Bitcoin’s early adopters came from many different directions, drawn in for a variety of reasons. Some were Ron Paul, End the Fed, sound-money types who saw Bitcoin as a hard-money alternative to fiat, a tool for self-sovereignty, and a way to opt out of government control. Others came from the cypherpunk movement, focused on privacy, open-source technology, and resistance to state surveillance. There were also those from the Occupy Wall Street/Mr. Robot crowd, who viewed Bitcoin as a weapon against corporate banks and financial elites. Some progressive tech entrepreneurs saw it as an experiment in decentralization, financial inclusion, or even a means to disrupt capitalism itself. Each of these groups approached Bitcoin with their own vision, but over time, many tried to reshape it to fit their own ideological goals—whether through governance models, regulatory compliance, or social justice narratives. Meanwhile, those who understood Bitcoin’s true power as a free-market system of incentives built on proof-of-work stayed focused on sovereignty, self-reliance, and economic reality.
Of all these groups, I think I most associate with the Ron Paul types, those End the Fed, sound-money revolutionaries who see Bitcoin as a self-sovereignty alternative to fiat. We all find our niche in the space, regardless of why we came to it on the first place. My favorite niche is that of a community organizer, a type much different than one of my most hated political figures, Mr. Barry Soetoro. But alas unless you have ties to political bundlers like Jeffrey Katzenberg, Andy Spahn, Penny Pritzker, George Soros, and Oprah Winfrey, or pro government collusion and censorship, progressive tech bro money like Jack Dorsey’s StartSmall LLC. Bitcoin and self-sovereignty Pleb community organizing can’t buy you more than a coffee and sure as hell can’t buy you a 6,400-square-foot mansion in Hyde Park, Chicago. But it does earn you a lot of good friends, and I place value on social, cultural, and spiritual capital just as much as I do financial, which brings me to the point of this article, accumulation of financial capital via Bitcoin mining as the primary (not the only) motivation to participate in mining.
As much as I love the fact that I heat my home with Bitcoin mining and that we at Ungovernable Misfits has a fantastic community of Bitcoin miners who have built and innovated so many great things in mining; from off grid solutions to fantastic uses for waste heat like dehydrating foodstuffs or even Krazy Karl and his immersion lamb sous vide, my main motivation in Bitcoin mining…is….FINANCIAL!!!! I don’t mine to “support the network” or out of duty, nor to make the world a better place. I mine because it is in my rational self-interest to do so, but only if I achieve a financial gain. I mine to acquire Bitcoin, generate eventual profit. Whether I find stranded and wasted sources of energy my motivation is to turn it into hard money. Whether I use excess or stranded natural gas, hydro, wind, solar, capture industrial heat to mine efficiently, turning waste into wealth with a landfill mine, I am doing it to make money. My mining operations aren’t designed to appease decentralized hashrate enthusiasts, climate hysterics, or Twitter influencers, it’s designed to acquire Bitcoin at the lowest possible cost, without KYC, and without asking permission from both bureaucratic or virtue-al regulators.
This is the opposite of the Dorsey-funded, open-source, virtue-signaling Bitcoin projects that pretend to care about decentralization while focusing the miner’s incentives towards virtue rather than profit. Their initiatives push mining towards collectivist, progressive horse shit, mining your nose off to spite your face for the sake of the “cause”.
Mining is wrought with those who manipulate the market, from regulatory-captured public miners to hardware manufacturers that are in bed with nation-state interests, Cantillionaire cronies who seem to have an unlimited capacity to borrow money to fund project after project only to run it into the ground at strip clubs well below the quality of establishments like Hash Sluts. We’ve always fought against those bitch ass motherfuckers on Ungovernable Misfits. But recently the altruistic, mining for the cause progressive has been the louder voice in room.
I’m neither, I guess, I’m just some weirdo trying to make a profit at this, trying to do it well, not do it for the right reasons. I mine because I intend it to benefit….ME. And not that I’m for some kind of purity test, but I think it’s the purest form of mining.
I’m of the mind that “me first”, for profit mining is the most Objectivist economic system ever built. It is pure capitalism. The most efficient miners thrive, and the least efficient perish. It is voluntary. No one is forced to mine, yet those who do are rewarded by the network. It is real value creation. A miner must expend energy and capital to produce hashes, just as a pizza shop owner must expend capital and labor to create a great-a pizza pie.
Back to Ayn Rand and objectivism, I’m working on it here, but I’ll eventually make the point that mining is best approached for the lens of Objectivism. Ayn Rand despised the idea of the unearned. In Francisco d’Anconia’s Money Speech in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand wrote ‘Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter”. I may say ‘Run for your life from any man who tells you that mining for profit is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching cuckhold. Miners don’t hit blocks and are paid block subsidies and tx fees out of charity or goodwill, they receive them because they proved their work, provided real energy, and competed in an open market, and that sure as hell doesn’t make them evil. Mining doesn’t need a moral narrative, miners don’t need to justify the choices they make in their operations. The profit motive is the narrative.
There is no moral obligation to support the network. If mining isn’t profitable, it’s not worth doing. Miners have a hard enough time simply surviving. It’s challenging enough to chase efficiency, to arbitrage energy markets, fight the nanny state, placate neighborhood Karens who complain that your miners are giving their chihuahua panic attacks, besides competing for blocks against larger operations with deep pockets, so deep, so deep, put her ass to sleep.
Ayn Rand understood this, and if she were alive today, I have to think she would see Bitcoin as the ultimate individualist technology—the final rejection of collectivism in money. She’d blow copious amounts of cigarette smoke right in the faces of those who mine for ideology and praise over those who mine for profit. We’re competing against progressive soy boys yapping about decentralization while cashing checks from progressive philanthropists. While also competing against corporate miners gargling the balls of the banking class.
Ultimately, mine for whatever reason you mine, I don’t care.
In Atlas Shrugged, during John Gault’s oath of the men of Galt’s Gulch speech, he says “I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." Let me rephrase that, I swear by my life and my love for it, that I will never mine for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to mine for the sake of mine. There’s only one true test of mining success, are you still standing, are you still hashing? That’s it. Everything else is noise.