After nearly four years of studying Bitcoin I can say this honestly: nothing in my life — no book, no movement, no ideology — has challenged my intelligence and worldview as relentlessly as Bitcoin. Just when I think I’ve grasped the shape of it, the system reveals another seam: a new debate, a new protocol nuance, a new set of questions that push me back into research and into the long, patient work of understanding.

What hooked me was simple and domestic. I was talking with my mother about gold — how for centuries people dug it out of the earth with shovels and picks, then built ever more complex machines to do it better. I asked her: in a world full of distributed computers, of global networks and proof-based work, isn’t it logical that we’d build machines to “dig” a new kind of gold? Her answer was immediate and clear: yes. We shouldn’t be digging in the ground anymore.

That moment — a small, ordinary exchange — opened the door. Bitcoin began as an idea that made sense at a single glance, then unfolded into a rabbit hole of surprising depth. Consensus stopped being an abstract political word and became a question of what reality we choose to enforce. Relay policies, tolerance of minorities, the mechanics of difficulty adjustment, the fragile discipline of running your own node — all of these are not mere technicalities; they are living arguments about trust, power, and independence.

Self-custody turned from a slogan into practice: cold wallets, hot wallets, BIP39 seed phrases, passphrases — each a ritual that forces you to confront responsibility. The more I learn, the more the system asks of me: to verify rather than to accept, to read rather than to repeat, to engage rather than to spectate.

Bitcoin is an intellectual ecosystem that refuses simplification. It sharpens the mind because it demands humility and constant learning. It makes you suspicious of easy narratives and encourages the habit of testing claims against observable reality. And it changes the way you look at everything else — money, institutions, history, and even ordinary conversations at the kitchen table.

I’m still early in this journey, and that’s the point. The learning never ends. Every new problem is an invitation: to read, to question, to argue, and — if you want to call it that — to be reborn, a little bit, by what you discover.