@ Marc
2025-02-16 17:10:55
I asked a pleb to answer a few questions about selling stuff for sats, and he asked me, "What made you want to do a story/article on this?"
The short answer: Because I like seeing people make their own bitcoin jobs, but the question made me think about the why. When I tried to be an English teacher, one of my professors said, "The difference between a job and a career is that a career is something you think about all day." I didn't become an English teacher, because I already had something I think about all day: bitcoin. I didn't fit the teacher ethos, for whatever reason, so undecided, I wanted to work in bitcoin sometime around block 525,000.
That's about the time I began writing on [yalls.org](https:..yalls.org). I fell in love with the idea of writing for sats. It was too early. Very few people used lightning back then, but the idea of earning sats to write was invigorating. I had no illusions of earning enough to earn a living, but yalls had a paywall. I spent a fair amount of time experimenting with these paywalls. Part of my articles were available for free, but to finish the article required a payment of 210 sats when that was about two cents. I was fascinated with this concept because it meant I could write for sats. Readers could send p2p electronic cash to me—sats short for satoshis. Each bitcoin can be divided into 100,000,000 sats. The lightning network allowed people to send you micropayments.
## Yalls
This was not possible with credit cards because of the fees they charge. The lightning network can be used to circumvent fees imposed on credit card merchants and the sats can now be instantly converted to fiat. This is not financial advice. Earning bitcoin is 21 million times more interesting than trading bitcoin. Investors talk about green dildos, red dildos, and some other sex toy called a bollinger band. If you're into that kind of kinky stuff, I don't judge, but I stay vanilla and stack sats. I experimented with shitcoin play in younger years, but it was just a phase. I finally realized alts are an attempt to break the solution to the double-spending problem sometime around block 630,000.
That's when I declared myself a bitcoin maxi on yalls.org. Adam Back retweeted it. It didn't go viral, but that was amazing. I'm just an anonymous user who couldn't get an English teaching job, but Adam Back...You know..The guy Satoshi cited in the white paper—That guy retweeted my article. I started a couple of anonymous blogs and earned a small amount of sats in the early days of nostr.
### How I Made 1,000,000 Volunteering At Pacific Bitcoin
I volunteered for Pacific Bitcoin 2022. I volunteered to save some sats on a ticket. I stayed in a hostel. I did not expect to get paid, but it earned me a million sats after I sold the pack of collectible cards that came in a swag bag at the conference. What if I can one day retire on the millions of sats I earned over the last few years? I'm not sure that will happen, but it might be enough for my grandchildren to retire. *If bitcoin goes up "forever Laura..." you're never too late to earn bitcoin on the side. The sats you earn go up in value forever.
Maybe the ROI on your college degree didn't pay off like you thought it would. You read Walden and Civil Disobedience and A Letter From a Birmingham Jail...thought...these are great ideas. They prepared me to read Early Retirement Extreme. I also listened to Choose FI and decoded Mr. Money Mustache. Dave Ramsey says you should get a second job to pay off debt in a country where many people working two jobs are still getting into more debt. Maybe they should use that extra job to stack sats. Earning bitcoin feels different than buying bitcoin. It means earning money on the Internet without needing a trusted third party. PayPal and Patreon have been around for years. They are nothing new, digital middlemen.
Although the less technical often use bitcoin non-custodially, it's getting easier to take self-custody and use bitcoin as it was intended, p2p electronic cash. Why use eBay when you can have a garage sale on nostr? Even Dave Ramsey can sell stuff on nostr. He's been telling people to avoid bitcoin since it was $400. What if you sell your fancy clothes made in Bangladesh on nostr while instantaneously converting it to USD on Strike? You can send 1,000 fiat bucks to your checking account faster than a speeding Superman. You can get the garage sale money deposited to your bank account within a half-hour. I can't even drive to an ATM that fast! Transfer the money to a savings account that pays 0.01% interest. Baby Step 1 complete! You can take the instant fiat from your next nostr garage sell and pay your debt straight from the Strike App!
This is NOT financial advice.
