SwBratcher on Nostr: I’m Swiss by blood. American by birth. Self-sovereign by choice. The same old ...

I’m Swiss by blood. American by birth. Self-sovereign by choice.

The same old stubborn dream: to be one’s own man, on one’s own land, whether the proof of work be soil or bits.

In 1871 there was a young man with his brothers in Zürich’s tight streets, among tighter prospects. He knew how to mend a clock and plant a row of crop as straight as a rifle barrel, but Switzerland offered little true freedom. So he up and swapped cobblestone for prairie dust. Left behind the ticking old clocks for the ticking cicadas of Kansas and Missouri. There he planted his name in dirt and staked his future with a shovel and stubborn will.

And wouldn’t you know it, that five generations later, his blood up and does it again. But this time the land isn’t dirt, it’s binary. It’s not 500 acres, it’s coin in cold storage. He isn’t pushing a plow, he’s running a node. But it’s the same heart under a different hat: mistrust of kings and emperors, love of open fields and broad skies, and the notion that freedom isn’t given—it’s claimed. Still humble and still stacking after150 years.