I’ve been around the block. I was a Bitcoin maxi. I know the inner circles, the outer circles, the group chats, and the “private” Signal groups where people say what they’d never say on Twitter.

So let me tell you about an open secret: The Closeted Bitcoiner.

You may know who I’m talking about. He’s the guy who posts “Bitcoin is sound money” all day, then he'll confess he holds Monero to his monerocoiner friend — but only after the third drink, and only if you swear not to tell anyone. He goes home after his favorite YouTuber screams “Monero has no liquidity” and uses Monero to pay for his VPN subscription. Same day. Heck... sometimes the same hour.

His natural habitat is primarily Twitter, where he performs Bitcoin maximalism for an audience of other people also performing Bitcoin maximalism. He is very busy: The blocksize war ended years ago but somehow he is still fighting it.

There was a new war about Ordinals. Before that it was SegWit. Before that something else. The Bitcoin civil war has more sequels than The Fast and The Furious (and approximately the same intellectual depth).

They spend more energy attacking each other’s ideological pockets than they spend attacking the system that actually enslaves them. The Closeted Bitcoiner participates in all of it. He has to. His social status depends on it.

He lives in two worlds simultaneously.

In private, he knows something he can’t say out loud: Monero does what Bitcoin was supposed to do in the first place.

He knows this. And the knowledge is eating him alive.

The tribal cost of admitting the truth out loud is simply too high. If he says it out loud, he loses the group chat, the conference invites, the YouTube audience, and the carefully constructed identity of "Being Right About Bitcoin Since 2013." The sunk cost does not appear financial, but existential.

So he stays in the closet: He nods along. He calls Monero a “privacy coin” with the exact same energy people once used to say, “I’m not gay, I just think Brad Pitt is objectively attractive.”

The most recent mass sighting:

October 6, 2026. Bitcoin Mechanic — former Bitcoin maximalist and fork promoter — published a 70-minute video trying to analyze Monero in depth. He praised FCMP, the community’s commitment to decentralization, and P2Pool’s 16% sovereign mining rate — four times better than anything Bitcoin has managed.

He said if you need to do “the most illegal thing ever,” Monero is “probably the best tool.” Then he went back to promoting his rug pull.

You can watch that video and read the comment section. Those are Closeted Bitcoiners: Not asking if Monero works — they already know. They’re asking themselves if they can afford to admit it in public.

I know because I was one of them. I walked out of the Bitcoin closet a few months ago. The fear is real. The clumsy, fumbling anxiety of your first swap — the shaking hands, the offering you’re making, the desperate hope that it just works. It’s like losing your virginity all over again! The ignorance is real. The ego is real. And none of it has anything to do with whether Monero is actual money.

Spoiler: it is!

So here is my message to the Closeted Bitcoiners:

We know you’re using Monero, You have the right to use Monero, There is nothing wrong with using Monero, You are always welcome here, and nobody is going to make you feel ashamed for the journey it took to get here — because many of us took the same one.

The water here is fine. You don’t have to pretend that Jerome Powell is your daddy anymore.

But please — for the love of the genesis block — stop preaching to the rest of us about “sound money” while your secret craving for Monero is practically burning a hole in your pocket.