Orange-pilling has become a mental issue
a long-read / deep dive on post 2018 Orange-pilling
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#bitcoin
#orangepilling
#BitcoinWhispering
As old people tend to say:
*nasal voice* “*Back in my day…*” … Bitcoin was this wild, beautiful thing, new. It was something technical that came alive before our very eyes after running a node (just a .exe running on a windows machine in my case).
Even when you started to painstakingly mined bitcoin on a GPU, in a pool, you felt like growing a network of like minded people, or at least people who thought there was something there. Even if we couldn’t comprehend what it all would lead to (or what fiat value it could reach).
Then came the first paper wallets, the first good software wallets and attempts at hardware wallets, the first buzz of owning your own value — it was motivating and rewarding. The look on the face of other people you explained bitcoin to, when they’ve seen their first transaction pop up after validation. Awesome.
Back then, it wasn’t about fiat gains or slick marketing campaigns; it was about a distributed network “generating” numbers, keeping a distribute ledger “in synchronization”, at the same time it was a middle finger to the system, representing freedom to transact in value we valued ourselves because of the underlying network of people, nodes and miners.
It was this sort of secret handshake between tech minded people, anti-globalists, anarchists, nerds and rebels who saw the fiat scam for what it was.
Orange-pilling wasn’t even a term; it was just what you did.
You’d walk people through the setup of bitcoin core, and the white paper, told them why central banks are a trick that functions as a legalized Ponzi scheme and you showed them bitcoin’s workings without middlemen.
You played around with bitcoin, person to person, no bullshit, no subscriptions, no suits, no posing like a big shot, no referral links.
Those were the fun times — pre-Saylor, pre-nation-state hype, pre-every Laura, Luigi, and self-proclaimed “OG” thinking they’re going to conquer the world.
I miss that.But times change.
The good ol’ days are deadIt’s not the first instance in our lifetime that we see things pop-up, being invented, and where some good new idea becomes a reality and then that very good idea becomes an institution (there’s an obscure 1990s movie reference for you).
We live and learn, just like the first technical people setting up their own point of presence internet servers, we all have to learn how to grow and adapt.Early Bitcoiners didn’t have referral links or corporate sponsors — they had a mission, and the spirit came from within themselves and from the math and tech they’ve seen at work in practice. And yes, educating about it was important, as was looking for ways to improve bitcoin (the early years weren’t exactly main-stream material for example).
From that learning yourself about Bitcoin and feeling the need to share and convince others around you, came the need to talk and learn together with others.
You’d talk your buddy into installing a wallet over a coffee, maybe show your uncle how to buy a few bitcoin, and it felt like planting seeds for something real.
Even if they didn’t get it—“So this number goes from my address to your address?”—you kept explaining and showing.
Then the suits rolled in. Bigger companies wer started, like Blockstream, Trezor, Coinbase and Binance.
Wall Street, Saylor with his infinite buy tweets, El Salvador and its volcano bonds, the US ETF approval — and the game changed, everyone heard about it one way or another. That’s damned important! You’re NOT the bringer of news.
Suddenly, it wasn’t grassroots anymore; it was headlines, hype and game-theory. As predicted by so many in the space.
Fine, whatever, it’s progress or something else, but we as bitcoiners need to adapt to that reality.
Some adaptations will also cause us to put energy elsewhere than before.
What worked in 2012 or 2016, might not work anymore after 2024.
”We bitcoiners route around problems.” Right?You didn’t need new people to create an account, or be part of a ‘squad’ or team, you certainly didn’t need them to sell merchandise. You just showed them bitcoin’s inner workings.
Bitcoin was the marketing, the engine, the product and the goal. Bitcoin was the core. Just like digital communication was the core of the earliest internet enthusiasts. The magic of sending a text into the network, and through clever routing, someone thousands of miles away could read it almost immediately, that was the magic, the core.Sending value with bitcoin has that same magical way, immutable, uncensored, unconfiscatable, with proven digital scarcity and forced honesty.
Nowadays we have so-called orange-pillers.
