Hanukkah Reflections on My Year of Toying With Bitcoin

Let's start with what it took to sell a few poetry books using a bitcoin node.

If you actually rely on bitcoin for business, many non-custodial products and services are so experimental that you need tech support to operate them reliably.

Some people are surely using bitcoin today to improve their financial self-sovereignty.

Bitcoin is only transparent to people with the skills to read this data.

Some of the sharpest engineers I know in places like Iran still struggle to use bitcoin because there aren't enough people to transact with.

In short, social networks still control liquidity, whether it's bitcoin or paper rupees.

The Indian outlet Economic Times referred to bitcoin as the "New hawala," an ancient brokerage system often used for remittances.

My bitcoin experiments got easier when I started treating cryptocurrency like black market rupees.

How does one lawfully and privately get a book to a buyer living in rural Latin America? Can bitcoin really connect people to the global economy, including but not limited to digital products? If so, that process requires trust on both ends.

For over a decade bitcoin has already proven to be the experiment that flickers but never goes dark, almost like a candle.