This is part of a series that began with Fiat Incentives Everywhere, which maps how the legacy system’s cost structures have infiltrated every layer of Bitcoin’s human infrastructure. This article goes deeper into marketing: The content creators, educators, public speakers, and influencers who shape what most learners believe about Bitcoin.
How the Attention Economy Works
Traditional social media platforms reward engagement metrics. Clickbait titles, alarmist price predictions; fast-paced, algorithm-friendly formatting generate clicks. Us versus them narratives lead to more captured attention via doom scrolling. Fear-mongering generates monetizable views. Outrageous price predictions are enticing and financially rewarded. Finance YouTube channels typically earn $10 to $25 per 1,000 views from ads alone, with top performers reaching $29 or more.[1][2] A single video with 300,000 views can generate $7,500 or more before sponsorships and affiliate deals. And it compounds; videos continue to passively provide income into the future so long as they continue generating clicks. More videos means more compounding income, keeping creators on a content generation hamster wheel.
Clickbait is profitable; technically grounded Bitcoin education, not so much. This is not a complaint; it is a description of how the incentive structure works.
Across the Bitcoin education space, it is now common for a service to be recommended by multiple well-known voices at once, each recommendation sounding like a personal endorsement. Often times, these are actually affiliate deals which pay out per sale Some of these recommendations are part of publicly advertised referral programs that pay creators up to $450 for every lead that converts. When I checked how the promoters of such services handled disclosure against the FTC’s Endorsement Guides, which require any financial relationship to be disclosed clearly and conspicuously near the endorsement itself every time it appears,[9] none of the 15 channels I examined were fully compliant across all sponsored content, and the silence was loudest on the highest-paying links.
What this means for you as the viewer is concrete: A recommendation that sounds like personal conviction may be a paid placement, and without disclosure you have no way to tell the two apart. An influencer earning hundreds of dollars in affiliate revenue for promoting a service has a strong financial interest in not disclosing the affiliate partnership, or in downplaying it as them just receiving a ‘small commission’ if you click. The incentive structure explains the silence: Being paid handsomely for what seems like a sincere, unpaid endorsement.
Incentivized Self-Censorship
On top of ads and affiliate deals, influencers also earn from sponsorship deals. Publicly filed press releases from a single Bitcoin company show individual creator sponsorships worth tens of thousands of dollars per month in cash and company shares, with one relationship exceeding $480,000 over 18 months.[6][7][8]
What is less obvious is the impacts the incentives produce. Even if a creator wanted to scrutinise their sponsor’s practices, their income depends on not doing so. A creator sponsored by a lending platform is structurally unable to examine the risks of Bitcoin-collateralised debt without jeopardising their livelihood. The structure traps good people into silence as the rational choice. In 2026, there is no shortage of issues in Bitcoin that warrant serious public scrutiny, and yet the creators with the largest audiences are often the quietest on exactly those issues, or actively amplifying the narratives their sponsors need spread.
This dynamic compounds into a self-reinforcing system that becomes nearly impossible to compete with. Clickbait generates a larger audience which attracts sponsors. Bigger vanity metrics means more sponsors willing to pay higher premiums. Reach attracts placement, placement compounds reach. Sponsorship revenue funds hiring which means more content output, which means more visibility, more reach, which means a bigger audience, which attracts more lucrative sponsors. That revenue funds conference appearances, networking, and visibility that smaller creators simply cannot access. Every turn of the loop widens the gap, and every turn of it is powered by fiat incentives.
But that loop has one input it cannot generate for itself: Your attention. That is the only thing that actually decides what compounds.
The Conference Pipeline
Conferences feed directly into the compounding loop described earlier. A creator who can afford to attend, who has the audience size to justify a speaking slot or a panel, who sells more tickets, gets more visibility, which grows their audience, which attracts more sponsors, which funds the next conference appearance. A creator operating on value for value does not enter this cycle. They just don’t have the numbers.
