RIP MP.

More sensitiveⁱ ink has already been spilled on the subject, but a wise, if challenging, man passed away last week. His name will be familiar to long-time readers of this blog, being as it was that he directly encouraged my return to blogging in 2014 and indirectly inspired much of the first few years of content. Indeed, it was with his mostly if not entirely dispassionate assistance that I leveraged the superpower of the written word to mature, to understand the world at large, and to understand my own role in the then-emergent Bitcoin movement.

During those formative years,ⁱⁱ in the darkest depths of that crypto-winter, we conversed regularly, mostly via IRC. I always learned something, occasionally painfully, but the process of riffing on his nearly endless supply of seemingly-throw-away-yet-effortlessly-revelatory comments and turning them into articles was the kind of rigorous tutelage that no one could put a price on. For hours a day I read chat logs, as well as his blog Trilema, sponging up as much as I could of the old rabbi’s teachings, many of which still resonate through the years. Even if I almost certainly went too far in adopting his peculiarly cynical view of humanity or his megalomaniacally idealistic views in general – views that were shaped by his own experience in communist Romania, not my own in docile Canada – it was not before I also came to understand an immeasurable amount more about politics, biology, history, philosophy, and life than I did before.

He was an educator till his final days, if one regularly too tough and too readily frustrated by this world. Still, he leaves a quiet and enduring legacy difficult to calculate or quantify. Without him, the world of digital assets wouldn’t be the gleaming beacon of opportunity that it is today. For that, and for the countless lives he touched, we’re grateful and won’t soon forget him.

His name was Mircea Popescu, aka MP.

RIP.
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1. And clock-stopping… ↩
2. Up through 2016 really. ↩