for a year or so until I decided to buy some bitcoin with a credit card just to to try out how it works. I had never heard the term ”decentralized”. Bitcoin was cumbersome and it didn’t feel secure at all (because I wasn’t secure), so after a couple of test buys, I left Bitcoin again.

What caught my attention was that whenever Bitcoin would pop into my head again, and I went to check my wallet, there always seemed to be more value than I had before making those purchases. I think that was the first true wake up call that I should probably pay more attention to it. 

When I first heard about Bitcoin I had the same reaction I have heard many other Bitcoiners share:

"What a cool project, too bad the government will kill it eventually" or "it will be hacked" or "maybe it’s just another Ponzi scheme".

So I completely sympathize with median-Joe’s initial perception of Bitcoin, shared by many intelligent people as well.

We are dealing with a discovery akin to finding a new life sustaining planet or infinite energy source that will forever change everything we took for granted about society, governance, safety and business. It’s a giant leap of faith, not unlike unplugging from The Matrix, that many are not ready to take.

We should not treat these people as our enemies, but rather victims of fiat-imposed self-imprisonment.

As the Bitcoin number goes up, more and more people are starting to believe there is a way to live and die free, not by the grace of the state.

I am happy that before I actually bought bitcoin, I did read enough to know to hold my own keys. 

What I neglected to recognize was to take proper care of the backup.

Nothing stings like still having your public address and no way to access the sats. Fast forward this same goofing around on and off Bitcoin to 2017, when I finally decided it was time to read the actual white paper. My heart sank and cold sweat was pouring down my temples. The answer was there all along, so close, and yet so distanced by my own distorted view of the world. For the first time I saw the world clearly, much like Neo discovering The Matrix.

I immediately got completely obsessed and consumed by the idea of an unstoppable, unconfiscatable money.

I hardly slept or ate for many weeks straight, devouring every video, podcast and article I came across. As a side note, I also discovered ketogenic diet around the same time which gave me even more clarity and energy to keep at it. Bitcoin does have the tendency to force us to look twice at everything we have taken for granted in the fiat world, including dietary guidelines, politics and all other propaganda.

I didn’t know anyone else who was into Bitcoin, so my sources were in part very questionable, leading to some ill-advised dabbling in shitcoins. I definitely paid my dues there. Soon I started writing my own ”crypto” articles, and shared them in the biggest Finnish ”crypto enthusiast” Facebook group. I got some positive feedback, which fueled my desire to make even better content. One of the biggest turning points was when @Qhardening invited me to join his telegram group, which quickly became a home to me. I met the first of those we today call Bitcoin maximalists, and with the 2018 crash my shitcoinery started to rapidly give way to toxic Bitcoin maximalism.

My initial thought was to focus on influencing people in English, which is the common language of the global village that is the internet, where bitcoin is used as a global free money. Somewhere down the road I was convinced that since I also know Finnish, it is my duty to educate my countrymen. Not to say I’m a nationalist in any capacity, yuck! Just that there are still many great people who respond better to their maternal language.

I was still a regular member of Facebook half way through 2018, before deleting my profile entirely (nowadays I only have an account for educational and business purposes there). Anyway, I came across an interesting event in the aforementioned Facebook group. It was about forming the first cryptocurrency association in Finland. There was an open call for community members to join the election of the board and the chairman as well. I was surprised there was no association yet, given that LocalBitcoins and Prasos are Finnish OG Bitcoin companies. I decided to go check it out. I figured given my oratory skills, it should not be too difficult to get in the board. I only entertained the thought of getting elected chairman in the category ”yeah, right”. It was a cold March 2018 afternoon when I arrived at the venue, as I noticed the meeting had already started. I was a bit late because I almost didn’t go. Looking back, it was because of crippling fear of disappointment and failure. As I shuffled through the seated participants, trying to find a place for myself, I glanced at the crowd and realized I knew absolutely no-one there. Apart from @Technom4ge, that at the time was one of my idols, being one of the better known Bitcoin OG’s in Finland. My heart was racing just to share the room with him. I was just in time, as soon the facilitator called for candidates for the chairman position.

