It's a quiet Sunday afternoon.
Phone turned off.
No notifications.
I sat down and took a clean piece of paper.
I wrote down 12 words.
I didn't rush.
I checked them twice.
Nobody was watching me, nobody was giving me permission.
In that single quiet moment, something magical happened – an ordinary civil association (NGO) in Slovakia (Curiosity Institute) – became its own bank
...one week ago
I was sitting in a traditional bank.
Old office. Suffocating heat.
A desperate desk fan trying to move the heavy summer air.
Across from me, a clerk who had forgotten how to smile.
I had emailed all the official NGO documents a week in advance. For "pre-approval."
It didn’t matter.
60 minutes of my life spent watching a man manually re-type every single piece of paper.
My signature needed on exactly 16 physical documents.
Sixteen stamps to satisfy the bureaucratic cage of the old world.
What a contrast to that quiet Sunday.
To live freely, to create, to shape ourselves and the world around us, we must first stand on solid ground. And the ground beneath us has been shaking violently for quite some time now.
Something is Terribly, Terribly Wrong
Have you noticed it too? Stock markets are hitting all-time highs, yet human happiness and optimism are at absolute freezing point. Every fifth child battles depression and a sense of total hopelessness. We are overwhelmed by digital noise, inflation, and the feeling that we are working like crazy, yet our fiat money buys less and less food, less housing, and less freedom.
The biggest and most dangerous lie the modern system constantly feeds us is that the responsibility for our lives, our future, and our money belongs to someone else. That if we work hard and obediently follow the lined-out rules, someone out there will protect us.
They won't. When money belongs to governments and traditional banks, sooner or later it simply stops belonging to you. They are just glowing numbers in someone else's software, which the system can lock up overnight or debase through inflation.
In 1971, something happened that changed the world forever. The US severed the final link between money and reality (gold). Since then, money has been printed out of thin air. And when you change the money, you change the behavior of the entire society.
You replace responsibility with excuses, and true creation with pure speculation.
At the Curiosity Institute, we refuse to outsource our future and hand over responsibility to others. We are curious to see how far we can go when an individual—and a community—takes sovereignty fully into their own hands.
We decided on a step that civil associations in Slovakia don't usually take. We shed our digital masks, bypassed the old bureaucratic cages, and established the first truly decentralized, transparent Bitcoin account for our association. We believe in sound money and in truth that doesn't need to be proven by stamps.
Introducing the Fund of Future Moments
This step isn't about speculation, charts, or making a quick buck. It's about the freedom to create on our own terms. We named our crypto-piggy bank the Fund of Future Moments.
When you decide to send us a few satoshis, you aren't buying a subscription, nor are you subsidizing a bureaucratic apparatus. You are investing directly into moments we will create together in the real world—into times when we turn off the noise of the world, turn on ourselves, laugh like little kids, and feel the presence with all our heart.
From now on, our finances are naked, honest, and openly accessible on the blockchain. Every single person can verify in real-time how many funds flow through it and how time flows with them. We took full responsibility. Freedom isn't comfortable, but that stability and solid ground beneath our feet are damn well worth it.
🛠️ Technical Corner: Our Blueprint
If you love hands-on craftsmanship, functional infrastructure, and want to code similar financial sovereignty for your own project or business, here is our complete technical blueprint that runs the whole show:
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The Heart of Our Network (Our Own Bitcoin Node / Umbrel): This is the biggest deal. We don't rely on third-party servers. At the Institute, our own Umbrel server runs non-stop, powered hardware-wise by a compact Asus NUC 14 Essential N355, with a full Bitcoin node purring inside. We are a direct, independent cell of the global network. And the best part? Our on-chain Trezor communicates exclusively with our node. No foreign eyes, pure sovereignty. Don't trust, verify in absolute practice.
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Solid Foundation (Cold Storage): We generated a standalone, hidden account protected by a secret passphrase via a Trezor hardware wallet. On the website, we use a single fixed, static on-chain address (
bc1qksufz3fg30a692w26s8x4kjhj980e39g2s52hr), making the history easily readable for anyone with just one click. -
Real-Time Status (Mempool): No bank statements that you have to export into PDFs. We have a direct link on the web pointing to the open-source block explorer
mempool.space. Anyone who clicks the link can see the status of our on-chain wallet directly in Bitcoin's digital ledger. -
Lightning Flow (Lightning Network): Since on-chain fees on the mainnet can sometimes be too high for smaller donations, we bridged the presence with a lightning layer. We use the open-source project LNbits, which runs on Czecho-Slovak community infrastructure.
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Pay Links Extension (LNURL-pay): Inside LNbits, we activated the Pay Links module. We created a static payment link with a set minimum of 10,000 sats (around €6, which beautifully filters out empty spam and micro-pennies) and a maximum for generous ideas. We generated this link in the BECH32 format, which every modern Lightning wallet understands flawlessly.
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Interactive 3D Coin (Custom HTML Widget): To make it visually engaging on the web and match our minimalist geometry, we wrapped the entire logic into a custom CSS/JS script. We built a widget featuring a black circle inscribed inside a sharp square with the ₿ logo. When a user clicks the Lightning or On-Chain button, the coin seamlessly flips in 3D space, generating a clean, precise QR code.
And that's it. No contracts, no bank approvals, no waiting for an account setup. Pure, sovereign technology at the service of curiosity.
If this resonates with you, check out NGO directly at playcreatelove.com.
Verify, don't trust.
- Roman
Play. Create. Love. ☀️🌲⚙️