Average Gary: Bitcoin Is the Peaceful Revolution

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Average Gary came on the show this week, and we ended up going for just over two hours on a conversation I didn't want to stop. Gary is a former Navy intel guy who got liberty-pilled somewhere between a bourbon night in 2014 and reading Tom Woods' Rollback, arrived at Bitcoin around 2020-21, and has since become one of the core contributors pushing open-source mining forward through Stratum V2 and the Bitcoin Veterans network. He's avg_gary on X and Average Gary on Nostr if you want to go find him.

The thread running through the whole conversation is something I've believed for a long time but Gary articulates with a clarity that comes from having actually signed up to fight: veterans who reach Bitcoin understand what's at stake at a level most people don't, because they've watched up close how fiat money funds the machine. The incentives are so clear. And once you see it, Bitcoin stops being an investment and starts being a mission.

The difference between Gary's mission now and the one he was handed in the Navy is that this one doesn't require anybody to die. You stack sats, you run a cash-flow-positive business, you starve the parasites economically, and you win.

I'm a propaganda arm for Bitcoin. This episode is part of that operation.

Key takeaways

• Bitcoin is the peaceful weapon, veterans who've watched fiat fund forever wars understand that stacking sats and building a circular economy is more effective than any armed conflict. You don't have to mow anyone down; you just have to be successful and let the parasites starve.
• Bitcoin Veterans is a leaderless distributed network with two rules, no violence, no shitcoins. Anyone can start a meetup, spin up a regional Signal chat, or run a topical group. Veterans' military training maps almost directly onto Bitcoin infrastructure skills, from cold storage to running a mining site.
• Hurricane Helene proved the model, Gary's group raised over a Bitcoin for operations in Western NC and Eastern TN, was on the ground before FEMA had its act together, ran Meshtastic radios off National Guard birds, set up a Cold Card-equipped logistics hub through a local vet, and had armed watch over supplies overnight. Bitcoin-funded, veteran-led mutual aid ran circles around the bureaucracy.
• Open-source mining firmware is a national security issue, closed-source firmware from Chinese manufacturers is an Antbleed-style attack vector waiting to be used. Mujina, developed with support from 256 Foundation, gives miners chip-level control, heterogeneous hashboard support, and power tuning without a full restart. This is the sovereign answer.
• 5th-gen information warfare is already happening to you, a reported algorithm change on X isolated Bitcoiners from each other for years. Most people don't know they're in a war for their attention and beliefs. The counter is in-person meetups, Nostr, and community-building you can actually touch.
• The Bitcoin circular economy is being built right now, from eHash eCash tokens that let a heat-mining community clear zero-fee transactions when they find a block, to sats-for-beef, sats-for-coffee, and Bitcoin-standard local businesses, the infrastructure for opting out of the fiat system is operational.

From the FOB to the Fed

Gary enlisted in 2008, went to boot camp from August to October of that year, and was completely cut off from the outside world when Lehman blew up. He remembers noticing that the officers were glued to the news and couldn't figure out what was happening. He got out 11 years, 4 months, and 3 days later, when his first kid arrived and the Navy made clear it was going to ship him back to a regular unit doing regular Navy problems.

The monetary awakening came somewhere around 2014-15, when he was working in a special operations intel environment and living with a friend he calls Tim. Over bourbon at the house, Tim started walking him through liberty ideas, the Federal Reserve, the Cantillon effect, budget inflation inside the DOD. Gary was simultaneously watching his unit burn through end-of-fiscal-year money just to protect next year's budget.

Buy gear nobody needs, send people to courses they don't require, because if you don't spend the million, they'll only give you nine hundred thousand next year. He saw it across the entire government structure once he knew what to look for. The perverse incentive doesn't require malice. The system just designs you to want more.

His entry text was Tom Woods' Rollback. He says he had the "money is broken" problem seeded in his brain by 2015. He just didn't find the solution until he stumbled into Bitcoin around 2020-21, when the pandemic had him working in big tech, looking for a remote job, and his buddy Tim pointed him at crypto.

