Bitcoin + Trees + Civics

It's time to build new institutions

Wake up! The Bitcoin Renaissance is underway. A new age is dawning and with it comes a rare opportunity to rebuild society on a more just and stable foundation. A full cultural revival however requires the founding of new institutions. The Bitcoin Tree Forum or BTreeC represents one such attempt and is a physical embodiment of low time preference. It seeks to instill in society the ideals of stewardship, cooperation and freedom. A BTreeC is a generations long project and as such will evolve with time, but the time to begin is now. So join the Nakamoto Tree Project and let's get to work building tangible, real world institutions that can educate, inspire, and support our local communities for centuries to come.

Bitcoin +Trees + Civics = BTreeC

A BTreeC is a grove of trees (ideally Giant Sequoias) planted by bitcoiners and stewarded by bitcoiners as an act of service for the generations to come. It serves as a local forum to gather and coordinate human effort towards projects that promise long term value to the community. It's a meeting place for citizens to lower their time preference and partake in something bigger than themselves. At the center of the grove is a publicly accessible Bitcoin node or QR code that serves as a portal for communities to transfer value between one another and facilitate other, yet to be imagined, use cases. Bitcoin is a public utility and as such it should have public interfaces.

" What’s the measure of a healthy society? Arguably, it’s a willingness to undertake long term projects, whose completion their originators will never live to see. Virtually anything worth building takes time to build. Enduring institutions don’t come easy. "

— Nic Carter

"The cathedral is not the stones that compose it. Nor is Bitcoin the blocks. The cathedral is the physical embodiment of a singular idea: something greater exists. Its greatness makes you feel small, and reminds you of your place in the universe."

— Nic Carter

"Bitcoiners who earnestly believe in a better monetary world, and aren’t afraid to bring that reality to bear, are the equivalent of masons and laborers, working on a monetary cathedral which they may never see come to fruition. But this is ok. As long as we believe in a big, audacious vision, believe that there is still beauty in the world, and that there remain great things worth striving for, we will succeed and inspire."

— also Nic Carter from this great essay

The best time to begin a Bitcoin Tree Forum was January 3rd 2009. The second best time is now.

The Bitcoin Tree Forum is like a cathedral. It's a loooong term thing. Cathedrals are cool. They take a lot of work, they stand the test of time, and they lift the human spirit. A grove of Giant Sequoias is a natural cathedral. Bitcoin is a monetary cathedral. Unfortunately building cathedrals is expensive, however planting them is cheap. Plant one in your yard, plant one at city hall, host a meetup and then install a public Bitcoin node (either onsite or inside the local library) and display a QR code. Run lightning and connect to the Blockstream satellite broadcast. The future is ours to make, so let’s make it beautiful, and lets push Bitcoin into the public sphere on our own terms.

Bitcoin Tree Forums can be places of renewal to the civic spirit that seems to be in decline across so many of our fractured human communities

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail"

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than one rooted in pavements."

— Aldo Leopold

" The Big Tree (Sequoia) is Nature's forest masterpiece, and, so far as I know, the greatest of all living things."

— John Muir

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