They’re trying to spread those values. Or so they should..They didn’t get the memo on Bitcoin becoming more commonly known apparently, and if they did, their lust for dopamine has long replaced that with their urge to get people to install a lightning wallet. It’s sometimes rather disturbing to see this Orange Pill’ing play out.
They’re out there, like they’re stuck in 2013. But they’re usually not from 2013 at all, more like class of 2020’ish. Not that it matters, they’re still living in the illusion that there are people out there that didn’t hear of bitcoin and that THEY and THEY alone can save these poor souls.
After 2018 it’s safe to say that that’s not the case.
I’ll repeat that for the die-hard orange-piller: they do not need you to hear about bitcoin.These Orange Pillers have another kind of magic happen:
While they’re winning over new souls into bitcoin, one barber, taxi driver and babysitter at a time, they get the small electric charge in their brain that tells them their wealth, their (and their holding’s) value will go up somehow. They’re also desperate to make some kind of connection with other bitcoiners, and while they lack that connection, they try to find (or make) new bitcoiners around them.
This approach might have worked in the past, but things are different now. You’re usually talking to people who you try to convince of something they’ve already rejected (often harshly rejected) or never will care about .
Most people, do not give a damn about inflation or how that came to be. Certainly when they’re doing their job.
It’s like someone shoving the book of a cult under your nose and trying to convince you it’s going to save your life. You’re not open to it, neither are most of the Orange pill targets to your bitcoin gospel.
Orange Pillers don’t see how the very people they try to convince today weren’t “in it” for a variety of (good for them) reasons. Unlike in the old days, where people’s natural state was “not heard of bitcoin”; since it was new, and people genuinely didn’t learn about it or read into it.
That’s however, not the case today. That taxi driver? He heard about bitcoin. Be sure.Such new people today, are almost non-existing, they either bought some long ago, got rekt trading shitcoins and stayed away.
That, or they found it all a bit too “iffy” (thank you mainstream media) and will politely hold back from not yelling to your face, “I don’t care about that Bitcoin stuff!”.
They know it’s some form of money or value, they know it exists. Which makes orange pillers the bringers of old news to the bottom of the barral.
They might get a “hit” now and then of course. But even then, your impact is neglectable in a world that rewards cowardice and short term greed. You’re too late. You don’t scale. And it doesn’t matter.Since 2020, it has shifted from genuinely introducing people to bitcoin to just “spreading it for the sake of spreading it.”
It looks more and more like an old lion, pacing back and forth in a cramped cage at an old ZOO, restless and frustrated.
There’s just empty repetition.The mental breakdown of orange-pilling
Let’s look a little further into the act of orange pilling.
It’s not like a 1990s hacker type showing a brand new Hayes -compatible modem to his buddy and trying to get a connection going to a local Point of Presence to get internet access.
It’s more like showing your holiday pictures to an uninterested family member. All to get the dopamine hit, the ‘aha moment’ out of someone is now your own ‘aha got someone new’ moment. Like an addict looking for that next high.
You want them to get the app, get some sats and feel the same feeling you have. While they’re worrying about cleaning a table for example, or getting your bill.
This “badge of honor” of Orange Pilling someone is that little shot of dopamine many people need (especially in group) to feel validated.
The real feeling has everything to do with social conformity1 and the involved brain areas that get stimulus shots and increased activity.2
Above that, for the sake of the mental reward, some people go further down the social boundaries. That’s why orange pilling, often comes across as pushy, unnatural and/or annoying.
It’s because it’s basically an activity with all the neuro stimulus of an addiction, or done as an ego boost.Math based
On top of all of that. If you do the math on it the whole action becomes even more ludicrous.
The math in the early days of bitcoin was simple: there was exponential expansion of the number of bitcoiners.
Purely for bitcoin, the growth in numbers is still going strong, but the percentage has now naturally been flattened out because of media coverage, scams that trick people into other stuff and the close to impossible way to scale the onboarding from a person to person level to larger scales (there are apps doing a good job however, but even then it spread under former bitcoin users or people already in the know on some level, like former shitcoiners).
So even at the rate of trying to orange-pill let’s say 10 people per week (many bitcoiners don’t even tàlk to 10 people a week, let alone convince them to use bitcoin).
