There is a story I can't get out of my head when I think of pure Bitcoin, unfiltered. Mircea Popescu.

This guy was truly different. Romanian, controversial, too cultured for most to understand. Back in 2011, when Bitcoin was just something from obscure forums, he was already observing, thinking differently from everyone else. And in 2012, he did something that now seems insane: he created MPEx, a deregulated exchange, without audits, without anything the governments wanted.

To understand Mircea Popescu, you need to realize that, for him, normal rules didn't make sense. MPEx was entirely his. He decided who could enter, what was listed, how it operated. Radical libertarians revered him. Regulators hated him. It makes sense.

But what truly made him unique was his blog, the Trilema. Dense, challenging, provocative. Mircea Popescu attacked governments, elites, political correctness. He even criticized other crypto figures, like Vitalik Buterin. It was impossible not to have a strong opinion about him.

Then came 2021. Mircea Popescu drowned in Costa Rica. And here’s where it gets strange.

The guy held around 100,000 BTC. Billions of dollars in a wallet. Since then, nothing has moved. No coins have left. It’s as if Mircea Popescu took an entire fortune to the grave.

Is it a myth? Is it true? It doesn't matter. What matters is that Mircea Popescu represented Bitcoin in its rawest form: uncontrollable, uncompromising, perhaps even irretrievable. He was the Bitcoin that no one could regulate, not even death could touch his legacy.