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How the heck did I get old and am sore after a long day of work, when I used to (semi) regularly do this all the time?!?

BREAKING: The Netherlands just told its citizens to go to hell. 36% tax on unrealized gains. Approved. You didn't sell anything. You didn't make a single euro in cash. Your portfolio went up on paper. The government sends you a bill anyway. 61,000 citizens petitioned against it. Parliament approved it anyway. No cash to pay the tax? Not their problem. Asset crashes after you paid? Not their problem. This is not tax policy. This is the government treating your paper gains as their income. Before you've made a single euro. The most talented Dutch investors are already leaving. Capital goes where it is treated best. 2028 is coming. Plan accordingly.

As you probably know, there's a giant skull on display in the Bitcoin Museum in Nashville. It was created in 2023 for GreenpeaceUSA's campaign against Bitcoin mining, and its job was to make the world see Bitcoin as an environmental villain. So how did it end up in a museum built by the people it was designed to shame? I was close to most of what happened next. But it took me until this year to see what the story was actually about. Early 2023 was the high-water mark of the environmental case against Bitcoin. Tesla had already stopped accepting Bitcoin payments, citing environmental concerns. Most press on mining was hostile. And GreenpeaceUSA's "Change the Code" campaign, funded with $5 million from Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, had just unveiled its centrepiece: the Skull of Satoshi, a striking sculpture by the artist Ben Von Wong. Source: bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Troy Cross (who became not just a comrade in arms but a friend during this chapter of Bitcoin's history) saw a different way in. Troy's insight was and always had been to turn a public debate into a 1:1 conversation fast. He did that much better than was ever my nature, and he did it with Ben. It was Troy who invited Ben to talk to him: environmentalist to environmentalist, peer to peer. At last year's Bitcoin conference, Troy told me something I didn't know at the time: the conversation had lasted for four days. Troy made the case most of us would have made: how mining soaks up wasted renewable energy, how it can stabilise grids. And it worked, for hours at a time. Ben would shift. Then he'd check in with GreenpeaceUSA, and the campaign would pull him back to the script. At one point they brought in Alex de Vries, the central-bank employee whose since-debunked research the campaign was largely built on, to talk to Ben directly. Two steps forward, two steps back. Source: x.com/DSBatten/status/186725… Then Troy stopped. He told me later that the breakthrough came "when I stopped trying to spell out the case for Bitcoin and just said, 'OK, let me lay out all the reasons why I think you're opposed to it.'" Read that again. The turning point in the most public fight over Bitcoin's environmental story was a man offering to argue his opponent's case. I've coached founders and CEOs for twenty years, and I recognised the move the moment Troy described it. When a person is defending a position, their mind is occupied with protection, and almost nothing you say gets processed. Data bounces off a defended mind. When you lay out someone's case better than they've articulated it themselves, the defence has nothing left to push against - you've proven you understand them before asking to be understood (Aristotle noticed the same thing about character twenty-three centuries ago). Source: classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/r… And those first days of arguing weren't wasted. They showed Ben who he was dealing with: an environmentalist who knew the data cold and never once raised his voice. By the time Troy held up the mirror, Ben trusted the man holding it. The order matters. People accept evidence from a messenger they trust, inside a conversation that feels safe, and at no other time. What happened next was the tide turned. Ben adopted a new position around Bitcoin, not pro-Bitcoin, but definitely no longer anti-Bitcoin either. He was now in the middle ground of uncertainty, redefining the meaning of his own art and expressing hope of both sides engaging in dialog. His beautiful tweet where he announced this shift was not only public, it has remained his pinned post ever since: "I made the Skull believing that Bitcoin Mining was a simple black-and-white issue. I've spent my entire career trying to reduce real-world physical waste, and PoW felt intuitively wasteful. Of course, I was wrong. Few things in the world are black and white. Dumb me." The "Dumb me" included - his words, on his profile, by his choice, for three years now. Source: x.com/thevonwong/status/1639… He let better information redraw the picture in shades of gray, publicly, which takes more intellectual honesty than either defending one's original position or "switching teams". Then Ben did something nobody asked of him. He set up meetings between the campaign's director, Josh Archer, and four of us: Troy, Margot Paez, Trey Walsh and me. What was said in those rooms stays private, and that's how it should be. What I can share is that I found Josh genuinely interested. A few months later, he left the campaign. Then he left GreenpeaceUSA altogether. The campaign wound down. Not one node owner changed the code. In April last year, I reached out to Ben to ask whether we could procure the skull from him, so it could have a second life somewhere better than a warehouse. The reply never came. Six weeks later I found out why: Ripple, the company whose co-founder had funded the campaign, had already bought it under NDA, to unveil at the Bitcoin Conference and gift to the Bitcoin Museum in Nashville. The sculpture commissioned to bury Bitcoin's reputation was donated to Bitcoin's museum by the campaign's own funder. You couldnt script it. At the Bitcoin Conference, Ben got back to me with a message: "I think you were right in some ways in that Bitcoin really has been the fastest greening technology out of all the other ones. And looking at how other technologies have gone backwards, Bitcoin hasn't ... yet, anyways." I asked whether I could share it publicly. He replied: "Sure thing go for it. Thanks for asking I appreciate the transparency." That "yet, anyways" at the end is what intellectual honesty sounds like in two words. Ben was prepared to give time, data and evidence the casting vote. Few things in the world are black and white - and Ben writes like a man who means it. The skull arrived in Nashville as it should have: unaltered - the same immutable monument Ben has built. What had changed was everything surrounding it: the art's meaning, the story around it, the zeitgeist, the artist himself. All that had changed because of the simple acts of one human talking to another human, repeated over time. And Troy's four days were one thread of many. Nobody appointed him to talk to Ben. Nobody appointed Margot, Trey or me to defend Bitcoin. No campaign manager set us weekly KPIs for number of GreenpeaceUSA ratios. Nobody coordinated the Bitcoiners who met every campaign post with their own data, day after day, in numbers no press office could match. The campaign ran on $5 million, a media plan and a famous brand. The defence ran on individuals with no budget, no leader and no title, each deciding alone to talk to another human being directly. Satoshi's whitepaper described electronic cash that needed no intermediaries. It turned out the defence of his network needed none either. That's what the skull means to me now. A network designed peer to peer was defended peer to peer.

