There are days when I genuinely don't know whether to laugh…

There are days when I genuinely don't know whether to laugh or pour another drink.
You get these people on the internet explaining proof-of-work to me as though they've discovered fire. Some bloke whose academic output consists of a Twitter thread and three podcasts is eager to explain economics. Another wants to explain distributed systems. A third has watched a YouTube video and now feels qualified to lecture me about cryptography.
Meanwhile, this year alone, I've had close to twenty peer-reviewed papers accepted, and we're only halfway through the year.
Not tweets. Not podcasts. Not memes.
Peer-reviewed papers.
Q1 economics journals. Computer science. Physics. Actual journals where angry experts spend months trying to find flaws in your work before allowing it into print.
I've published books. Monographs. Research papers. Conference papers. Material that has survived scrutiny from people who make a living tearing apart bad ideas.
And then some fellow whose greatest intellectual achievement was remembering his exchange password arrives to tell me, "Bro, you need to learn more about Bitcoin."
It's beautiful in a way.
Imagine walking into a hospital and explaining surgery to the chief surgeon because you've watched Grey's Anatomy. Imagine explaining jet propulsion to Rolls-Royce engineers because you once sat near a window seat. Imagine wandering into CERN carrying a Reddit printout and announcing that you've solved particle physics.
That's the level of confidence we're dealing with.
The modern world has produced a fascinating creature: the man who mistakes access to information for possession of knowledge.
He has read summaries instead of books, headlines instead of papers, slogans instead of arguments, and somehow concludes that expertise is a conspiracy against common sense.
The funny thing is that real experts spend most of their lives discovering how much they don't know.
The internet expert spends most of his life explaining how much everyone else doesn't know.
And there he sits, surrounded by people who have never built anything, never published anything, never designed anything, never had a single idea survive formal scrutiny, confidently explaining reality to those who actually do the work.
At some point you stop arguing.
You stop correcting.
You stop caring.
You simply watch.
Because reality is patient.
Reality does not read Twitter.
Reality does not care about influencers.
Reality does not care about memes.
Reality merely waits until the bill arrives.
And eventually it always does.