My experience crossing paths with Mircea Popescu was immortalized on his blog here: http://trilema.com/2015/a-sjsqd-walks-into-a-pub/

An absolutely fascinating character and despite whatever immense controversy his attitude, presence, ideas and personality may have shown and caused people to immensely dislike him, he spoke his own truth and was an embodiment of the "real internet" and not the very "strictly corporate" personalities that have since taken over cryptocurrency and the internet. Very sad that he passed away.

I met many people like Mircea (albeit generally less controversial) through my travels on the internet who also spoke their own truth - it is a great loss to the world that IRC and self-hosted blogs/websites have largely been replaced by Discord/X/Twitter and highly corporate, slickly branded shit which is devoid of actual soul.

I dearly miss the great art of conversation over protocols like IRC where people gathered around actual watering holes that required skill and social bonds to maintain (IRC required either hosting a server or using complex bots and other things to make shit work - any idiot can set up a Discord server) and would be populated by people who would openly challenge your ideas, call you an idiot and sign off by saying "Nobody cares. Kill yourself." before banning you.

This to be followed up by one of the grandmasters of Bitcoin saying they thought you were "absolutely endearing" - I feel a great loss when I look at the current state of web3 but maybe danielpbarron was right when he said: "Yes! Stay on irc 24/7! Forget the forum -- forget reddit; those are distractions."