Culture Shock: Pura Vida in the Desert

At some point in the day, we realized the magic was there. Something big was happening. This was the first of many more to come. We bottled lightning at Culture Shock #1…

As it turns out, lightning was on the menu to the tune of 1.3+ million sats sent directly to Sara Jade via Value 4 Value on the lightning network during what couldn’t have been more than a 40-minute performance. Also on the menu, literal Bitcoin Birria courtesy of Heidi—homemade, no less. Attendees got to snap out of the fiat nightmare by making all purchases in sats.

The focus of the day was laying the foundation for a thriving Nostr community in Phoenix, Arizona. February 17, 2024 was a day a small group of dedicated plebs made history:

Culture Shock was the first Value 4 Value concert in Phoenix
It was also the first Nostr community event in Phoenix, a natural extension of our local Bitcoin meetups and a way to highlight hardworking devs.

NostrPHX exists to create community among Bitcoin and Nostr plebs in the desert. We’re a grassroots group putting in work to help others onboard to Nostr and Bitcoin. Our ethos is pura vida. We aim to contribute value and reward Value 4 Value. We live in the world of HOPE.

As I walked into Hello Lincoln, I was immediately met by a table of Nostr dog tags opposite a huge display of Lightning Store merch and a very excited pair of plebs. The Pura Vida was in the air as I met Erik from Juxtapose. I instantly migrated to Bitcoin Cartoons’ table and he put me through a quiz to guess what his various drawings were about. All the vendors were taking lightning payments for food, Bitcoin disc golf, art, and merch.

I came intending to spend not a single U.S. dollar all day and I wasn’t disappointed.

I stood in the middle of a mini circular Bitcoin economy with a V4V concert to round out the day. Perfection. This experience alone was something I’d only dreamed of after years of living in the Midwest feeling like the only pleb in a flyover state. But at Culture Shock? Every conversation made me feel seen as a Bitcoiner and Nostr fanatic. As a woman in a room full of men, I felt like a peer and never out of place.

A different feeling began to bubble up halfway through the day. The more I met and talked to people and listened to speakers, the more I realized I was in a room filled 100% with builders and problem solvers. I’m not sure specifically which speaker triggered this realization. Was it OpenMike, talking about how he’d created Tunestr to fix live music with V4V? Was it Sam Means and Michael Rhee discussing fixing the music industry with Wavlake and V4V? Was it Clavadev talking about fixing shopping with Shopstr?

This is what I mean by bottling lightning at Culture Shock. Don’t even get me started on Arkinox talking about his projects like Cyberspace and others that are far above my pay grade as a non-dev. All I know is that the dude is going places. If you think lightning doesn’t strike twice, you need to come to our next event. The zaps flow freely here in the desert like a monsoon of good intentions.

When Sara Jade, the artist who would perform the concert, walked in, she came right up to me and hugged me. We started talking like old friends because we’d been following each other on Nostr so we had much to chat about!

Culture Shock did not have gates. It did not have U.S. dollars. It did not have Ticketmaster or tickets. Culture Shock is what happens when a small group of people determined to live their purpose manage to launch something so magical it can only be described as lightning in a bottle. (Though, in our case, it was more like lightning in a hot wallet). Those four plebs who put this grassroots effort together in two months were Santos, Heidi, Sam, and QW.

I could run down point by point what you missed, but you can see that here and it wouldn’t do the event justice. What I will do is invite you to join us. If you’re committed to building and making change, come along for the ride. We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re going to ride this lightning to get there.