He interviewed at Celsius (they ghosted him, which he now calls a bullet dodged), tried Ethereum and found he couldn't afford to do anything interesting with it, then loaded Bitcoin on an old gaming laptop and had a node syncing within a day. That was it.

Smedley Butler said war is a racket. Gary doesn't hedge it much beyond that. He watched a drone feed, saw the puff of smoke, cheered with the room, and has spent time since reflecting on what that does to a soul. The monetary incentive to keep the machine going, all the contract companies, the logistics and supply chains that go dark when there's no war, is just the incentive structure. Bitcoin is the exit that doesn't require a shot fired.

Bitcoin Veterans: Two Rules, No Leaders

Bitcoin Veterans started as a Twitter group chat between five guys who noticed there was no Bitcoin community for veterans and that the skills military training produces map almost perfectly onto what the Bitcoin network needs. Beans, bullets, and Band-Aids become ASICs, electrons, and secure enclaves. The guy who learned never to connect the crypto radio to the internet understands cold storage intuitively. The chief petty officer who had to brief a plan, train the team, execute, and link back up understands distributed operations without needing it explained.

From the group chat it grew into regional Signal chats, then topical chats, there's a pilots chat, a health and wellness chat, a Tesla owners chat, a Bitcoin Veterans of Christ chat with, by Gary's description, deep theological debates going on. They ran a Twitter Space every weekday at 10 AM. They got a room at the 2024 Bitcoin conference, held qualification exercises for ham radio down in the basement, and called it a high-signal event because that's what it was.

The following year they partnered with Bitcoin Park for the first formal summit. This November 9th and 10th they're doing the third annual summit at Bitcoin Park, with a range day the second day at a private facility outside Nashville. BitcoinVeterans.org/Summit2026 has the details.

The two rules exist because they need to exist. No violence means no fed-posting, no calls for aggression. Gary is precise about this: being peaceful is not being harmless. You can roll jiu-jitsu, go to the range, train. The right to self-defense exists.

But Bitcoin Veterans is not calling for violence, not inciting anything, and not a militia. Gary corrected me on that directly when I used the word, and the distinction matters.

No shitcoins is self-explanatory.

Outside those two rules, anyone can do anything. Pop-up meetup in Des Moines? Call it Bitcoin Veterans. Go for it. Gary's not in charge. Nobody is. That's the point.

Connected to this is Operation Bitcoin, run by Gabe Lord, which has an actual partnership with the state of Georgia for Bitcoin mining workforce development and training. That's a separate nonprofit with a specific mandate, but it illustrates what Gary sees coming: veterans plugging into the Bitcoin industry at every level, because the overlap between military skill sets and Bitcoin infrastructure is real and deep.

Hurricane Helene: Bitcoin-Funded, Veteran-Led

By Gary's account, Bitcoin Veterans raised over a Bitcoin for operations in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee after Helene hit. That funded guys loading up their trucks with camping gear, water, food, blankets, and driving into an area where the entire grid was down, electricity gone, cell service gone, roads washed out.

Gary had bought around 300 Meshtastic radios from China a couple years prior. A buddy named Jordan had taken 80 of them off his hands at a bourbon night. A few months later, Helene hits, and they have off-grid mesh network radios ready to deploy.

The National Guard birds became unintentional relay nodes, when a helicopter flies over a holler where line-of-sight doesn't reach, the Meshtastic messages can ping up and out. Before Starlinks were going in, guys were on ATVs riding through back roads making contact with local churches, which Gary describes as the most reliable source of community knowledge in that area. The churches know who's around, even people who don't attend.

They linked up with a local Christian Rangers group already operating in the area. Force multiplied them instead of duplicating effort. Got one veteran set up with a Cold Card and funded him directly, he had a warehouse that became a logistics hub for distributing disaster equipment.

Not a Bitcoiner, but a veteran, which was enough for the shared handshake. Some of Gary's guys stood armed watch overnight over the supplies because there were people playing games with incoming shipments and somebody needed to be there.

