How I found the tip

by Bob

I’m gonna start this facking story at the bottom. A product of self delusion, pity and destruction. High time preference and ego had sent me down a long road, some of it glorious and wild, much of it grotesque and pathetic.  I’ll spare you the details of that journey and get on to the next one, how I pulled myself up out of the mud and found myself on the tip.

There I am, a 36 year old pile of shit. I’ve smashed all the many shining opportunities offered to me to smithereens years ago. I’ve given up heroin, again, because I couldn’t afford it.  It’s cheaper to buy enough rot gut whiskey to drink myself into a blackout, wander into a dive bar, find the biggest fella I can and try to make him hate me as much as I hated myself.

This was getting more and more difficult as I had already been 86ed from most drinking establishments in New Orleans, but where there’s a will there’s a way. If I couldn’t find someone to do it for me I’d do it myself, roll around in broken glass, light myself on fire, ride my bike into traffic, I’d find something. My heart yearned for that final leap into the abyss. I had been making half-assed attempts for a decade, but just couldn’t seem to get it done. After many lost friends, broken bones, jail cells and blood I reached a tipping point: I either had to finish this thing off or change, and I was just too chicken shit to die. 

7 am October 8th 2011 I walked into an AA meeting so broken I was finally capable of receiving help. For the first time in my life I had become teachable. My ego could no longer protect me from the reality that had been abundantly clear to everyone around me: I was not good at this. Every decision I had made or method I had used to conquer life had gotten me right where I was. A broken middle-aged man with absolutely nothing, begging for help in the attic of a coffee shop. I was now capable of receiving instructions from people that knew how to do things better than I did: what a facking breakthrough. The first thing I learned was how to get, and much more importantly how to stay, sober. I followed every instruction I was given, again something I had never really done before. I didn’t argue with the guy that had been 20 years sober that I didn’t really like those instructions or that my personal method was somehow better, as I had done in previous years; I just listened and followed them and gosh darn it wouldn’t ya know it I haven’t had a drink since, amazing (eye rolling emoji)!

So now I’m a sober middle-aged man who has smashed what was once a promising career with nothing to show for it or prospects to speak of. Wtf now higher power? I had always been drawn to poker and had lost a good bit of money trying to be like the cool guys in the movies and TV. Over the last few years in New Orleans I had gotten a routine down pretty good. I’d go down to the poker room and buy in for 200 bucks, run it up to 1-2k then drink straight whiskey until I was back down to 0. This process varied in length; one of these sessions took me 56 hours, but the result was always the same. With 30 days of sobriety under my belt I asked myself a question: What if I just cut out the ‘drink whiskey till I lose it all’ part? The answer wasn’t quite as easy as I thought and included countless hours of study of psychology and strategy, a stack of books a good four feet high, coaching, mastery of self, dealing with intense pain without self destructing and a bunch of other shit that all heavily relied on the super power discovered on october 8th: shutting the fuck up and listening to people who know what they’re talking about. Through this the results changed and the game of number-go-up began. I had never played this game before, but if you wanted to play poker it became clear that this was what was at its heart: NGU. In order to win this game, protecting the numbers you had collected was even more important than collecting numbers, and I took on another first: saving.

I get a little nervous talking about the details of the following years. I’ll let your imagination do some other work, but I continued to play this game, trying to get better at it and found myself with a job that I loved, but I’ll leave it at that. After about five years of playing NGU exclusively, I started to wonder if I wasn’t missing out on some other cool stuff. I went out looking for love and I found it. The numbers I had been stacking started to feel a little different. What could they do for us in the future? I knew I was doing something wrong, the number was going up, but the vessel that carried them was losing value. But I just kept playing the game. 