When hypothetically 50% of these people (not unusual with word of mouth recommendations) actually install the app you recommended, and we take also a high percentage of 10% actually do a regular buy of bitcoin after installing any of these apps (Strike or Blink or any other).
Given that hypothetical high rate of 10 people a day plus the conversion rate, it would take approximately 200 weeks, close to four years (pun intended) to reach 2000 people as a critical mass that actually installed and used the bitcoin app.
If these 2000 people all buy for about 1000$ worth of bitcoin each, they’ll be good for about 2 million dollars in bitcoin buys over a four year period.
Even if you take very, very optimistic statistics this, you’ll get a close to zero impact, safe for the occasional big shot you might encounter and converts into a mini-Saylor, or the occasional person you might have saved a few thousand dollars (because they all keep thinking in fiat terms anyway).
But on the other side, people with +100 million dollars to spend will surely have advisors and in-house knowledge, to not having to to rely on your sorry ass explaining bitcoin or installing Wallet of Satoshi on their phone or something.
That’s all peanuts. It’s futile. And you’re fighting an honorable battle from 11 years ago.Why
I can’t grasp why so many people keep doing this the way they do.
Orange-pilling mostly works when the price is going up anyway, unfortunately.
However, when BTC’s up 15% in a week, everyone’s a genius and your coworker suddenly can be all ears about “sound money” and future price gains.
When it’s crashing or flat? Good luck, nobody cares among the normies, unless the “orange-pillee” (the target) has their own ulterior motives for listening (like getting someone to at least give them some attention in any form).
And by the way, to come back to these taxi drivers you try to convince… many taxi drivers already had their share of die hard bitcoiners in their car, and got the explanation. Some of them even act like total noobs probably to get some sats out of your orange pilling wallet. They’re good at playing dumb, trust me.
Do you really think a taxi driver in let’s say Lugano, Amsterdam or Prague didn’t already know bitcoin before you tried to convince him to accept it? You’re not the first. At all.Most of all, you interact with people while they’re doing their job. You’re actually interfering with their work. When a waiter in a fully booked restaurant has to halt his word and listen to you explaining how to install a lightning wallet on their old iphone that’s almost out of battery, you’re losing anyway.
They might listen, they might even be pestered to the point they’ll install the damned app. And what do you win or achieve?
A sparkle in your brain that says “you’re such a cool bitcoiner”?
Then… after what’s usually a painful few minutes going through a horrible counter-intuitive interface, you get them 5000 sats or whatever over to them.Oh and adding things like “Hey man, keep these sats for at least 4 years, it will go up in price” is just rotten as well. Just give the people a decent tip and leave. You’re not doing anyone a favor.
When the moment’s there ànd some people are clearly open to it, thèn you might add some info. Point them to an easy to use non KYC app (if there is such a thing).
But even then, just letting someone know you want to pay in bitcoin, should be enough, WHISPER bitcoin.
They don’t need your pushy sales pitch on top of the daily struggles they face in hospitality and retail jobs.
The squadsAn example,… I saw this crew, let’s name them the “Re-play” squad, they’re all wearing blue hats and have a few flyers with them from a marketing company which managed to put them to some good use at a very low expense rate.
This image is still stuck in my head, some random European country during late summer time — local Bitcoiners, along with some counterparts from other countries. The real “we’re the future” types.
Sitting on the floor at a Bitcoin party, rolling “funny cigarettes” passing a lighter, chatting and laughing about how they orange-pilled some dude in a bar.
“Yeah, man, I showed him how to set up a Lightning wallet in a few minutes, he’s in!”. Then taking a big puff.
Except here’s the punchline: the guy wasn’t “in” he was probably just some horny schmuck trying to get into the pants of a woman Bitcoiner in the group, who’d flashed her … QR code at him.They’re all proud, they’re all high, they all belong to a group now … and they’re convinced they’re conquering the world one wallet at a time (they don’t do the math on that, neither should they,… ignorance is bliss).
Doing good for bitcoin has been transcended into an egotrip, and the short-lived kick in the orbitofrontal cortex3 for “doing something”, it’s the filling of a lingering emptiness.
