Traveling on a Bitcoin Standard
By Sidd
Let me start by shattering your expectations.
It’s all part of the plan – just be patient.
This is not a story of spending Bitcoin while traveling.
While that’s an admirable pursuit, it’s not my North Star.
You may know me from my Bitcoin Tour across America to 30+ meetups in 2022.
That trip wasn’t about spending Bitcoin either.
That trip and this story are part of a different form of traveling on a Bitcoin standard.
CAPTION: After over three months on the road from my starting point at Bitcoin 2022 in Miami, this was the final stop on the Bitcoin Tour: Los Angeles.
I grew up with traveling in my blood; the son of a commercial airline pilot. My family used those free flight benefits to their fullest: climbing the Eiffel tower in a muggy Parisian summer, sharing a Peking duck for Thanksgiving in Vietnam, spending Christmas with my aunt and uncle on the quiet side of Oahu.
My favorite place as a child was the airport. I looked up at that board of flight numbers and saw endless possibilities and new horizons to discover. We flew standby: we only got on if there was an available seat. Sometimes we spent all night in the airport, but other times we scored Business Class.
The magic of travel to me lies in the unknown and unpredictable. In my childhood, that always started right at the airport.
So maybe I was destined to leave home for good.
Four years ago, I finally took the leap. With a flexible remote job I packed up and got on a flight to Thailand. I decided I’d try it for 90 days.
I lived more in those 90 days than in the previous three years of corporate life in New York City. Every day was an expedition, even if I only walked 2 minutes from my apartment.
CAPTION: My first time riding a proper geared motorcycle. A CBR250 on the road from Chiang Mai to Pai.
It was during this time that I went deeper down the Bitcoin rabbit hole.
To me, and I believe to many of you, Bitcoin represents truth. An ethereal network that harnesses chaotic energy to create a predictable, stable, incorruptible platform for commerce, connection and human flourishing.
My journey down the Bitcoin rabbit hole continues to reveal more about the corruption in all the systems around us today. How education can morph into indoctrination, individualism can revolt into loneliness and division, responsibility and safety can become fear and paralysis. I’ve seen how in so many ways, we are fed programming that pleases us and consoles us instead of telling us the truth.
We’ve stopped facing the unpredictable chaos all around us and stopped working, through ourselves and our communities, to harness that chaos into a poetic form of order. We gladly trade our spirit away for a tenuous guarantee of safety and comfort.
We give up on pioneering and exploring in favor of instant pleasure.
And we now do that exactly where exploration is nearly inherent: traveling.
Sure, we get on planes, trains, and automobiles to change our physical location. But if our minds are not open to new possibilities, to new ways of life, to a pioneering spirit – we go nowhere.
We’re changing the decor of our living room.
Living to the beat of our expectations, our programming, our past. No longer in the pursuit of taming the chaos of an open horizon. And real growth, real connection, and dare I say real life only happens at the edge of the comfort zone and beyond.
The magic of travel reveals itself only when we surrender to the unknown.
This absolutely requires confronting challenges to your beliefs, to your worldview, to your comfort and safety.
But when you can honor this, travel brings a whole boatload of these experiences right at you. That’s nothing short of impossible to access in the familiar surroundings of home.
Very few people travel with this mindset anymore. I see proof of this every day in Thailand.
You could cut the fear, hesitation, and loaded expectations with a knife.
People who have spent years here who still see food poisoning when they look at a local restaurant, still ignore learning the language because Google Translate works just fine, still pity villagers for their lack of new cars and staid, western-style houses.
Let me start by admitting that I still, in many ways, fall victim to many of these. I am by no means immune. I am articulating my own personal experience as well as what I’ve observed from others.
The internet and the information superhighways ironically made travel both much simpler and much more difficult. We have exponentially more access to the world around us than ever before, but that means we also have access to home from anywhere in the world.
It’s easier than ever to travel thousands of miles while staying mentally rooted right at home.
We can look out at an exotic and foreign world while firmly seeing it through the lens of our home culture, which we’re reminded of every time we pick up our phone. If that home culture tells us street food is dangerous, we’re constantly reminded to stay in our lane, lest you find out what kind of spiritual awakening you can have after a night spent upending your guts into a toilet.
Through this information superhighway we can psyop ourselves into a passport full of stamps without a single revelatory travel experience.
But the beauty in all this is that it is easier than ever to truly travel, because your spirit is completely within your control.
The logistics of traveling – from plane tickets to payment infrastructure – are not within your control. But the internet has made these cheap, easy and commodified across the globe.
All you need to truly travel today is a spirit that’s ready for the unknown.
A spirit that’s ready to have one’s existing worldview challenged and possibly shattered.
Most Bitcoiners know this feeling, because they went through it in order to discover Bitcoin. Many now orient their lives around seeking similar truth in every domain of their life.
