My Orange Pill Moment
In the 2008 Great Financial Crisis I was in high school. My parents were financially illiterate and had no assets so they didn’t really “feel” the down turn nor could they explain to me what was going on in the world. All I remember seeing on the news was how absurd the situations that these banks had wandered into were and then trying to argue that they were “to big to fail” so they would all continue to have jobs next week.
I remember arguing with my friends that these banks deserved to go under, the cab drivers and strippers that had 4 houses with mortgages at 104% loan to value deserved to lose the houses, and the underwriters of those loans deserved to go to jail. Once the dust settled, I realized the powers that be and society largely disagreed with me. The banks got bailed out for the most part and no one went to jail. My first taste of capitalized gains and socialized losses. For the next 12 years, I never truly came to accept what had played out. I always felt like I was the crazy one for thinking sometimes companies needed to go bankrupt and society is better as a whole when that happens.
When I started my career in the mid 2010’s, investing was psychologically difficult for me because even then, valuations of public companies seemed stretched on a historical basis. But every investor everywhere had been conditioned by the Federal Reserve to always buy the dip, and they were always rewarded for doing so. So I shoved my gut instincts as far to the back of my mind as I could and started investing anyways.
In 2017 I joined the company fantasy football draft. When the initial email with the rules, the buy in, and the payouts was distributed, the coordinator had options to pay in crypto to addresses in BTC, ETH, or XRP with long strings of characters after them. Having no idea what these were, I asked the draft coordinator what the long strings of characters were. I don’t even remember what his explanation was, only that when I asked him what you could do with it he said, “you can buy drugs with it on the internet.” I thought to myself, “well, I don’t do drugs, so I guess I don’t need whatever that is.” This was my first touch point with Bitcoin. I then forgot about it for another 3 years.
In March 2020, all my emotions from 12 years prior came roaring back with a vengeance with the CARES Act. In a few weeks, we created $2.2 trillion out of thin air. Enough money to buy the house outright that my wife and I had just purchased a few months prior every second for 6 weeks. Since my wife was furloughed from work for 4 months, I had bigger things to worry about than the morals and ethics of printing that much money in such a short period of time.
Then in November, 2020, Congress was in the midst of hashing out what became another $2.3 trillion spending bill. When coupled with the CARES Act and then the American Rescue Plan, we had expanded the money supply by 40% in one calendar year. The student was ready for the teacher to appear.
November 24, 2020, I saw a podcast episode titled BTC 001: Bitcoin Common Misconceptions pop up in the investors podcast feed, a show I had been listening to for years. It definitely made me aware Bitcoin was meant for more than just buying drugs on the internet.
December 1st, 2020, BTC 002: The Case for Bitcoin w/ Vijay Boyapati dropped in the the TIP feed and absolutely melted my brain. The switch had flipped. The lightbulb was on it was as if I had just opened my eyes for the first time in my life. I realized I hadn’t been the crazy one over the last 12 years and there were millions of people in the world that shared very similar beliefs. I was not alone.
Little beknownst to me, on January 3rd, 2009, in the depths of my first mental struggle, Satoshi Nakamoto inscribed in the first Bitcoin block, “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” The message was clear. No more bail outs. No more kicking the can down the road. Everyone will play by the same rules. We are ripping the money printer out of your hands and destroying it.
The jig is up. The number of people around the world have figured out the fiat currency Ponzi scheme has reached critical mass. Fiat currency has crossed the event horizon of the Bitcoin black hole and in what will seem like the blink of an eye in human history, will be shredded into atoms by the gravitational pull of Bitcoin.
The operating system of the world is being overwritten right in front of our very eyes. There is no stopping this train. The only choice you have is when to get on.