A few of them hiked up to one of the taller peaks in the area and put a solar Meshtastic repeater node up top, which Gary says blew up the coverage across the whole region.

Meanwhile FEMA had taken up hotel space so incoming volunteers couldn't find lodging, and the guys slept in half-finished condos in sleeping bags. I'll add what I remember from Florida at that same time: people with destroyed property wanted to pay private trash haulers to clear the debris, and FEMA said no. The trash sat there getting moldy and creating a health hazard. That's a glaring example of the incompetence of the federal government, and it's the counterpoint to what Gary's network was doing, distributed self-organization, Bitcoin-funded, operating at a fraction of the cost, already on the ground before the news cycle had fully caught up.

5th Generation Warfare and the Information Battle

Gary's framework for 5th-gen warfare is simple and worth sitting with: there are no civilians. Everyone is a combatant in the information war. Most people don't know they're in a war, which means they're getting eaten alive by it.

This podcast is a form of it. When Gary is talking to me and I'm putting it out to however many thousand listeners, ideas are going into people's heads. That's always been true of media. What's different now is that it's never been cheaper to participate, and it's never been more systematically weaponized, by governments, by corporations, by individuals, by algorithms.

The X algorithm story is the concrete example I kept coming back to during the conversation. A reported change by one person in control of the algorithm, and suddenly Bitcoiners who hadn't seen each other on the platform in years were seeing each other again. My cousin had been telling me for two years that my tweets weren't showing up.

Whether that was malignant intent or just an incentive misalignment in the algorithm design doesn't matter, the outcome was isolation. And Bitcoiners, a community that is genuinely distributed and genuinely leaderless, got discombobulated by it in a way that military-trained people would recognize immediately as what happens when you lose comms.

The counter, both Gary and I landed on, is in-person. Get to a Bitcoin meetup. If there isn't one near you, start one. The reason it matters isn't just social, it's that you cannot replicate in digital space what happens when you're physically in a room with people who are mutually aligned at the foundational layer on what value means.

Gary put it simply: money is a placeholder for value. If we all agree on 21 million, we can start building from there without re-litigating the basics every time.

Gary also frames it as a spiritual war, and I'm not going to sand that down. He's a man of faith. So am I. Satan's a prowling lion waiting for the lone man in isolation. The in-person community is the answer to that too, not just the algorithm problem.

I said on tape that I'm a propaganda arm for Bitcoin, and I meant it. This is 5th-gen information warfare and I'm a willing participant. Every episode of this show, every issue of the newsletter, every conversation like this one is part of it.

Decentralizing the Mine: Mujina, Stratum V2, and eHash

Gary has been working in Bitcoin mining development for just over two years, jumping straight into Stratum V2. Before getting into where it's going, it's worth explaining the attack vector it's designed to close.

Most Bitcoin mining hardware has come from Chinese manufacturers whose firmware has historically been completely closed-source. Antbleed was the documented example, a backdoor in the firmware that could allow a remote entity to brick machines. You could have your miner shut down because you were connected to the manufacturer's servers.

Gary explains it straightforwardly: if something's going on in meatspace between the US and China, and they have that backdoor, and they have a sufficient share of the hash rate, they just turn it off. That's 5th-gen warfare at the infrastructure level, and most Bitcoiners who came in post-2020 have never heard of it.

Chinese manufacturers are ruthless capitalists making a killing on the hardware. The firmware is an afterthought, they need something to run the machines, but engineering serious firmware is not the priority, and they actively put in safeguards to prevent jailbreaking. Your warranty gets voided if you touch it.

Mujina is the open-source answer. Developed with support from 256 Foundation (shout out to Schnitzel), it gives you chip-level communication with your hashboards. The practical result Gary walked through: right now, if you want to tune your power consumption, most stock firmware shuts down the miner, restarts the whole process, which takes time and puts wear on the chips. Mujina lets you tune to the exact wattage you need without a restart.

