The price of Bitcoin may be down significantly from its all-time high from about a year ago, but with individuals and firms losing tremendous amounts of money during the collapse of a number of crypto businesses, people may begin to notice that the Bitcoin maximalists are unconcerned and will get out of this unscathed. Without any desire to factor in personal accountability into why this is the case, many will just settle on the conclusion that we got lucky.
They did the same thing when we reaped the rewards of the last bull run and they’ll do the same thing after the next one.
And they’ll be totally wrong about it. This has nothing to do with luck.
If you’re interested in consistently making good decisions and working your way towards achieving your goals, you will realize that luck doesn’t actually exist. Sure, we use the term casually, but even if we say something like, “He got a lucky bounce on that catch,” the player still had to make the decision to put himself where he was and execute the catch. This is why we often hear the phrase “you make your own luck” in sports. The best players might get “lucky” sometimes, but that luck is downstream of the skill, effort, and determination that sets them apart from everyone else.
The same applies to Bitcoin maximalists. We put in the work to understand how the world and Bitcoin work while others didn’t. We didn’t just blindly trust the word of others and we didn’t think that some nameless bureaucrats sitting in an office somewhere would take care of us. Then we executed. We put our money where our mouths were by dumping fiat for Bitcoin. We didn’t try to read the tea leaves and trade our Bitcoin in the hopes of getting more. And we didn’t send our Bitcoin to people promising a return on it. We held it. That means we get to reap the rewards.
This isn’t meant to be a dunk on anyone. The only validation I need is from my full node. This is meant to be a blueprint.
It really shouldn’t be a dunk because none of us are perfect. Many of us held all sorts of crypto garbage and tried our hands in trading. Some of us sent our Bitcoin to people who promised to send us more Bitcoin back. And many of us didn’t start trying to learn about the impact of Bitcoin the moment we first heard about it. Mistakes were made (I shudder at the thought of all of mine), but we learned from them.
We learned how Bitcoin works and how to use it; we learned how the existing fiat system works and how the ruling class uses it. We put two and two together and realized that the only play was to acquire and hold Bitcoin. If Bitcoin is poised to become sound money in the long run but we don’t have a crystal ball to understand how the price is going to be affected by short term variables, we’re wasting our time worrying about trying to time the market to alchemize more sats on an exchange. Our studies also informed us of not only the treachery of fractional reserves but also the reality that no human in the history of the world has been able to resist the temptation of using IOUs for your money. If you send your Bitcoin to someone promising you more in return, there’s a good chance you’ll get less back if any at all. We’re seeing this now with the collapse of the likes of FTX and Blockfi.
But this is nothing new. The scams of today are the same as the scams of yesterday but with added sophistication. The latest cryptocurrency featuring plugs by your favorite celebrities are the same cargo cults of decentralization we saw years ago on the message boards of bitcointalk.org. All it took was a little bit of knowledge and some patience to avoid wanting to try to accumulate Bitcoin the easy way.
Bitcoin has and will always be free and open source software. At any time, anyone can review the code. But while not all of us are capable of performing a code review, we all are capable of running the code, earning tremendous amounts of knowledge. There have always been opportunities to learn about Bitcoin and with the passage of time comes even more outlets for learning. The huge slate of Bitcoin podcasts, Youtube channels, websites, and meetups didn’t exist years ago, but people still found ways to learn. Why did that happen? It’s because they wanted it. And they never stopped. They understood that even the new ideas of Bitcoin had to be built on the pillars of previous knowledge, so they went and studied that too.
Some people may be willing to grant us all of that, but they might push back by claiming that we were lucky to hear and decide to learn about Bitcoin when we did. But why would that be true? Are some of us simply genetically predisposed to be interested in Bitcoin like Brian Armstrong is genetically predisposed to balding? Or did we earn the position to be ready for Bitcoin when we heard about it?
There’s no magic around Bitcoin. It sounds crazy and/or pointless depending on your understanding of the technology and economics. Most people find it uninteresting.
Whether we realized it or not, most Bitcoin maximalists were looking for Bitcoin before we ever heard about it. Many of us were libertarians or at least skeptical of the current arrangement of government and the monetary system. We rejected the fiat system and yearned for a return to a hard money standard but had no new monetary technology to use for it. So when we each discovered Bitcoin, it plugged right it. It scratched our itch. The slipper fit.
And again, we found ourselves in this position because we had already decided not to accept the way we were told the world worked. We recognized that there was something wrong, so we took the time to explore the ideas. We learned about ethics and economics and reasoned that we should reject the world’s current operating system and replace it with something more moral that served to benefit each individual instead of a few at the expense of everyone else. It was all because we weren’t afraid to ask questions and keep asking questions when the answers didn’t make sense.
If you’re not there yet with Bitcoin, that’s okay, you still have time. The good news is that there are now more people and information than ever to help you along your journey. The template is there, you just need to decide to put in the time and effort to follow it. It’s time to create your own luck.