In late 2025, I proposed a presentation to a conference with a “high signal” reputation in the Bitcoin community and stated upfront that ticket sales were not my business model. All subsequent communications focused exclusively on whether I had promoted the event or sold tickets; whether I was invited to actually attend was never confirmed. Even in Bitcoin, contribution is still measured in fiat terms. If it does not convert to sales, it does not register. Conferences cost money to run and organisers face real financial pressure, but when that pressure means the only metric of value is sales, the incentive structure has already been captured.
The Same Dynamic on Nostr
This dynamic extends into platforms that were supposed to be different. On certain Nostr clients, new users are placed into pre-selected follow lists or are obliged to choose from lists during onboarding; at one point consciously opting out required clicking ‘unselect all.'[3][4] The accounts on those lists are not necessarily there because they are the highest signal voices on the protocol; they are there because they are known to the client developers or group creators. The effect on audience metrics is the same as on any fiat platform; larger accounts compound by default of being in the pre-created lists while smaller pleb accounts are required to grow organically. Many smaller accounts describe Nostr like “yelling into the void” because, structurally-speaking, they are.
This is not speculation: I published a full structural analysis of this pattern, including relay data, engagement comparisons, and zap distribution, in Nostr’s Retention Problem: A Structural Diagnosis. The data shows the same Cantillon logic that the STRC analysis identifies in capital concentration operating on attention: New user attention flows first and disproportionately to a small number of pre-selected accounts that continue to grow, while everyone else publishes into silence. The onboarding retention numbers are telling: Less than 1% of new Nostr users still use it after three weeks.
The difference is that on Nostr, none of this is locked in: The same analysis proposes concrete fixes like onboarding that helps new users understand the unique value propositions of Nostr (e.g. no algorithm) walking them through building their own feed instead of inheriting one.
What It Costs to Say No
I work at this full time. I have no sponsors, no advertisers, no affiliate revenue, no fiat assets to fall back on. My YouTube channel is de-monetised and I’m all in on Bitcoin. In 2026 so far, my total income across value-for-value zaps and book sales combined (which I consider value-for-value) is just over 800 euros. That figure is in euros, not sats, because my rent is denominated in fiat. What matters is what it buys today, not what the equivalent in sats might be worth by the time you read this.
To put that in concrete terms, my most recent video is a 30-minute Nostr tutorial that walks through major clients, tests each app on camera, and screen-records the full setup process from scratch. The final product took 56 hours to create from scripting, to testing every application, filming, and editing, all done by one person with no team and no budget. This is the kind of work that cannot be generated by Ai, because it requires a human being to actually download, install, configure, and test each piece of software, then explain it clearly to someone who has never seen it before. That video generated just over 80 euros in value-for-value zaps, nearly 90% of which came from one zap. Both of the following are true simultaneously: I am incredibly grateful, and, as a sole revenue source, it’s unsustainable.
While I was not accepted to a conference I actually wanted to join, a few months ago I was offered a fully paid trip to present at a major conference, flights included, plus a six-figure sum to present. The offer was worth almost 1.5 Bitcoin at today’s price, but it was oozing with fiat incentives. I said no.
If you have not read Beyond Money, you might think this contradicts the thesis, but the book is about where this transition ends. This article is about where we are right now. Right now, we are in the middle of the transition, and the middle is hard. But I would rather be exactly where I am than accept money that contradicts the work. Doing this honestly requires dedication, deep immersion, and years of proof-of-work. I also recognise that the transition makes this standard difficult to sustain, including for me.
The only reason I can do this at all is because of my savings in Bitcoin, and those are finite. Value for value alone, with no grants, no sponsors, and no fiat income, cannot sustain a creator through the transition if the audience’s attention and money are still flowing to the fiat side by default. That dynamic, more than any lack of conviction, is likely why so few have tried.
Savings run out. If the cost of maintaining integrity through this transition is arriving on the other side with nothing left, then the community will have failed the people who tried hardest to build the bridge on sound principles and cypherpunk values. I am aware this is my own case I am making; and the argument also extends beyond me to every creator, developer, and builder facing the same structural pressure.
“It’s Business”
But you might say: “What’s wrong with taking sponsors? Running YouTube ads? Trying to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible? You can’t expect everyone to work value for value only.” I agree. Everyone should do what’s right for them. My point is that value for value cannot scale as an alternative to the fiat creator economy if the audience’s habits are still funding the fiat side by default. The model is not broken. The flow of attention and money is still pointed in the opposite direction of what most Bitcoiners are saying they want to build.
