I’d like to think that I’m a reasonable creative, heterodox, and unconventional thinker – long-time Contravex readers might even be inclined to agree – but holy shitsticks was I ill-equipped for the hot-dog-down-the-hallway that was Bitcoin MENA 2025 conference in Abu Dhabii this past week.ii
While puppet-pawns CZ and Saylor expectedly drew the largest crowds, and exhibitors mostly hawked hashpower futures contracts and tax-advantaged foreign passports, there managed to be a few eye-opening speakers, namely Ali Alnuaimi, a nuclear engineer who launched UAE’s first reactor and sat on the nation’s Space Agency board, and Simon Dixon, who despite literally “calling it in” stole the show and sent me down a deep dive of his archives.iii
But as for conference speakers I actually had access to at the conference after-party, I found myself with a group that seized the opportunity to “do me an educate” and lift back the veil of my apparent ignorance on an incredible variety of subjects.iv The “trutherisms” upon which I was enlightened were as varied and exotic as they were indicative of the mindset required to be a hardcore Bitcoin Maxi in Anno Satoshi 16.v Without further ado, here’s a scarcely believable sampling:
- The Earth might not be flat but it might not also be completely round either. Think Truman Show.vi Flight paths of airplanes aren’t “nose-down” enough given a supposedly round earth,
- Former head of NASA from the “Apollo” era James C. Fletcher had a bible verse on his gravestone, specifically Job 38:19-20 that says “Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof, That thou shouldest take it to the bound thereof, and that thou shouldest know the paths to the house thereof?” which is basically proof positive that the moon landings were fake and gay and that the “stars” are actually holes in a fixed firmament (ie. “exosphere”) just like Plato said
- Antartica is bigger than we’ve been lead to believe. It’s not just ice, there’s also vegetation on the other side of it.vii
- Airplanes take-off using jet fuel but they can’t actually carry enough fuel for their longer jouneys (not enough room in the plane’s tanks) but that’s actually okay because the engines are really perpetual motion machines that leverage the infinite energy from the aether to propel them and only need a modest amount of jet fuel to “kick start”
- Einstein was a fake and we would still have semiconductors even without his theories of relativity
- Nikola Tesla was the real deal and discovered how to create infinite zero-point energy for free
- 9/11 was CIA/Mossad operation and most wars for the last hundred years (or more) were false flag operations by Military Industrial Complexviii
- 17′ tall giants walked the Earth within the last few thousand years and their bones are being reconstructed as “dinosaurs” to hide this history from us, ergo dinosaurs are completely fake and never existed
- The Earth is only about 5000 years old, which is conveniently the accuracy of carbon dating
- The same giants built all the beautiful, neoclassically crafted, solid stone buildings of Europe/America and all these buildings are much older than we’ve been lead to believe, and are in fact remnants of an powerful lost civilisation that also built like the pyramids. Even Alberta’s Legislature building is way older than 1905 and wouldn’t even be possible for a bunch of Scottish immigrants to have built so recently.ix
- The Bible is literally true, so Noah (of flood fame) was a great-great-grandson of Adam (of garden fame) and they both lived to be over 900 years of age.x
- There was a mud-flood about 300 years ago that wiped out most of humanity and we’ve been trying to rebuild civilisation ever since. Bitcoin is a key part of the rebuild.
- Humans didn’t evolve from monkeys but rather devolved downwards from higher, more intelligent beings.xi
- The “jab” and other COVID-era “health and safety” policies were beta tests for the increasingly totalitarian regimes of the futurexii
- Food pyramid is fake and gay, our food is generally being poisoned
- When you’re feeling sick, just eat more red meat
- If you don’t wear sunglasses, you can’t get sunburned because sunglasses prevent your body from secreting natural sunscreen
- Oil isn’t really scarce and obviously didn’t come from dinosaurs
- Monarchy is a superior form of governance to all othersxiii which is why the Jordanian Hashemite Dynasty descending from Mohammed needs to be reinstated across the region.
Thus we can establish the state of play amongst hardcore Bitcoiners circa 2025.
And I get it, or at least I empathise, for we really do live in an utterly poisoned information environment today, and there’s relatively little reliable community to be found in the mainstream, such are the silo’ing forces ripping apart our families that we might be easier to conquer.xiv Goodness knows #bitcoin-assets had a whif of this irreverence back in the day, but that IRC channel was staffed by some of the most brilliant, physics-fluent, polyglot machiavellians you ever did meet. Now? It’s more a case of huddling together for warmth in the middle of a winter storm, and believing to believe because hey it worked for Viktor Frankl. By contrast, back when I attended Bitcoin San Jose in 2013 alongside Charlie Shrem, the Winklevii, Andreas Antonopoulos, and the like – where you were as likely to see Google Glass being worn as toe-shoes – the after-party conversations were more along the lines of “who was your favourite Roman Emperor?”, “why is elliptic curve cryptography a potential Achilles heel?”, and “how long will it take for nation-states to start mining?”