As everyone turned to see who spoke I realized it’s game time; I had nothing to lose except my face that no-one knew. There were three of us gunning for that position, and before voting we all got to give a pitch on how we would make the Bitcoin scene better in Finland. This is where I was at my comfort zone and to my surprise, after two rounds of voting I emerged victorious with a margin of one vote. The sensation was unbelievable and I really didn’t feel like I could let the community down. I had promised to devote unlimited time for this position should I be selected. And that I did. Throughout my term we made close to 100 YouTube videos that are really scarce in Finnish, arranged several educational events and talked to many regulators and authorities including Bank of Finland. One key point somewhere in the beginning of my term was when @BTCParadigm joined the ranks and helped us take our content to the next level. He is now the serving chairman of the association.

I feel proud of what we have accomplished within this short time, as we have witnessed several individuals rise up from the ranks of Bitcoiners to answer the ever expanding need of quality content about Bitcoin. People such as @Bio_Bitcoin, who finally took the initiative to translate the Bitcoin white paper into Finnish. We set the precedent that anyone can do it as long as they are willing to give it their all. Not to say that the Finnish Bitcoin scene would have been insignificant before us, given that Martti Malmi is also a Finn, just that perhaps we took the scene a few steps closer towards the general population. We did this mainly by creating novel and evergreen content about Bitcoin and individual freedoms, and translating key literature from English. This undertaking of public education expanded into my current main enterprise that is Konsensus Network, The Bitcoin Publishing House. First I published the Finnish version of The Bitcoin Standard by @Saifedean and shortly after a couple more books. Then I got the opportunity to expand to global markets with the Portuguese Bitcoin Standard, and now I am expanding to original English books as well. Publishing books is not easy by any means, but thanks to the tools of the information age, like the internet, I was able to teach myself to typeset and publish books professionally in a matter of one year. Of course enjoying it immensely along the way has been key.

Bitcoiners are by far the most generous and hard working people, with the lowest time preference, I have ever come across and I can’t praise each and every team member enough. Their investment of the most valuable asset, time, will not go overlooked by history when the demand for Bitcoin knowledge ticks up along with Bitcoin valuation.

It is difficult for many Finns to understand why Bitcoin is important and what exactly is the utility it provides. I tend to chalk this up to our socialist background inherited from the Soviet Union. Interestingly, Finland has perhaps the only somewhat successful implementation of socialism (alongside some Scandinavian countries perhaps). It can work only due to a small population, naturally driving services and supply chains to centralization. Not so for example in China, that is often perceived a socialist regime, but where it is impossible to weed out small entrepreneurs from competing with monopolies and oligopolies due to large volume of demand, which makes individual wealth generation through small business ventures plausible. In Finland most goods will be directed through central warehouses belonging to an oligopoly of two large corporations. They incidentally seem to consistently land the best real estate and land leases from the government, effectively forming the entrepreneurial landscape and driving out smaller operators in favor of worse and more expensive service. Not to mention the opportunity costs for individual consumers, having to drive vast distances to soulless auto markets that I call gas station castles.

The worst part is that most Finns see centralization of goods and services as good for consumers, and few even recall the times when one could get personalized and happy service from hard working entrepreneurs that were always accountable to the customer. That does not exist in Finland anymore, and by my experience we have one of the worst customer service experiences in the world: the customer is always in the wrong.

Long story short: it is nearly impossible to convince people they could benefit from a different system when the current system is:

• all they know

• works to relative satisfaction

This mindset has led many to believe there is more value in so called ”blockchain projects” that would offer nothing but incremental improvements to status quo and would still require trusting self-proclaimed authorities. The ethos “if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide” lives strong in Finland, as does trust in the state and police. Taking personal responsibility seems to be the new counter culture. Being responsible for their own keys scares the shit out of many Finns. Yet I remain optimistic that as government operations gradually prove less and less reliable, while personal investment opportunities grow more and more robust, we could see some sort of a beautiful personal deleveraging, including bank runs, debt jubilee and a mass exodus to hard money such as gold and Bitcoin.

There is no need for a violent revolution when all we need is to opt-out from systems that no longer work for us. 

We now have that option.