This is what I mean when I say traveling on a Bitcoin standard.
Traveling on a Bitcoin standard involves opening up to new perspectives that can only be accessed through the experiences of travel. It involves leaving home – and all the expectations and familiarities that come with it – at home.
Traveling on a Bitcoin standard means getting to the root of the truth in traveling: the ways it changes us and how we interface with the outside world.
Now we are no longer in the comfort of our living room; we are out in the jungle, pushing our boundaries. Pioneering and exploring. Not just physically moving, but activating and moving our spirit.
This is your wake up call to begin truly traveling.
Maybe that’s all you needed.
If it is: book a plane ticket to somewhere you’ve never been, right now.
Make no plans.
Arrive and figure it out.
But I also understand it’s not that easy.
If you’ve been eating chips on the couch for 20 years, you’re unlikely to get up and run a marathon today. Physically you could, but those mental barriers are high.
Taking on the challenge of traveling on a Bitcoin standard is no different. Diving in headfirst to that next level of exploration might not be a leap you’re willing to take. I’ve been stumbling on this path my whole life, returning often to the comforts of my living room physically and spiritually.
If you’re not already buying your plane ticket, I am working on something just for you.
I call it the Ride of Passage: travel experiences meant to guide you towards surrendering to the unknown. Towards travel on a Bitcoin standard.
What does this mean?
- There’s an itinerary (sometimes) – but you’re encouraged not to look at it.
- You’re surrounded by like-minded individuals – other Bitcoiners and sovereign individuals.
- You’re constantly facing the unexpected – in the form of surprises and challenges.
- You get to live your own movie – discovering every twist and turn for that magical first time.
Every inch of these experiences is designed to challenge your need to know, your expectations, your worldview.
And now I have the proof of work to back it up: the inaugural Ride of Passage. Through a week exploring Northern Thailand together, I revealed the food, the culture, the lifestyles that I’ve come to know, appreciate and love here to six lucky Bitcoiners.
It all started with a tweet, calling for Bitcoiners who wanted a tour of my adopted home of Thailand on the ultimate freedom machine: a motorcycle. The purpose was to show this group a local experience: a ride I would go on myself. I wanted to push everyone’s comfort zone in a way I know the average tour company would not do because they’d risk getting a bad review.
And by pushing our comfort zones together, I knew the group would bond in a way that no conference or meetup can.
These six Bitcoiners stepped up to the challenge and showed their willingness to go deep into the jungle with me. I spoke with them in depth before the ride to make sure they’d be a fit for this experience, and I plan to continue that vetting with each future Ride of Passage.
CAPTION: The lucky six and me, in the Tham Luang cave where a boy’s soccer team went through one hell of a rite of passage.
This trip did exactly what I hoped it would; it became the start of a new journey of discovery into the unknown for everyone who participated.
It prompted reflection on our home cultures, on our relationships, on our lifestyles. Hell, it even prompted the photographer and videographer I hired to come along with us to peer into the Bitcoin rabbit hole. He’s now accepting Bitcoin as payment for his work.
I give credit to each of those individuals for living through their spirit on this ride. The ride opened the door, but they had to walk through it.
Everyone on this ride let go of their need to know, to intellectualize and instead went straight to what we’ve all but forgotten how to do as a society: they experienced first.
These participants also built bonds with each other that they will develop and nurture for the rest of their lives.
When the institutions that provide structure to our daily lives crumble on their foundations of fraudulent fiat, those relationships will swoop in to keep us going: physically, mentally, and spiritually. Just as we’re seeing with local Bitcoin meetups.
Even though I painstakingly planned each bit of this ride and all the A, B and C paths, it set out a new course for me as well.
Traveling on a Bitcoin standard – truly traveling – creates a deeper relationship with yourself, with your community, with everyone and everything. It reinforces a lower time preference, a happier life, and a freer soul.
So I will pioneer new ways to inspire people to travel on a Bitcoin standard. In 2024 that will take the form of three rides:
- The Ride of Passage: Magical Thailand – back and better than ever, for a new group of sovereign individuals ready to surrender to the unknown.
- The Ride of Passage: Midwest – a trip through the sovereign enclaves of the American Midwest, with copious Bitcoin meetups and ranch visits.
- The Ride of Passage: Rally – a build-your-own-adventure rally ride through the hills of Thailand on a small and unkillable scooter.
I’ll also produce a series of travel guides to form the diving board for your own head-first journey into traveling on a Bitcoin standard, starting with Northern Thailand.
If any of this interests you, go to https://rideofpassage.live and put in an email address I can reach you at.
Are you ready?
Let’s get busy.
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Note from Stackchain Magazine: No Bitcoin (or inferior monies) were exchanged for this article. Life is and adventure and Bitcoin can unlock it for you. This article was written Sidd you can find him on X or Telegram @captainsiddh or go to his site here