I think somewhere in 2015 a good friend of mine comes running into the poker room extremely excited about this bitcoin thing he had discovered and told everyone that would listen, and of course nobody did, that we all had to get as much of this bitcoin as we could. He began his journey and started piling in, putting absolutely every penny he could hustle into it. Over the next year or so I pleaded with him to sell some – he was all in and it looked completely insane to me – but he wasn’t hearing any of it. Time went on and I started to get very nervous about the currency I was all in on, the dollar. I had never trusted the government and was starting to not trust the promissory notes I was holding and wanted some kind of hedge. If I didn’t know **** I think it would have been gold but I did, so I thought I’d give this bitcoin shit a try. I once again called on my super power acquired on the 8th and asked him what to do. He gave me three important instructions. 1. Take custody of your own coin, 2. Never sell, no matter what, 3. If it goes down, buy more. I followed these instructions to the letter, cause ya know I know how to do that now, and had my coin in a hardware wallet before I had even heard of bitcoin mining. 

My understanding of what I was accumulating and holding was extremely limited, but as I began to get a better understanding of what it was and what it was capable of doing, one thing really stuck out to me from a poker perspective: the pot odds were insane. It was impossible for me to determine what the chances of its success were, but the return if it won was astronomical. (This is still true today). Given that, there was just no way I wasn’t getting my money in. 

My timing was pretty crazy because this was directly before the 2017 run and I was on a wild ass ride up and back down without ever really knowing what the fuck was going on. I didn’t know shit, but I understood the hard cap, so fuck you, I kept blindly following the 3 rules. Years go by, I read an article here and there, but the only other person I know who has coin is ****; he tells me to buy some shitcoins so of course I do. He eventually tells me to trade all my bitcoin for a shitcoin, but despite my super power it just didn’t seem right. I didn’t understand the logic and broke from the instruction. I’m not letting go of my facking bitcoin.

The pandemic hits. It seems like the world is ending. The NBA suspends games – this must be it. I watch my savings shrink dramatically, buy some frozen pizzas and hunker down with my lady, blah blah blah quarantine, long walks, more frozen pizza, the aliens are here, blah blah, I order some bitcoin books and the number starts to go back up. The more I read the more excited I start getting about bitcoin. Not only could it potentially make me rich as fack, but it could make the world a better place and offer protection from this rotten corrupt system to those that need it the most. It could bring prosperity to millions of people without hope – how facking cool. There wasn’t anyone around me that wanted to hear my manic rants so I turned to social media, Twatter. I got on there and found some voices I like: Pierre Rochard was my favorite. I found myself in a fight with him without really knowing shit – my super power doesn’t seem as effective on the interwebs. I found some other plebs that I could get down with. My bestie was an anon called nobody, and we bonded over not being complete bigoted pieces of shit, which was kind of cool. I discover why I wouldn’t sell my bitcoin: I’m a toxic bitcoin maximalist that just had yet to meet his tribe. I got married to my lady somewhere in there – she is my soulmate and the most incredible human being I have ever known by the way. I try to put my manic rants into little short twats to contribute to the movement/network, but usually only get a like or two, usually nobody. My wife starts feeling really bad for me. I was getting in there everyday and Twatting shit that is really important to me and getting very little back. It didn’t really bother me, but she was starting to genuinely worry and feel bad for me. I just told her I’m grinding. 

Throughout this twatter journey I experienced my second bull market, but not quite as alone as I was the first time and then my second bear market, much of which I was definitely not alone. On July 18th 2022 I saw a Twat from ArizonaHODL talking about: even on days he feels broke he stacks with a 5 smash buy receipt and I thought: ya know what? Fuck you. I stacked 6 dollars on it. It felt pretty good, until that little yellow fucker nobody came in and stacked 7 on my 6. I wasn’t having it so I walked down to the ATM to deposit more cuckbucks and stacked 8 right on top of that shit – I had found the tip.

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Note from Stackchain Magazine: No Bitcoin (or inferior monies) were exchanged for this article, also no sexual favors were exchanged despite what you might have heard. Normally we’d plug an LNurl in here for you to tip Bob, but it’s a WoS and they just nuked harder than Bama on a bender. So until we get an updated address you’ll just have to go find Bob on X and throw some sats at him. @happyclowntime

Edit LNurl below

stingysled36@walletofsatoshi.com Bob said Fuck it, he ride or die with WoS