OtisA502 shared: BRIAN (BrianBRose) Regarding Bitcoin: “Do you still find it hard to convince people that this is a big problem, and perhaps, like you said, the most important freedom of them all?”

“DAN (danheld): “Absolutely. That’s why I call it ‘orange pilling,’ because it does take someone from a state of sort of accepting of whatever the financial system is, and it moves them to a new level of consciousness of realizing and waking up to what the world is.

“A lot of people like to be asleep. Do you really want to challenge the underpinnings of the entire economy, do you want to wake up and challenge your assumptions of God and money. Money is one of those components that I would say is similar to like challenging someone’s beliefs in God. Money is inherent with the state, the state is a set of government that controls various things that you do.

So for someone to wake up and challenge their assumptions over like why does this couple hundred year old entity have control over me, and then also what is money, and the meta sort of thoughts about like what money represents and that money is just a belief system, is a lot to take in. A lot of people don’t want to wake up on their Tuesday and go, I’m ready to challenge all of my existing belief system.

“So I totally get that it takes a long time for people to get ‘orange pilled.’ And for me, it’s sort of a calling of mine and why I produce so much content. It took me years, right; it wasn’t like a snap sort of moment. I was mentally prepped and ready for the message to be received back in 2012, but not a lot of other people had that same mindset that I did.

So for me, I feel like when I create content, I’m making that ladder a little bit shorter, letting people spend less time in the — it took me years to really fully understand Bitcoin, really get a good grasp around it; and by the way, I’m still learning on a day-to-day basis about various things about Bitcoin.

So certainly, it’s a very difficult journey; because one, people don’t want to wake up and challenge their assumptions; and two, Bitcoin isn’t just like technology, it’s not like a new weather app, it’s not a new social network. it has vast overlaying architecture of — you know, you have to think about like governance, public/private key cryptography, economics, game theory, physics even with Bitcoin’s proof of work mechanism. So these are all intertwined together.

The people to get it first were a little bit more of a polymath type, folks who can easily switch between disciplines. It doesn’t take a high IQ to understand Bitcoin, so don’t feel threatened if you’re listening to this and you’re like, oh, man, that sounds really complicated. There’s nuance to it.

You can understand Bitcoin at a very high level, and then the further in you dig you realize there’s all of these really interesting concepts that are pillars to why Bitcoin exists and why Bitcoin was created the way it was created.”