The same people move around like they’re an anthill, reminiscent of the hippie communes, until they’ve returned to their misery at home, knee deep in sorrows of the fiat world. As is the orange pilled person by they way, who’s life won’t be helped by a few sats and yet a new app on their phone. An app they’ll hardly use, unless they start to bond with the other bitcoiners in the area.These people you target already have had all chances in the world to learn about bitcoin but are too far gone to care.
Podcasts, books, family members that are into bitcoin, or whatever blog or online service… even the biggest shitcoin casino’s only have rather decent guides and basic explanations. There are excellent educational apps like yzer.io4 as well as the excellent lopp.net5 website by Jameson Lopp.Convincing people one-by-one doesn’t work anymore—it’s inefficient and outdated since the price surges, media coverage, and ETF launches. Even if some are open to it, it’s a futile, unscalable solution of dread, working indirectly for the benefit of the Wall street types or some shitcoin casinos (where most “new coiners” end up).
Orange pillers, also never can “read the room”. The crew in a busy restaurant or bar isn’t waiting for any explanation about UTXOs or custodians from you!
Even if you’ll hit machine-like numbers of onboarding twenty people a day (By then, you’ll need to avoid being labeled the local bitcoin village fool in your community) and assume they’re all pure bitcoiners afterwards.
Which won’t happen either as any incentive of the orange pilled people is clearly nòt long-term thinking; otherwise they would have onboarded you some 8 years ago!
People are extremely lazy, and the general public usually has an attention span of about 8 seconds at best6.
Back in the early days, you could sit people down and show another tech person for hours on end how to work with bitcoin, now more than a decade later, you have about 5 to 60 seconds tops. (most lightning wallet’s onboarding sequence easily takes 2 tot 5 minutes)To further convince yourself how pointless Orange Pilling is today: go out and watch people on a public transport vehicle: they scroll and swipe through TikTok and Instagram. You’ll notice they’re swipe-apes, there’s no substance or reliable source of bitcoin buying power there, no bitcoin innovation will come from them, and no philosophical insights will ever be ignited in their buy-the-next-cool-sneakers-now brain. They’re not a target audience. They’re the all singing and all dancing crap of the world. They’re not convinced, Inconvincible and inconvertible.
Meanwhile, no substantial steps have been made for bitcoin, even if you get them to install that app you so desperately want them to have. Neither can you expect the no-coiners or pre-coiners (god I hate that word, it sounds kinky somehow) to do anything for bitcoin, as the gap between them and the actual positive impact they could have is too wide.
It costs time, studying and experimenting. While these people excel at thing like: shopping, watching dime-a-dozen garbage series on Netflix, watching social media posts that don’t challenge them, and eating take-out food while score some drugs.
So… to conclude the story about that dude in the bar which was so carefully orange pilled by our “Re play” squad members, he probably traded his sats for a beer by now (although that demands some form of effort in finding a recipient that has beer and wants to trade it for sats, which is unlikely) , more likely he forgot about the app altogether or he’s trading shitcoins to “make more money as greed that sets in. And he probably got that woman’s telephone number, to “talk about those bitcoins” later on at his crappy rental apartment right above a shoarma restaurant.
The phrase “everyone’s a scammer” includes people who pretend to care about bitcoin just to get something out of it. Even a complete newbie or shitcoin fan will fake interest in bitcoin to seem legit. I’ve watched it happen.Orange-pilling: the good, the bad, and the ugly
So onboarding devolved into this whole subculture of failure, and started to manifest itself over time as a empty motion, a series of must-do things.
The Pavlovian response whenever someone is a walking opportunity for accepting bitcoin (certainly in any bar, restaurant or hotel), results in the foaming at the mouth to get them onboarded on some app or wallet.
It’s so pointless I actually feel ashamed when I’m in a group that starts to hawk and push their lightning wallets onto unsuspecting people who just want to do their job.
(and Lightning Wallets are so crappy to onboard people with, it’s mind numbingly stupid)
To my amazement, there are actually a lot of bitcoin holders, or people that claim to be into bitcoin (especially in a bull market) who still pester random people with this kind of behavior.
