Before The Lord Said 'Let There Be Substack' The Word Was Without Form And Published On Medium

Hallelujah, here are the links to the Medium posts.

A SHORTCUT FOR THE IMPETUOUS READER

If you don’t care about why we decided to move from Medium to Substack but want to read about how Bitcoin is a demonic monstrosity made out of computers and greed and all the rest, you can jump straight to the good stuff.)

FOREWORD

There never was a plan to formally publish anything like The Cryptocalypse Chronicles. I initially only planned to inscribe The Prophecies Of The Oracle Of Tulips into Reddit so that there would be a timestamp I could point to later and say “I told you so” to various friends who still thought “crypto” was going to somehow stop war, upend the class system, and solve world hunger at the same time as it made them very, very wealthy.

One thing lead to another and soon I was fully engaging with social media¹ for the first time in my life. Several days in I found myself still awake at 5AM trying to explain a somewhat nuanced series of financial events by alternating between tweets and edits to existing Reddit posts. Needless to say, it wasn’t really working. Then suddenly a random user on Twitter suggested that perhaps I should publish my explanation in a more formal way because (they claimed) people would want to read it.

So I joined Medium and typed something up. I spent no more than 2 minutes considering my options as far as publishing platforms; I knew that sometimes people did this kind of thing on Medium and I knew that I didn’t hate reading things on Medium and that was good enough. I was vaguely aware that all the cool kids seemed to have moved to the Substack lunch table but I’ve never been that concerned with where the cool kids go. In fact it’s far more in my nature to be constantly swimming in the other direction.

At no point in this 120 second long descent of the decision tree did I anticipate that any of my pointed commentary about this ongoing capitalist car crash would clock five figures worth of reads in a single twenty four hour period and spark long debates on internet message boards. Even more surprising was the idea that hundreds of people would actually sign up to have more of my rantings delivered to them in real time. But life can take weird turns and all of that ended up happening.

At that point I started to realize that Medium hadn’t been a good choice. They were going to put all of my treatises behind a pay wall and I really was not OK with that. I figured that there must be a way that I could liberate my readership from the cold hand of capitalist profit taking by placing that hand around my own neck - Medium must have some way I, a writer of prose, could pay them a small ransom to Medium to make that prose freely available.

But writers with those sorts of altruistic ideas about their readership’s access to their thoughts is not Medium’s business model. The friction of the paywall is basically their whole business model. They wanted the readers to cough up that $5 and offered no way for me to carry that cost for them.

I thought that sucked, so here we are.

PREVIOUS EPISODES OF THE CRYPTOCALYPSE CHRONICLES

These are promotional links that should get you around Medium’s paywall.

• Cryptocurrency Is A Hideous Monstrosity Made Out Of Computers And Greed That Must Be Destroyed Before It Devours The World (If you read any of these, read this one.)
  

• 3AC and BlockFi Made The Same Exact Dumb Trade And Seem Headed For The Same Dumb Place
  

• The Cryptocalypse Files, Vol. 1: The Closening
  

If you think I’m being foolish for trying to change platforms mid-stream or have a good reason Medium is worth sticking by, feel free to let me know. This whole world of social media and publishing platforms is very new to me.

1. For those of you who still have never tried this, let me just tell you: social media is wild.