@ Bayman11771

What draws people to Bitcoin? Or more importantly, what keeps people around? I'm not referring to people with deep intellectual commitment to the protocol, but rather the initially idly curious. It might require mustering a little courage to attend that first meet up, worried that you don't know anyone, or perhaps find yourself among a crowd of serious, knowledgeable Bitcoiners when you know little to nothing about the protocol. The newly curious might also be put off by the occasionally energetic arguments one finds on Bitcoin Twitter, worried that your curiosity might not match the level of conviction that screams through the screen in an even cursory scroll through some well-known Twitter accounts. Whereas the Bitcoin community might appear imposing at first glance, I believe that the community itself deserves much of the credit for Bitcoin's adoption. And I'm not talking only about the developers or thought leaders who get most of our attention, but also the everyday pleb sitting next to you at your first meet up who welcomes you to the group.

I was a little further along in my Bitcoin journey when I began joining the local meet ups. I knew less than a lot of other attendees, but I also thought I had a fighting chance of keeping pace with others. Ordinals - I had an educated opinion. The future of the security budget - I had some informed thoughts about that as well. I'm generally an extrovert and the other attendees were friendly and engaging with this newcomer beyond my expectations. But there was part of my background I wasn't necessarily eager to share, one that I was worried would make this group of otherwise welcoming people view me with suspicion. I knew how some Bitcoiners view the activities of certain government agencies. I was keenly aware of the "deep state" narratives circulating on social media. Thus, I was a little nervous about whether this group would welcome a former CIA officer. (Spoiler alert - nobody cared) But were it not for my time as CIA, I might never have found Bitcoin.

As a CIA Operations Officer, I worked in a variety of areas. But where my career - and my life - took a turn was when I accepted an assignment at CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) in 2018. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies were not on anyone's list of priorities before 2018. My arrival at CCI coincided with the emergence of several national security issues with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency nexuses. North Korea realized that robbing altcoin platforms was easy money; ransomware actors were pillaging businesses and government entities for millions of dollars demanding Bitcoin and crypto as payment; and countries were using these protocols to evade sanctions and conduct other activities deemed in opposition to US national security interests. With so much attention, I had to take time to learn.

Being in CCI during this period not only forced me to learn, but it also allowed me to meet some, impressively intelligent people who not only knew a lot about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but many were also early adopters. One of the first people I leaned on had been home mining Bitcoin as early as 2012. The more you learn, the more you start to notice. I suddenly noticed a "We Are All Satoshi" bumper sticker pinned to a cubicle I had walked past countless times before; another officer seemed to have an endless supply of Ethereum t-shirts he wore nearly every day (the cyber center is distinctly less formal than the rest of CIA). And with these protocols now at the forefront of national policy discussions, people I had known for years were gradually revealed to me as Bitcoiners or active in other cryptocurrency communities.

Like many Bitcoiners, my journey began in the altcoin casino, and the story of my eventual evolution into a Bitcoiner is not dissimilar to others. Roughly one year after buying my first altcoin on Coinbase, I was clean and altcoin-free, using Bitcoin-only platforms and marching with intent further down the rabbit hole. Every Bitcoiner's conviction evolves, different aspects of the protocol speaking with varying volume to facets of your worldview and circumstances. For me, what initially drew me to Bitcoin was the ability to self-custody your money without - and beyond the reach of - intermediaries.

I spent the first half of my career at CIA in the shadow of 9/11. That event was intensely personal for me. I grew up on Long Island and unfortunately know more than a few people murdered on that day. When I served in the Middle East, I was right in the middle of the War on Terror, supporting initiatives that would bolster our ability to find those who had attacked and continued to threaten us. One of the tools that the United States sharpened and wielded with great success was the weaponization of the dollar. In the years following 9/11 a veritable dollar industrial complex was created, with cadres of government employees who as of today have spent their entire careers honing the use of the dollar as an instrument of foreign policy and national security. By the time I arrived in CCI in 2018, several years had passed since my time in the Middle East, and these interceding years offered the time and space I needed to see chaotic or intensely personal events with a clear, critical eye. My point is not to persuade or dissuade about the things that happened during those years; I'm just setting a scene.

By 2018, national security priorities were changing. The United States was still involved in multiple conflicts with origins in the War on Terror, but there was a distinct shift toward other strategic challenges. Just as I had begun really digging into Bitcoin, another seismic event shook the world and laid bare cracks in the social consensus about the nature of government power - COVID. Mandatory vaccines, enforced lockdowns (sometimes at gunpoint), suppression of free speech and freedom of conscience, and the de-banking of critics. As someone who understood how the government uses the dollar as a weapon, coupled with my classically liberal instincts, I was immediately drawn to the inviolable right to property Bitcoin offers those who take the time to learn and embrace self-custody. Self-custody and censorship resistant transactions were the spark that illuminated for me the importance of the ultimate success of this protocol and our ability to live freely and with agency over our property.

Just over a year has passed since I left CIA. When you work at CIA, it is difficult to appreciate how all consuming it can be. You learn to live with certain restrictions, you tend to socialize with colleagues, such that having a job that you are largely unable to talk about with outsiders becomes so normal that you learn to bifurcate your world into two camps - colleagues and everyone else. Not a criticism, just an observation. Similarly, when you emerge from the bubble, whether into a new career or moving to a new location, there is a distinctly refreshing breeze that envelopes you when you can open up to the rest of the world. For me, this included increasing my financial and economic literacy. Investing compels you to actively engage with the world, and that engagement introduced me to some of the most brilliant people whose work I had the pleasure of following and even meeting. "The Bitcoin Standard" and "Broken Money" are just two of the many works that helped me learn and better understand how Bitcoin could in fact change the world.

