San Francisco, CA is quietly a pretty big city for Bitcoin... I can walk to where I can get Bitcoin at a local store, and if I were eating out more, I could eat on Bitcoin for some time here. But it is bad stewardship in my mind to spend Bitcoin on eating out -- for literal consumables, what else is fiat for?
If I decide to hold on to my Bitcoin and not sell, though, I am going to need to find ways to invest it and grow it, and I'd like to do that doing Bitcoin things ... and this led me to discover Presidio Bitcoin this week.
However, there was no address on the website, https://www.presidiobitcoin.org/, and that puzzled me a little ... but also intrigued me ... a secret Bitcoin hub in the middle of Presidio National Park. Maybe not QUITE a secret, but that tells me the local Bitcoiners are a bit past the stage of trying to bring people in that don't already get it, or even wanting anyone they have to convince around. This would have disturbed me more last year than it does now ... I've learned that some things are for who they are for, and if you want something, you have to go get it.
I was a whole entire professional journalist trained for investigative journalism ... give me any two known landmarks, and I'll figure out where you are. Presidio Bitcoin's website's first picture had a well-known landmark -- the Golden Gate Bridge, and also a parking lot with some strips of green. The picture was taken high up -- two or three stories. The only challenge I knew there was going to be was fog... the thing about San Francisco is that there's one good day every summer in which the bridge can be seen like that -- there was little chance I would see the bridge in July! Nonetheless, that told me what part of Presidio National Park I should focus on, and I was confident that once I got on the ground I could find my way even in the fog.
I also packed several gifts ...
... and the thought I had as I packed up was thinking, "Well, at least I will be meeting people who get what I'm talking about, and will appreciate the love of Bitcoin and be open to hear what Hive is doing with it! I just have to find them!"
I was blessed on Monday to get to Presidio National Park just as the fog was beginning to come in...
... and that gave me time to get oriented. The Presidio is large, but what helped me was remembering what you learn in real investigation: organizations that don't want to be found in a public place actually stick out like a sore thumb. Look for the most featureless building that fits into the known landscape. I found the buildings in the photo pretty quickly ...
... and soon noticed that the buildings had lovely signage for the businesses there and pretty landscaping on that side of the green and the parking lot ...
... but the other buildings on the other side were giving me a series of boring blue doors with no landscaping and no signage.
That was the only one of those doors that even had door knobs -- process of elimination, in the end.
Got inside and there was the most boring old directory, but down at the bottom, there it was.
In retrospect, this building is where all the law firms and capital groups quietly hang out ... no visible security, but then again, if you can't triangulate from a photograph, you're not finding this place, period! Presidio Bitcoin is only having people who understand larger matters in finance and law as their neighbors! I was instructed by this ... how to stop wasting time as a Bitcoiner, 101!
The assistant manager was doubly surprised: first, that anyone went through the trouble of finding Presidio Bitcoin, and second, I'm a bit of an exotic flower for the Bitcoin scene in the Bay Area -- they identify as part of the Silicon Valley tech crowd, and African American women are rare in that scene. But, he got over that quickly, and was glad enough to talk to another knowledgable Bitcoiner!
I got an answer to the questions I've been asking and writing about Bitcoin in One Bitcoin Club: serious Bitcoiners don't care that much about runes, ordinals, and the Bitcoin Operating System. He gave me a new term to think on: "We are monetary maximalists." He was intrigued to hear about how Hive helps people access the power of Bitcoin along with the Hive Backed Dollar and what Hive has been able to do in connecting people through proof-of-brain to both Hive and Bitcoin, and invited me to several future events that are for the less technical Bitcoiner -- I'm no developer, but I am interested as an investor in what great things developers are building using Bitcoin, and on Hive we can access all those things too! I've already signed up for one free event next week!
The opening of new ground in learning Bitcoin and being around people who actually GET IT ... this is a choice I did not expect to have to make in 2023 ... I realize so many people behind me are choosing by their unwillingness to act to stay in the fog ...
... but it is enough for me to be for myself the one who takes what I have and pushes forward to build on it ... if that means searching a national park for more knowledge of Bitcoin, OK ... if that means writing on a front-end on a blockchain most don't know about, OK... there are some places the crowd may never care enough to go.
But I care. That's how I found Presidio Bitcoin, San Francisco's best-kept Bitcoin secret, and will have access to talk about Hive to Bitcoiners who don't know yet we have the railways to the world that they need to truly make Bitcoin available to the masses. But also ... jjust to be somewhere to enjoy Bitcoin, with people who enjoy Bitcoin ... it will be a pleasure!