Some of these are trying to get them to click a referral link from a venture capital firm, in return for a few bucks (incentives these days are needed to get the groundswell going apparently), or worse even, make them install some non-custodial wallet and run into the brick wall of initial on-chain setup fees and then run away like a complete loser because they’re too cheap to fork that initial on-chain fee out for the people they’ve tried to onboard. “Yeah, like, you can buy these 100.000 sats online later if you like and thèn you can have this wallet, but at least it’s not custodial eh.. uh … My buddies are over there, I’ll see you later”.
When you start to observe these people in the wild, it’s like watching a gaze of raccoons going through some neighborhood’s trash cans at night (without the playful conviction).
Fascinating, if you’re into low-budget wildlife documentaries.
Gaze of raccoons looking for a QR code
IF you still want to onboard someone, point them to the right info at the right time (when thèy ask you).
I call it “Bitcoin whispering”. #BitcoinWhispering
Let’s quickly look at the three sort of Orange Pillers:The pushy ideologists: The most annoying of the bunch, but at the same time the ones who mean really well. I sometimes feel sorry for them.
No one’s safe from them. Hairdresser? “You should accept Bitcoin, man.” Bartender? “Credit cards are no goog, why not use Lightning?” Taxi driver? “Ever heard of Lightning? I can tip you in Bitcoin, man.” They’re not educating; they’re feeding their ego and their need to spread the word.The referral grifters: More damaging to Bitcoin than shitcoiners in my opinion. They don’t care about Bitcoin’s properties; it’s just a slot machine for them. And if they understand, their short term greed and social circle dependency makes them go for spreading the word of a middleman company.
“Sign up with my link, bro, stack those sats!”
Their goal? A kickback and the next pat on the back from their miserable squad members.The show-offs: The worst. They don’t know anything themselves but love the spotlight. “Yeah, I got my barber stacking sats!” Yet when it’s time to actually help onboard a business, they’re nowhere to be found. All talk, no substance. They achieve a small social circle of noob bitcoiners surrounding them, with most of them going through the shitcoin-phase shortly after or swapping off-the book gains. They’re not good for bitcoin and usually don’t stay that long anyway.
The world doesn’t need your savior complex.After the second half of 2024 if someone wanted in, they’ll find a way. And if they ask a Bitcoiner for help? Sure, we’ll point them in the right direction — most of us will help when asked (gladly so).
But this idea that you, oh mighty orange-piller, need to swoop in and “save” people is more about you than about bitcoin.Create a good, nice, safe (protected from scams!) environment or way to get people to the info and the other way around.
Be there when people can ask questions, lead by example, make it work and show it. If an app is easy to use, makes sense and has no friction, then people will come. If you’re pestering people and hounding them into liking something that’s so far removed from their reality (fiat-world), they’ll be scared away and not return.Conclusion
Although I miss the old days, I also realize they ain’t coming back — when orange-pilling was just sharing a crazy new idea with someone who was open to it.
The Orange pilling space is now too keen for a large part to shove their bitcoin app in someone’s face, be it in dollars, a few sats or a discount on their next transaction fee at some multi level marketing middleman.
This onboarding is also strangely in parallel with what shitcoiners or the most vile fiat companies do, OP’ers are too desperate for relevance so they often don’t look at the value proposition of bitcoin anymore. Filling their void got the upper hand.
Their shot of feelgood moments needs to be filled.
While there’s close to no impact to gain anymore on one-one-one convincing.
The lesson to save in bitcoin, is usually lost on the people anyway, which was the last reason left to do it.
Be there when people ask for help on bitcoin, build stuff, but stop the aggressive orange-pilling, it serves no purpose anymore other than your dopamine hit and a token feeling for “doing something”, and it’s a sad addiction.Therefore in 2025, orange-pilling has become of a full-blown mental issue.
by AVB
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Footnotes:https://journal.psych.ac.cn/xlkxjz/EN/Y2015/V23/I11/1956
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00160/full
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitofrontal_cortex
https://theweek.com/health-and-wellness/1025836/tiktok-brain-and-attention-spans
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