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Rumor has it, the guy with the best bitcoin chest, who also happens to be from the Midwest, will be there mingling amongst the rest. Look forward to meeting you legends there. (or seeing you again)

So cool!

>Be Elon >Get bullied so badly as a kid that you end up in the hospital >Escape into books >Read more than 8hrs a day >Teach yourself programming >Sell a video game at 12 >Leave South Africa >Sleep on couches >Work odd jobs >Get into America >Build a startup >Get fired from your own company >Start over >Build another company >Merge it into PayPal >Get removed as CEO >Your company gets acquired >Walk away with nearly $180 million >Instead of retiring at 31, put almost all of it into three impossible ideas: Electric cars, Solar energy, Rockets >People tell you you're insane >Start a rocket company with no aerospace degree >Learn rocket science from textbooks >First rocket fails >Second rocket fails >Third rocket fails >Divorce >Public humiliation >Cash running out >One launch away from bankruptcy >Launch anyway >The fourth rocket reaches orbit >NASA signs a contract >Survive >Tesla is weeks from collapse >Save it at the last minute >Get mocked for wanting reusable rockets. >Land one. >Then another. >Then dozens. >Turn science fiction into engineering >Get mocked for betting on EVs >Turn electric cars into status symbols >Force the entire auto industry to follow >Build the most valuable car company in history >Launch astronauts into orbit >Create a global satellite internet network. >Buy Twitter >Fire most of the staff >Rename it X >Walk into politics >Risk your reputation >Risk your companies >Risk your fortune >Become one of the most polarising people on Earth. >Get attacked by the media, politicians, competitors, and activists >Keep building anyway >Become a TRILLIONAIRE

Okay. I’m being ABSOLUTELY □□□□■100% SERIOUS ‼️ THIS IS THE BEST AD I’VE SEEN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!!!!

THEY’RE DOING IT!!! 🔥

(Image): concept (YT link 🔗): The execution How’d we do!? m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv4QEC…

Serving in the Army, building businesses, building traditional assets then selling everything and going all in on Bitcoin New Bitcoin podcast with the Luna’s youtu.be/OQjsmu9Glm0?is=KVOb…

I ❤️ that 💃🪩🕺🍊 is on this ‼️ Hoping they’ll do the same for @MWBTCSummit 🤩 Great work to @matteopelleg & Team!

Come for an early morning stroll through the art gallery @BTCPrague ! I walk you through all the amazing pieces with a litte mythos on each. Its a big gallery so parts 2 and 3 are coming later today. This is just the first of 3 walls!

During @BTCPrague conference 2026 you can check out almost all of my work from the past 2 years! Stop by the artist booth in the expo hall and let’s chat about my art and motivation as a Bitcoin artist. 🇨🇿🎨 #PCBArt #BitcoinArt

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