I ran a Bitcoin full node for a while years ago to learn and contribute, also coming from a perspective that appreciates any viable alt-money. I lost interest when the network centralized and speculation came to dominate. Then there were the governance-- I'll call them failures-- that resulted in multiple forks. I mean, c'mon, parallel systems are one thing but it illustrates that no one even is available to dig a moat around the relevant trademarks. And finally what caused me to disengage was a lack of-- I'll call it honesty about this being a secure long-term store of value. This is a distributed, Internet-dependent software program with a minimally-functional development contingent, that absolutely is a creature of this technological moment-- relative to network structure, laws and the security of the various layers of encryption baked into the system. It's a very human system and not pre-determined at all. If those systems fail for a day, or a week, I sort of doubt BTC ever would recover.

These days I follow the price to infer which direction black market money exchangers in China are running-- are the illegal capital flows toward or away from China today? I also think it's neat that sorta 'banking as a commodity item' has a sticker price in BTC. That is all.