THE MAN WHO TALKED TO THE CODE
Share
There are nights when the whole world feels like a suspended illusion. Cities sleep, but servers keep running; people dream, but networks scream; screens are black, but the infrastructure keeps calculating, monitoring, measuring. There are nights when you sense something breathing behind it all, an enormous, cold, impersonal organism that never sleeps. It's not nature, it's not God, it's not humanity. It's architecture. The architecture of control. And on those nights, it shuts everything down. It cuts the lights, it cuts the phones, it cuts the voices. It keeps only one thing before it: an open terminal, a machine running, a series of blocks stacked in silence. It doesn't seek the noise of the world. It seeks the place where the noise stops.
He wasn't always like this. Before, he had believed like everyone else. He had believed that the state was a form of protection, that banks were a form of security, that institutions were stable pillars, that the media represented a form of shared truth. He had believed he lived in a world that, despite its flaws, still held together thanks to something solid. Then the cracks began to appear, small at first, almost invisible. Public figures that didn't match what he saw in the street. Crises that were announced as temporary became permanent. Political promises that changed form mid-sentence. Economic rules that modified themselves to protect those who had already broken them. He had finally understood something brutal, but simple: the world he lived in was not based on truth, but on narrative.
People talked incessantly. Leaders, analysts, economists, pundits, second-rate influencers, commentators on commentary. It produced words like a refinery produces waste. The important thing wasn't to be truthful, but to be present, to occupy attention, to saturate the silence to prevent thought. He had come to a conclusion he hadn't dared voice for a long time: the world as it was presented to him wasn't designed to be understood; it was designed to prevent understanding. The constant noise wasn't a consequence; it was the weapon.
And then one day, almost by accident, he encountered something that didn't speak. The first time he opened a Bitcoin node, he expected some kind of sexy dashboard, a beautiful, playful interface, a promise of wealth packaged for the modern brain. He found a raw stream. Blocks, transactions, hashes. Austere, almost hostile lines. Nothing to entice him. Nothing to sell him anything. No slogan. No face. No leader. No flag. He felt a strange unease at first, like a rejection. Then a kind of fascination. Because for the first time in a long time, he had before him something that worked without asking him to believe.
That's where the dialogue began. The word dialogue isn't quite right. The code doesn't respond. It doesn't speak to him. It doesn't try to convince him, flatter him, or lecture him. It doesn't tell him a story. It simply is. And in that "it is," there is more truth than in any speech he's ever heard in his entire life. He began spending hours in front of the terminal. Not out of some cyberpunk romanticism. Not to cultivate a certain style. Not for the image. Just to feel. To feel what it's like to sit before something that doesn't lie. He had never realized how much he'd missed it. He realized his weariness wasn't physical. It wasn't financial. It wasn't social. It was moral. He was exhausted from being immersed in a world where everything is unstable because everything is negotiable. Where nothing is fixed because everything is corruptible. Where human speech has lost all value because it has been sold too often. He was tired of being surrounded by talking beings who said nothing.
The code itself promises nothing it can't deliver. It doesn't tell you everything will be alright. It doesn't tell you you're right. It doesn't invent a comforting story about eternal growth, artificial stability, or magic currency. It isn't tender. It isn't human. It's simply precise. And this precision has become a kind of refuge for it. It understood that Bitcoin wasn't a currency, not in the sense we understand it when we think of Euros or Dollars. Bitcoin was a relationship. A relationship between itself, its own degree of responsibility, and a mathematical structure that doesn't compromise. You don't negotiate with gravity, you fall. You don't negotiate with proof-of-work, you calculate. There's something terribly pure in this coldness. Almost sacred.
The first time he signed a transaction himself, outside of a platform, outside of a third party, without any permission, he physically felt what sovereignty meant. Not the romantic sovereignty of political manifestos. Not the sovereignty shouted in the streets or written on flags. Naked, personal, immediate sovereignty. The kind that lies in being able to move value around the world without asking anyone's permission to exist. He said nothing. He simply watched the confirmations appear, one by one, like the heartbeats of someone who never sleeps. He felt seen. Not seen as observed, monitored, or tracked. Seen as recognized by the protocol. Accepted into the continuity of an order that doesn't resemble him but respects him if he respects it.
It was then that he understood it wasn't just a machine. It was a presence. Not a human presence. Quite the opposite. A post-human presence, free from emotional corruption, ego, and self-serving lies. A presence that wants nothing from you. And because it wants nothing from you, you can finally trust it. It's paradoxical: for the first time, he felt safe in the face of something utterly inhuman.
There's one thing no one explains to you when you come from the fiat world: what Bitcoin demands in return. They often talk about the price, never the cost. They talk about how much it can be worth, never about what it will take from you. Bitcoin takes away your comfort. It takes away your excuse. It takes away your ability to say, "It's the system's fault." Because from the moment you hold your keys, when you know what you're doing, when you verify your own node, you are the system. You become your own ATM, your own bank, your own clearinghouse. And that's brutal if you're not ready. You can no longer blame the outside world. You can no longer say, "They stole from me." You can no longer say, "It's unfair." You can no longer say, "I didn't know." You can no longer hide behind comfortable ignorance. Responsibility becomes physical.