But that was a long time ago ; lifetimes ago…
- Abu Dhabi is home to the region’s finest cultural attractions including Louvre by Nouvel, Abrahamic Family House by Adjaye, and Zayed National Museum by Foster, etc. but the UAE capital city is ultimately not the multipolar “sovereign” it imagines itself. Despite UAE claiming to be a tax haven, crypto capital, luxury and tourism hub, new BRICS frontier, Abraham Accords nexus, and regional kingmakers, these goat-herding desert monarchs are still firmly under globalist hegemonic harnesses via (as best as I can tell):
1. Kompromat-wielding clandestine services ;
2. Financial-Industrial Complex (FIC) arbitraging Tahnoon/Mubadala ledger skims from Sudanese gold trade laundering via Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) crypto rails into G42 AI equity, as well as Bank for International Settlements (BIS) pressure via yuan-gold-swaps and hundreds of billions in orchestrated debt daisy chains ;
3. Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) entropy engines testing EDGE/Anduril drones for export ;
4. Technical-Industrial Complex (TIC) harvesting petabytes for Palantir to beta-test automated kill-chains in frontline conflicts, while Belt & Road Infrastructure fleshes out regional rare-earths leverageY’see there are no “nations” here, no left-right dichotomies, and even fewer religious wars than you’ve been led to believe. There’s money, there’s power, and there’s control. Much of the rest is window dressing at best and more often than not completely manufactured emotional theatre. Monkeys like shiny things, indeed. ↩
- In addition to the draw of world-class museums, I half went to Bitcoin MENA to support my friend who was speaking, but also to take in the final GP of the 2025 F1 season and cheer Max on, as well as visiting a few friends in Oman and Dubai while in the region.
Highlights from the trip?
- Flying 1st class on Etihad Airbus A380
- Verstappen’s tour de force in qualifying and race distance
- Discovering that Dubai is a russian-hoe-infested-soulless-desert-shithole that made Lanksky-Land feel charming and human-scaled
- Sotheby’s car auction at St Regis Saadiyat Abu Dhabi, featuring more Singers, Paganis, Koenigseggs, and GMAs than you could shake a stick at
- Shabbat services inside Ben Maimon synagogue at Abrahamic Family House
- The evanescent, alchemical, luminous 8-ton chandeliers at Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi
- Touring perhaps the most exquisite piece of architecture / craftsmanship in the 21st century: Omani Royal Opera House in Muscat, commissioned by the great Sultan Qaboos (1940-2020) cost $16bn in today’s dollars, aka $4bn in 2011 when completed:
- Ask Edmund de Waal, there’s nothing more satisfying than archival deep dives! ↩
- Calling Rawls! ↩
- AKA blockheight 927,878 as of this writing. ↩
- AKA Virgil’s FW2020 collection for Vuitton. ↩
- In my ECDO deep dive a while back I was reasonably persuaded that Antarctica was previously more equatorial than it is currentlyl and therefore had legitimate vegetation under it, since frozen and fossilised, but this “map trutherism” was new to me. ↩
- Don’t necessarily disagree with this one tbh. ↩
- It really helps to have zero understanding or experience in construction and architecture when making these specific claims, but apparently it was “Tartarians,” not y’know aristocratic Anglo-Saxon civilisation with talented Scottish stonemasons since replaced top-down by barbarian hordes. I mean I get it, the past was a foreign world, but beauty is still possible today! See Omani Royal Opera House. ↩
- More sophisticated readings of the Old Testament reveal that total sum of all pre-flood lifespans + post-flood (Genesis 11) = exactly 12,600 years = 10×1,260 (apocalyptic “half-week” from Daniel 7:25/Revelation 11:3—3.5 years × 360-day year). Symbolizes eschatological completeness: from creation to redemption. Incidentally, this very closely aligns with half of Plato’s “Perfect Year” (25,920) based on celestial precession… and the time from today since the last ECDO-induced global flood as indicated by Gobleke Tepe and the like… ↩
- This actually aligns with Hesiod’s Ages of Man so maybe not insane? ↩
- Also not sure I totally disagree with this one. ↩
- Funnily enough, this came from the most previously libertarian Bitcoiners, and I’m not sure I disagree either, nor is the rapid upward trajectory of UAE in the last 50 years, as well as the rapid downward trajectory of the Democratic West over that same time period any kind of realistic counter-point. ↩
- Lest we forget we’re at war:
