They don't look like they belong in the same sentence.
One is a decentralized monetary network secured by cryptography and energy. The other is a molecule that's been used in ceremony, therapy, and spiritual practice for thousands of years. One lives on a blockchain. The other grows in the ground.
But they share an enemy: the middleman.
And the middleman hates them both.
Control Requires Dependence
The financial system doesn't work unless you need it. You need a bank to hold your money. You need a payment processor to move it. You need permission — from an institution, from a regulator, from a terms-of-service agreement — to access what's yours.
That's not a bug. That's the business model.
Psychedelics work the same way — except the middleman is pharmaceutical. You're not supposed to sit with your own consciousness unsupervised. You need a diagnosis, a prescription, a therapist, a clinical trial. The idea that a person could have a direct, unmediated experience of their own mind — and come out the other side changed — is threatening to a system built on managing that mind for you.
Both Bitcoin and psychedelics say the same thing: you don't need us to get there.
The Experience Is the Point
You can't outsource a psychedelic experience. You can read trip reports, watch documentaries, talk to researchers. But until you sit with it yourself, you don't know. The encounter is direct. No institution stands between you and what you find there.
Bitcoin is the same. You can read whitepapers and watch YouTube explainers. But until you run a node, hold your own keys, send a transaction that no one can stop — you don't really understand what it is. The sovereignty is direct. No bank stands between you and your money.
Both require you to do the work. Both reward you with something no one can take away: direct knowledge.
Why They're Both Scheduled
The U.S. government put psilocybin on Schedule I in 1970 — no medical use, high potential for abuse. It also spent decades trying to kill Bitcoin, or at least tame it. Regulate it, KYC it, tax it into compliance.
I don't think that's a coincidence.
Things that return power to individuals — real power, not the kind you vote for every four years — tend to get suppressed. Because a person who can hold their own money and examine their own consciousness without permission is a person who is harder to manage.
I'm Not Making a Policy Argument
I'm not here to tell you what to put in your body or your wallet. That's the whole point — it's yours to decide.
What I'm saying is that the same instinct that drew me to Bitcoin drew me to the broader question of what it means to actually be free. Not free in a bumper sticker way. Free in the way where you've looked at your own mind without flinching, and you hold your own keys, and nobody can freeze your account or tell you what you're allowed to experience.
That instinct is worth following.
The enemy of both is the same: the idea that you need someone else's permission to access yourself.
Jon Rich writes at StackerZero. He's a maintenance worker from Maine, six years sober, and runs a Bitcoin node on a Raspberry Pi.