I could earn fiat on Poker Stars until the government took away my permission. I could earn fiat on Full Tilt, but they spent players' fiat and barely kept a fraction in reserve. The same is true of platforms. You can earn fiat on Twitter if you pay for the monthly Twitter lottery. American's can currently earn fiat on TikTok...but do see where this is going? That's why I like supporting people who have some sort of bitcoin side hustle. I may have found bitcoin in 2014, but I didn't have a full-time job. I was unemployed for a couple of years before that. This one time, I got into an argument with my wife because, some months, we could only scrape up $50 to "buy bitcoin." I was an asshole. I kinda feel bad about that, but I'm a lucky guy with a beautiful wife who forgave me for being an asshole and dashing doors to stack bitcoin without telling her about it. She was pretty pissed. That Fifty bucks we argued over is now worth...
The misses is not so *pisses* anymore.😁
- I've picked up extra jobs to stack sats.
- I used BTCPayServer to stack sats.
- I stacked sats with lnbits
- I originally set up a lightning node so I could stack sats on yalls.org.
- It took me six months to get a lightning node up and running on a raspberry pi.
#### Few
Very few people used the [lightning network](https://lightning.network/) back then. Any bitcoiner has the ability to make their own job. I started a blog and set up a BTCPayServer so people would pay me for my prose. Some actually did. It wasn't much money. I might have broken even, but the possibilities still intrigue me. You can use [Alby Hub on the cloud](https://albyhub.com/), [Zaprite](https://zaprite.com/), or run it on a [Start9](https://store.start9.com/collections/servers/products/server-one). You can pay GetAlby for a lightning node in the cloud. If you're a fiat-spending maximalist, you can [convert all your bitcoin to fiat with Strike](https://invite.strike.me/NGQDMT).\*
##### Bitcoin Is For Everybody, Even Nocoiners
Maybe you don't want bitcoin, but need some extra cash and can make candles. Fiat won't hedge against eggflation, but that's not what this is about. That's not the point. Bitcoin is for anybody, even no-coiners. You don't even need to make a website anymore. You can just use Shopstr, Plebian Market, Coinos, Cashu.me, Buzz Pay, and more.I just bought some soap from someone I saw on nostr. I decided to try something new this month. I paid with fiat, but the soap miner received bitcoin on the other end. Anyone with the Strike App can pay dollars to people who want bitcoin and vice-versa. Some people proudly proclaim they never...ever...spend bitcoin. Those who hodl never sell.
In Everyone's A Scammer, [Michael Bitstein](https://primal.net/bitstein) says:
`"Merchants are scammers because they lead you to believe that your bitcoins are only worth the price of their retail good in order to allow themselves (or those to whom they sell the bitcoins, if they so choose), rather than you, to benefit from future Bitcoin price increases. …And That’s a Good Thing This is not to say merchant adoption is bad. In fact, from the hoarder's perspective, merchant adoption is great. First, merchant adoption means that there is more demand for Bitcoin, that the Bitcoin network is growing, and that Bitcoin is thus more valuable than it was yesterday. Second, merchant adoption means there are more places to spend bitcoins. This does not mean a hoarder will actually want to spend bitcoins. More importantly, he can spend bitcoins.` If you like this quote, [please zap this note. 100% of these zaps go to [Bitstien](nostr:note1eaf0us6zlvlp3wt4gnjjlj6e3pk3fpdkqzfd6wpxfydp6rqgq9vq0ar8dm)
Saylor says **bitcoin is hope**, but you know what gives me hope? Not the billionaire buying bitcoin, but the pleb selling stuff for sats.
- Maybe there's a homeless person selling a few used books for a meal.
- Maybe an artist stacks $500 per month selling art on nostr.
- Maybe a recently X government employee can sell DEI training on the free and open market on nostr. Or...Maybe they can sell culturally appropriate tamales on nostr for actual sats instead.
Those are the stories I want to find. Bitcoin is for everybody, even people with college degrees that the job market does not value much. Saylor's not wrong. Bitcoin is hope. Saylor said he wants to make education free. That's why he founded Saylor Academy. They have a course called Bitcoin Is For Everybody. Bitcoin is for everybody, even no-coiners, even for people who went to college even though it didn't lead to a high-paying job. Bitcoin is hope for those people, people just like me.
nostr:npub1marc26z8nh3xkj5rcx7ufkatvx6ueqhp5vfw9v5teq26z254renshtf3g0
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\* Strike is an affiliate and I earn a small commision if you pay for the service. I use it to pay my credit card bills.