Last weekend I spoke at a practical preparedness event, and to my surprise, many participants already owned Bitcoin. Their questions were sharp, but the mood around the topic was mostly frustration and anger. Their sentiment was Bitcoin had been captured and compromised.

My response was Bitcoin cannot be captured or compromised. Only people can. And what else could we expect from fiat other than attempts to control the protocol that ends its 5,000-year reign? But something stuck with me; none of them ran nodes. They already had a foot out the prison door but were still spending their time yelling at the guards.

When I opened Nostr a few days later, I noticed a similar dynamic.

If we are here it’s because we know the playbook: Rome, China, France, Britain, Weimar, the United States… For millennia, every form of sound money has been debased by the very powers entrusted to protect it.

That same playbook is being run on Bitcoin right now.

Development governance is concentrating into fewer hands, conferences are platforming the institutions Bitcoin was designed to bypass, “financial engineering” is using fiat mechanics to vacuum a hard asset into corporate balance sheets, while funding pipelines quietly determine who gets to build on the protocol. Manufactured threats like “quantum computing” fill the headlines while the actual consolidation happens in plain sight.

The outrage comes from watching this all unfold. But what else could we expect?

Fiat co-opted gold, silver, land, labour, our time, attention, and energy. Naturally, it is attempting to absorb the tool leading to its own demise.

The deeper issue is that the system still lives inside us.

We were programmed and trained to stay in the cave and rage at shadows even when we know the way out. We all inherited “fiat mentality” just by being born into this global extraction system. It came from our upbringing, generational trauma, our teachers, and from society at large.

Being a Bitcoiner doesn’t undo decades of fiat conditioning.

It shows up as disillusionment when people we respected turn out to serve fiat interests. It shows up as the reflex to point fingers and fracture into factions. It shows up as declaring “Bitcoin has been compromised” without doing anything about it. These are the very reactions the fiat system needs to keep us distracted while it consolidates control.

So what if the rage, the division, and the finger-pointing were the actual psyop?

The frustration, the betrayal, the sense that something’s wrong: They are valid. Anger is a signal we desire change. Disillusionment is a sign we outsourced something important to someone else. And the urge to fight is proof we still care.

The question is whether we channel these emotions into agency, or let them fracture us. One of the most underestimated human abilities is that we can recognize our own programming and choose differently.

The fiat system doesn’t need to co-opt Bitcoin. It can’t. It only needs to co-opt us.

Max Keiser said it clearly: “You don’t change Bitcoin. Bitcoin changes you.” We get to decide how we react to the expected, and for the first time in 5,000 years, our reaction can actually change the outcome.

The prison door is open.

Run a node, take self-custody, and build.