Hi, if you care about (your?) Bitcoin, please act on this letter, which I am forwarding with minor redactions. It was originally directed at a local rural community of a handful of new bitcoiners, 14 family or single-person businesses accepting bitcoin, and a few hundred TH of home miners. I think the context becomes clear throughout the letter itself. IMO the second and third paragraphs need to be undrestood and acted upon by all bitcoiners and Bitcoin communities.
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January 23, 2026
Team Bitcoin,
This week I had to make an emergency move, and I am no longer in a position to operate without your support. As you know, building our Bitcoin community has been a passion project for me for nearly 3 years on my own resources, as something I care deeply about. I care because it is the only hope I see in defense against the new slavery that is spreading through currency debasement while the Orwellian nightmare is descending like a blanket over a sleeping world. But my hope in Bitcoin implies hope in humanity, because Bitcoin works in our favor only when ordinary individuals comprise the majority of the network of node runners and miners. Therefore, my hope is ultimately in YOU.
2025 was the year when it became clear that the banking system has taken over Bitcoin by debasing Bitcoin's monetary supply using tools like ETFs and other custodial services (e.g. [exchanges]). This week an ETF insider stated publicly that currency debasement is indeed happening to Bitcoin, which is why the price has decreased despite massive inflows of capital. The 21 million coin hard cap that made Bitcoin the hardest money on earth must be defended against such inflation, and the means to do so is to hold bitcoin under your own private key, using a trusted node (ideally your own) to verify and enforce the 21M hard cap.
But that is not all. It is also necessary to create a free and open market for REAL bitcoin (bitcoin held under your private key, verified by a trusted node). This market would naturally discover a bitcoin price that is higher than the price offered by custodial services, because the requirement to transact using one's own keys would exclude the counterfeit bitcoin created by ETFs and custodial exchanges. Such markets do exist, but we need to integrate this concept within our community, so that our local participation in the Bitcoin economy will no longer be tied to the conversion rate of the cheap counterfeit bitcoin proffered by the big exchanges, but rather to the higher price discovered by the open market for self-held bitcoin. This will have the effect of attracting bitcoin wealth to our community, because people who hold bitcoin would be able to buy more for it here than anywhere else, and we would hold on to it till a higher price instead of selling it cheap to exchanges and the like.
To implement this in our community, we need to roll out our own lightning wallet that processes payments based on the higher exchange rate for self-held bitcoin. And this is the point at which my move to a new home has begun to hinder the advancement of our Bitcoin community, because I am currently the owner and operator of the only lightning nodes we have, as well as the associated wallets, namely [A] that I demonstrated at the prior meetup, and [B] wallet app that is used by a few and has up till now paid for our server costs. Not only is more development needed in these areas, but we need such infrastructure to be decentralized within our community so that I can't be a single point of failure in the future. All of this advancement takes money in some form.
Without immediate help, my lightning nodes and their associated liquidity will go offline permanently and we will face major setbacks. Furthermore, I will not be able to continue development due to my down-graded quality of life. Freedom isn't cheap, not even in [author's country]! What we need is people who believe in the cause of freedom to fund my work (one modest man's salary). I opened this letter with hope: my hope in Bitcoin which implies my hope in humanity, especially my hope in you as my community. I am now asking you to return the faith I put in you, and ask for enough faith in me to get behind me financially so that I can continue to spearhead the Bitcoin movement in our area, accountable to the other officers you are currently electing.
We kicked off 2026 by starting to organize the community. At our next meetup, we will count the votes to confirm the elected officers and we will take nominations for up to 4 more officers to complete our core team. To support the work, we need an immediate Internet solution for me to continue to operate my nodes, to avoid losing what we already have, and we need to grow the support to a level of $500/month to allow me to return to a normal lifestyle and resume the prior level of development progress toward the aforementioned goals. If you know people who can combine forces to sponsor one person full time, please let the intentions be known to the officers and let's make it happen this year.
Yours,
[nym]