The scale of that default flow is easiest to see outside Bitcoin. In late 2025, one of YouTube’s largest creators disclosed over $35 million in lifetime YouTube ad earnings and explained why he had turned viewer donations off entirely: Next to ad revenue, they were negligible.[5] He can refuse donations because the ads pay. If a value-for-value creator refuses to subject their audience to fiat ads, then donations are all there is. By default, the creator economy funds whoever carries ads and starves whoever refuses them. Value for value only changes that if the audience changes its behaviour and supports directly, instead of assuming someone else will. But the disclosure cuts both ways: I work value for value, so I benefit directly if this article changes how you fund creators. Of course, I do have a financial interest in saying this, and you should weigh my argument with it in mind.
What is right for me is producing content that respects the viewer’s time and attention without inserting fiat incentives between us; ads and sponsorships that cut off deep conversations included. That is my choice. I am not asking anyone else to make it.
The Pattern
This is not about blaming anyone; my goal is to point out the gap between what we say we want and what we are actually funding, explored in the companion piece, and that gap is a normal part of any paradigm shift. The shift took me a long time as I justified watching the fear-mongering because “I needed to know what was happening in the space.” Fiat is going to fiat, even in Bitcoin. In the meantime, everyone is transitioning from one economic reality to another and some of our habits have not caught up with all our new beliefs. That gap is understandable. But it has consequences. If creators who stayed value-for-value run out of runway while creators who took the sponsors and affiliate deals compound, that is the incentive structure working exactly as designed. The question is whether we are comfortable with what it selects for.
Nostr’s architecture; an open protocol, relay diversity, client choice, verifiable identity for example, already provides the infrastructure to break this cycle. The tools exist. What remains is whether our habits catch up with our beliefs.
This is part of a series. Read the full map or the companion piece: The Comfortable Trap, or go deeper into Sales: The STRC Cantillon Reconstruction, Funding: Why Bitcoin Companies Drift, Development: Funded Compliance.
Data as of mid-June 2026.
Sources
[1] OutlierKit. (2026, May). YouTube RPM finance niche 2026: Complete earnings guide with real data. https://outlierkit.com/blog/youtube-rpm-finance-niche
[2] Mayo, J. (2023, January 5). Making $613,960 my first year on YouTube [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cz4in1WY-o
[3] Nostr Reviews. (2024, December 7). Review: Primal for Android. https://www.nostr-reviews.com/post/1733635103705/
[4] Liberati, D. (2025, September 30). NOSTR explained for beginners [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EhXdsJr8Hw&t=1322 (Screen recording demonstrating Primal’s default follow list during onboarding, at 22:02)
[5] penguinz0. (2025, October 15). I’m not turning it back on [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGTaWcU8I3E
[6] Bitcoin Well Inc. (2024, February 29). Bitcoin Well launches customer loyalty program alongside the Bitcoin jackpot contest and partnership with Simply Bitcoin [Press release]. https://bitcoinwell.com/press-releases/bitcoin-well-launches-customer-loyalty-with-simply-bitcoin-partnership-feb-29-2024
[7] Bitcoin Well Inc. (2024, April 2). Bitcoin Well announces BTC Sessions partnership [Press release]. https://bitcoinwell.com/press-releases/bitcoin-well-announces-btc-sessions-partnership-apr-02-2024
[8] Bitcoin Well Inc. (2025, July 24). Bitcoin Well launches daily recurring buy in Canada; renews sponsorship agreement with Simply Bitcoin [Press release]. https://bitcoinwell.com/press-releases/bitcoin-well-daily-recurring-buy-canada-renew-simply-bitcoin-sponsorship-jul-24-2025
[9] The Bitcoin Way. (n.d.). Partner program. Retrieved June 14, 2026, from https://thebitcoinway.com/partner
[10] Federal Trade Commission. (2023, June 29). Guides concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising, 16 C.F.R. § 255. https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/federal-register-notices/guides-concerning-use-endorsements-testimonials-advertising