Schnitzel demoed running multiple generations of hashboards in the same machine, hardware that stock firmware would refuse to handle. You want 2,000 watts or 5,000 watts? Set it. You want two hashboards instead of three because one died? Run it. The manufacturer no longer has you.

This matters for microgrids. If you're running a home miner or a community heat-mining setup and you want to react dynamically to solar generation curves, you need to be able to tune in real time. Mujina gets you there. The home mining solar data in the TFTC Home Mining Energy Playbook shows how volatile the draw curve can be, Mujina smooths it.

On the Stratum V2 side, Gary is most bullish on the Rust ecosystem synergy. Bitcoin Dev Kit, Lightning Dev Kit, Cashu Dev Kit, all Rust. Stratum V2 is Rust. That means these projects can talk to each other in ways that weren't possible before.

Gary built a proof of concept on Testnet 4 that rotates the Coinbase address on every block find using a Miniscript wildcard descriptor, essentially giving the pool an XPUB and having the software iterate through derived addresses automatically. Every block mined on his test pool went to a different address in sequence. If you're a pool worried about address reuse in a quantum-computing future, that's now technically demonstrated to work.

Demand Pool is doing something interesting on the payout side: a PPLNS-JD schema where the guaranteed block subsidy is distributed normally, but the fee weight of your custom block template determines your proportional reward. If your template is full of high-fee transactions, you get a heavier weight in the payout. Pure economics, if your block is worth more, you should get more.

The eHash idea is Gary's own proposal, and I want to be clear it's his thinking, not established protocol. The core of it: every mining share a pool tracks is already an IOU, a database entry that promises future Bitcoin. All pools are just accounting software.

If you swap the database for an eCash mint and issue eHash tokens as bearer instruments for those shares, suddenly your mining shares are liquid. Community members can trade them before the block is found. If you think the pool is about to hit, you buy eHash tokens. When the block comes in, the tokens resolve to actual Bitcoin. You can melt them over Lightning and pay for coffee.

The zero-fee private mempool use case follows from this. If you have a heat-mining community, a local meetup where everyone is mining for the heat and collectively running enough hash rate to find a block roughly once a month, you can maintain a private mempool of zero-fee transactions within that community. You're already paying for the hash rate. That hash rate is your fee.

When you find the block, you clear the books. Gary and I pushed back and forth on whether mempools will eventually clear on their own (my position) versus whether zero-fee community clearing is going to become a real layer of Bitcoin's economy (his). I'll hold my ground on mempools clearing eventually, but I'm genuinely fascinated by the eHash use case and I won't pretend otherwise.

The Peaceful Revolution in Practice

Gary's framework for winning is not complicated. Stack sats. Run a cash-flow-positive business. Push excess into Bitcoin. Starve the parasites by being successful. You don't have to go mow anyone down.

You just have to win economically and let the people extracting from you run out of host.

The local circular economy he describes is already working in pockets. Billy raises goats. Bobby grows herbs. Joe runs a trash company. You pay Joe for trash removal not necessarily because he's the cheapest but because he's on the mission, ethically and morally aligned on Bitcoin.

You buy beef from a mutual acquaintance who takes sats. You get your ghee from GreatGhee.com, your coffee from Sats.coffee. You run your meetup and the meetup becomes the network through which all of this flows.

I mentioned to Gary that I've been a new homeowner for about three months and spent last week doing a landscaping overhaul, going out in shorts and flip-flops to water the hydrangeas and talk to our AI agent Martin through the headphones while doing it. Gary recommended planting a tree for each of my kids. I have three to plant. He's right that I may never sit in the shade of those trees but my grandkids will.

The gospel homily at Mass this past Sunday was about sowing seeds, and this was the second conversation in a week where it came back to me unprompted. I got goosebumps both times. You plant the seeds, you don't know exactly what grows, you trust the process. These meetups, Bitcoin Veterans, and this podcast all work the same way.