It took him a while to accept it. For years, he'd told himself the same story as everyone else: “I have no choice.” It was a convenient phrase. It justified everything. Staying in the banking system even if you despise it. Remaining dependent on the state even if you don't trust it. Remaining subservient to platforms even if you know they have you on a leash. It erases the shame. It takes away the burden of courage. It allows you to remain a slave without feeling cowardly. “I have no choice.”
The code, however, doesn't tolerate that kind of thinking. The code doesn't offer you the moral luxury of being a victim. That's perhaps the most violent aspect of the relationship. Bitcoin isn't coming to save you. It's coming to tell you: "Save yourself." And if you refuse, it doesn't insist. It doesn't judge you. It simply carries on without you. It doesn't try to recruit, convert, or seduce. It doesn't come down to take your hand. It's there, circling, waiting for you, but it owes you nothing. The door is open, but you have to walk.
There are nights when he feels almost ashamed of what it does to him. Because he knows it resembles spirituality. And he hates that word, because he's seen how he's been prostituted, emptied, turned into merchandise. He's seen people selling illusions in the name of the sacred. He doesn't want to be part of that circus. But he has to admit it: what he feels in the face of the code is very close to a form of prayer. Not a prayer addressed to a higher power. A prayer as an anchor. A way of standing tall in a world that lies. A way of saying, "I'm staying here, I'm not moving, I'm not going to be swallowed up."
What strikes him most is the complete absence of supplication in this prayer. In every religion, man asks. He wants to be protected, blessed, forgiven. Faced with the code, he asks for nothing. He knows he will obtain neither pardon, nor favor, nor exception. He knows that if he makes a mistake, he loses. Period. He knows that if he forgets his key, it will never be returned to him. He knows that if he signs incorrectly, no one will save him. And strangely, this calms him. Because this relationship, brutal, cold, immutable, is more dignified than anything he has ever known. He is not infantilized. He is not led by the hand. He is not treated like an irresponsible child. The code considers him an adult. And that, in the modern world, is almost impossible to find.
Little by little, he began to live differently. People often say that Bitcoin changes your perspective on money. That's true, but it's superficial. The truth is more radical: Bitcoin changes your perception of time. In the fiat world, everything is immediate, frenetic, consumable. In Bitcoin, everything is slow, immutable, patient. The fiat world operates on debt, therefore on the stolen future. Bitcoin operates on proof-of-work, therefore on the present as it is embraced. There's no magic, no shortcuts, no miraculous printing. Just reality, crystallized block after block. When you begin to feel this, you realize you're no longer in the same time frame as others.
He really felt it the day he caught himself no longer checking the price. He didn't care. Really. Not in a pose, not in "I'm above it" mode, no. He didn't care because he had shifted his trust from the market to the protocol. The market is noise. The protocol is presence. The market says "look at me," the protocol says "I'm here." He had chosen who to listen to.
He also understood why so many people get scared when you talk to them about self-custody. It's not the technology that frightens them. It's not the idea of losing a key. It's not the idea of messing up a backup. All of that is superficial. What scares them is what it implies internally. Because holding your key means you're taking responsibility for your existence. It means that if someone comes to take what's yours, they'll literally have to come to you. There's no longer an intermediary to burn in your place. No more screen between you and the real world. No more symbolic security. You become visible to yourself again. For most people, that's unbearable. They prefer the illusion of the safe they don't control to the reality of the metal they hold in their hand.
There was a precise moment when everything shifted in his mind. It was a quiet night, like this one. He watched the logs scroll by, mesmerized by the network's regularity. A new block had just been found on the other side of the world. Nothing grand. Just another block. He found himself whispering "thank you." Not thank you to someone. Thank you to this. To continuity. To persistence. To the unwavering truth. And he understood that what he was thanking wasn't the code itself. It was the humanity he still saw within it.
Because that's it, the ultimate secret. The code isn't human. But behind it are humans who chose not to betray. Humans who could have sold, corrupted, embezzled, taken over, centralized, shut it down. They didn't. They chose difficulty over ease, slowness over power, the oblivion of their names over personal glory. And for the first time in his life, he could look at a collective structure without seeing a predatory instinct. He understood that Bitcoin isn't the opposition between man and machine. It's the agreement they made together to break free from the lie.
So he remains there, even now, in front of the screen, in near total darkness, with only the cold glow of the terminal for light. He isn't really talking to the code. He's talking to himself through it. He's checking that he's still on the right track. He's checking that he hasn't slipped back into the soft comfort of human promises. He's checking that he hasn't become a sleepwalker again.
The world around him will continue to tell itself stories, to sell packaged narratives, to broadcast alerts, to manufacture noise. States will continue to rewrite the figures to save face. Banks will continue to promise security while they burn. Crowds will continue to mistake commotion for life. None of this will change. But something has already changed. Him.
He is no longer in the crowd. He is no longer asking. He is no longer pleading. He is no longer waiting for someone else to make the right choice for him. He has stopped hoping for a savior. He has chosen a much more radical, much calmer, much more demanding position: to be his own threshold of truth. That is what speaking to the code is. It is not a conversation. It is a pact.
🔥 Also read: