Freedom. Fairness. Decentralization. | video

I've been going full steam ahead with @rstory and just uploaded an awesome new video produced by @amberjyang, who also created the cool graphic above. On the evening of the 26th I'll be talking about the project at an Minnesota Blockchain Initiative event, so if you're in the Twin Cities you should totally come.

This work is putting me in touch with my crypto roots in an interesting way. For me, the 2008 financial crisis was a wake up call. It got me seriously looking for alternatives to our rigged financial system. What I found were community currencies and experimental schemes with limited scalability. Crypto changed all of that. I didn't buy my first bitcoin until 2014, but after I did, I dove headlong into the new blockchain economy.

This emerging space was a high tech counterculture filled with people who were ready to take direct control of their money. It was electric. Over the years, this original crowd's prominence in the space waned. Scammers proliferated. Regulators mishandled the whole sector. And somewhere along the way, cryptocurrency was transformed from currency to an investment in the popular mind.

In 2014, the year I bought my first bitcoin, I got a job as a news editor for wanttoknow.info. I began summarizing news report after news report about major corruption and cover-ups. The financial system corruption seemed particularly insidious. So I bought a bitcoin with one of my first paychecks.

Now, ten years later, the legacy system is no less corrupt, but I'm reducing my dependence on it little by little, every day.

Read Free Mind Gazette on Substack

Read my novels:

• Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
• The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
• Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
• One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
• Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
• Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
• The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
• Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.

See my NFTs:

• Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
• History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
• Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.