On the civic side, Gary's pitch is: don't waste your time federally unless you're truly resourced and motivated for it. Locally, though, run for sheriff, board of supervisors, city auditor, councilman, that's where Bitcoiners can actually move things.

Gary tried to pitch BIT bonds in his local area in Virginia and found out the county can't do anything without Richmond's approval. He FOIAed the county and found they'd signed NDAs with data centers even while publicly claiming ignorance. The FOIA cost $400 for a narrowly scoped request. They wanted $4,000 for an email query.

He's right that this is the complete inversion of the relationship between the governed and the government, radical transparency demanded of citizens, total opacity demanded for officials. Veterans can go fix that at the local level, and they have the credibility to say hard things in those rooms.

One more thing Gary said that I want to make sure lands: Bitcoin Veterans is not a militia. He corrected me directly when I used that framing. It's a leaderless network of military-trained individuals who understand Bitcoin.

They have a lot of guns, as Gary noted, because they're veterans. But the organization explicitly does not advocate aggressive violence. The peaceful revolution being described here is economic and informational, not kinetic.

About Average Gary

Average Gary is a former US Navy intelligence specialist who served 11 years, 4 months, and 3 days, including a deployment to Afghanistan in 2012. After leaving the Navy, he worked in software engineering and discovered Bitcoin around 2020-21.

He became a contributor to the Stratum V2 project and an active participant in the Bitcoin Veterans network, which he helps coordinate alongside other founding members. He is working on open-source mining development including Coinbase address rotation tooling for mining pools.

He is on X as avg_gary and on Nostr as Average Gary. Bitcoin Veterans' annual summit information is at BitcoinVeterans.org/Summit2026.

Sources mentioned

• BitcoinVeterans.org/Summit2026: details on the 3rd annual Bitcoin Veterans Summit, November 9-10 at Bitcoin Park outside Nashville
• You Can't Have Capitalism When the Money Is Corrupted: TFTC piece on the fiat incentive rot Gary describes from inside the DOD
• DOE Closes $3.26B Texas Grid Loan as AI Demand Rewrites Power Queue: the grid modernization stakes Gary's energy infrastructure arguments sit inside
• BIP-110 Heads Into August With Less Than 1% Miner Support: the miner signaling and decentralization context for the Stratum V2 discussion
• Block Ships Nostr-Native AI Agent Workspace Buzz in Apache 2.0 Launch: Block's ecosystem work Gary references in the Bitkey/Cash App ad context

Watch the conversation

Timestamps

• 0:00 - Intro / Bitcoin in a world of debasing central banks
• 1:56 - Boot camp during the 2008 crash, Afghanistan deployment
• 12:31 - War is a racket: the monetary incentive to keep the machine going
• 18:40 - Tom Woods, Tim, and the liberty awakening
• 20:15 - First contact with Bitcoin, Celsius, Ethereum, and why BTC clicked
• 39:05 - Veterans, pain tolerance, and why Bitcoin is the new mission
• 46:21 - Bitcoin Veterans: origin, structure, two rules, no leaders
• 54:45 - Hurricane Helene: Meshtastic radios, Cold Cards, and armed watch
• 1:01:12 - 5th generation warfare: everyone is a combatant, most don't know it
• 1:06:05 - Sowing seeds: meetups, faith, and the local circular economy
• 1:10:00 - Civic engagement, FOIA, BIT bonds, and local elections
• 1:12:55 - Macrochips, planetary grids, and the cosmic case for strong energy infrastructure
• 1:23:33 - Bitcoin mining in Africa and the Congo nature preserve
• 1:28:46 - Mujina open-source firmware, Antbleed, and the case against closed-source mining
• 1:41:40 - Stratum V2, Coinbase address rotation, and the Rust ecosystem
• 1:47:23 - Private mempools, eHash eCash tokens, and the heat-mining circular economy
• 1:55:59 - AI, vibe coding, and using LLMs as output tools not advisors
• 1:59:03 - Sowing seeds, homeownership, and the pitch to veteran Bitcoiners
• 2:02:27 - Outro

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