I have been asked how I reconcile my previous career with my conviction in Bitcoin. I have accepted that my worldview has evolved following my departure from CIA, but this has been an evolution, not a revolution. Many Bitcoiners actively question whether the United States should even have a CIA, and whether its existence represents an existential threat to freedom. I think this belief is tightly wrapped in the idea that many of our problems emerge from the very existence of an intelligence apparatus, whether that be activities perceived to be undo meddling in foreign affairs or worse, abuse of basic liberties. It is perfectly fair to highlight that the actions of some senior leaders in the intelligence community have caused citizens to ask exactly what these organizations are up to. I would also add that the actions of these former leaders, some perhaps intended to cause you to infer they continued to speak for the agencies they used to lead, were viewed as dishonorable across wide swaths of the national security community. With trust squandered, it is perfectly reasonable to ask how deep the corruption runs.

Like the Bitcoin community, the intelligence community is not a monolith. Only an exceptional few do not respect the oath they take up entering on duty to defend the Constitution of the United States, but those that do uphold this commitment throughout their service. Those who work in that community and also identify as Bitcoiners hold the same core convictions about sound money, decentralization, property rights, and privacy as every other Bitcoiner. For many, this conviction is also fueled by the inevitable glimpses into the darker realities of the world you get when you work at CIA. If nothing else, if you work long enough at a place like CIA, you get a better understanding how the world really works. It is also understandably easy to make the leap from some of the worst policy errors of the War on Terror to the notion that were America to stop meddling, the world would somehow defy history and settle into an everlasting peace. How ever my worldview might have evolved over the past year, nothing has changed my belief that world is a fundamentally dangerous and competitive place. For me it's best summed up as "don't hate the player, hate the game." I remain hopeful that Bitcoin can change at least some of the rules of that game.

At this point you might be asking yourself why you wasted precious minutes on earth reading a confessional from someone who seems to be looking for absolution for his past. I also expect comments along the lines of "Once a spook, always a spook" or "Psyop." That's fine. When Bitcoiners say the "institutions are coming," they're almost always referring to tradfi. But for Bitcoin to achieve its fullest potential, institutional adoption will mean the breadth of society's institutions - public and private. I'm not proposing that government agencies will ever start transacting in Bitcoin, but these government institutions, like all others, are the sum of their parts, and these parts are people.

It is only thanks to my work at CIA that I was exposed to and forced to learn about Bitcoin. There's also no guarantee I ever would have found and embraced Bitcoin were it not for those circumstances that forced me to peek under the hood that first time. More and more, I view the world not as Bitcoiners and no-coiners, but rather as those who have and those who just haven't yet discovered Bitcoin. Some members of that latter category might even describe Bitcoin as a religion, or more derisively, a cult. I think there is a contemporary tendency to label anything that offers people a set of principles through which to view the world in this framework. For me, this displays our collective rootlessness, where any beliefs that force critical personal reflection evoke disparagement.

No, I don't think Bitcoin is a religion, nor do I believe it is an ideology. Religions have elements of the mystical; Bitcoin is open source, knowable and usable by all. Ideologies dehumanize us by denying us agency over our thoughts and actions in the pursuit of some doctrine; Bitcoin does the opposite, demanding personal responsibility and infinite inquiry. For me, Bitcoin has been a catalyst. It compels you to take a hard look at your beliefs and challenges you to view the world and the dominant narratives not through an ideological lens, but through a set of principles that challenge us to ask ourselves why we accept certain things as truth. The beauty of Bitcoin is that it doesn't predestine the path you choose to follow. Bitcoin illuminates.

For the people who work at CIA, challenging assumptions and changing the angle of the prism through which you view the world is the most basic of requirements. For many people in the intelligence community who concern themselves with it, Bitcoin is simply a tool actors use for different purposes. I can appreciate how only seeing Bitcoin as a piece of a problem you are looking to solve could naturally lead to a tendency to view Bitcoin itself as a problem. But I personally know many people who work in the intelligence business who have transcended that tendency and started their own Bitcoin journeys. That tradfi institutions are now accepting the inevitability that Bitcoin will play an important role in the global financial system is the result of individuals in those institutions seeing the potential and speaking truth to power. If our hope is that the United States remains (let us hope we don't once again have to "become") a nation welcoming of innovation and protecting of personal freedom, then helping people across the spectrum - including at places like CIA- understand this protocol and all its potential must remain a pillar of focus for the Bitcoin community.

The only regrets I feel now that my career at CIA is over are those same regrets we all feel during times of change or as we get older - instances in which I might have done certain things differently or better. Thus, when I get back to that prior question - how do I reconcile having worked at CIA and my belief in Bitcoin, I ultimately come down to believing there is no need for reconciliation at all. To say there is would mean that not only are the men and women who work with integrity and make real sacrifices at CIA somehow unworthy or otherwise unable to embrace core principles of sound money, decentralization, and censorship resistance, but also that these principles, along with the good people of the Bitcoin community, are somehow unable to reach them. If you want to change institutions, focus on giving people, those who constitute the sum of every institution's parts, the opportunity to understand how fixing the money might in fact fix the world. I, along with countless other Bitcoiners working in national security, am proof that Bitcoin is up to that challenge.