First, my annual income has ranged quite wildly from $100-180k for over a decade but I also live in an expensive metropolitan area where 1,500 sq ft of a condo or modest single-family home sells for $1.5m. I went to a financial advisor for the first time a few months back and they called me earnestly, "solidly middle class." So, $750k is significant.
I bought about $50k over various buys in 2013-2014. At the time, I’d say that was about 15% of my net worth (all of which I earned, I am no trust fund baby).
I have never once sold any bitcoin. All purchases go right into cold storage. I watched all the big dips. 30-50% drops in violently fast intervals. Long recoveries. Never touched it.
I’m no hero HODLer. In fact, I hate that term. It’s childish, and not in an oh-so-cool-for-the-Internet way. People with any kind of positive net worth have portfolios. You don’t HODL. You have assets in various instruments. Some on paper, some as property. You’re “HODLing” all of them. You’re sometimes reallocating, but largely you choose a mix and leave it alone. To say you HODL just tells me you’ve never had anything other than a cash savings account and probably a mountain of debt.
So why do I hold bitcoin and not sell it? For many reasons already espoused endlessly on this forum, but here’s a simple take I don’t see often: If one bitcoin is worth $1, it’s basically worth over $1 million. It’s either valueless or should be priced at whatever would account for the entire world’s business conducted in direct btc transactions with no fiat ramps. There is no in between. Because bitcoin either works or it doesn’t, and the objective fact is: it works. It has worked since 2009 when the open source software was released to the world.
Ask an average Joe anywhere in the world: “Is bitcoin proven, working software or just a prototype?” and I bet 9/10 say the latter. The mainstream narrative of bitcoin is so laden with bullshit, most people simply do not know that bitcoin just works and has worked since the beginning.
Its promise is to allow two entities to transfer value without any middleman, and that the value cannot be counterfeit. This has not changed. If you transferred coins to an address generated in 2009, they sit at that address today still. Any free wallet software today will let you access it. The original client and its variations have been iterated, but bitcoin is still just a ledger, shared by thousands of volunteered machines online. And the deflationary economic philosophy -- a limited supply of coins -- chosen by its original creator, is the same and will always be.
For all the endless talk of how the protocol, the thousands of pointless crypto copies, and decentralization is a platform that can change every industry… it all doesn’t matter. Maybe the other applications will happen meaningfully, maybe they won’t. But the first software devised which runs the largest network, and a permanent, immutable economic policy that is the polar opposite of MMT and the state-run money of every country around the world, **has already happened**.
Bitcoin’s price moves so much because most people are simply idiots. The “speculative asset” narrative is self-fulfilling. There’s nothing to speculate. Bitcoin works. Will it be adopted, won’t it be? It IS adopted. When one person agreed to hand over a product or service for some amount of coin, it was adopted.
The single biggest thing that slowed its *widespread* adoption was government making a coffee purchase a taxable event (i.e. defining bitcoin as property). If we weren’t concerned about bureaucratic friction, we’d just spend what we must and save the rest. Like money is supposed to work. Instead, we hoard. And the dumb players crash in and crash out, creating and riding their own mania, but never really understanding anything.
Screw every person — with ill will or just ignorance — that says it has no inherent value. It is technology with measurable demand. It is finite, it is impossible to counterfeit, it is instantly and safely transferrable between any two parties without a middleman, and cannot be confiscated. It also cannot be uninvented. Owning it is knowledge of characters in your head and that can never be regulated away.
Again: If bitcoin is not valued at zero, then its total value should amount to the entire stored work product of the human race. Because there’s no safer place to store that value. If you think that value stored in something like fiat, which can be printed infinitely, is safer, then you’re with 98% of the rest of the world right now and you’ll continue to resent every leap in value bitcoin makes. I’ll see you at the next peak, where many more gamblers will have come and gone, but a few more who understand that fiat is garbage will be here to stay.
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