If you did a pre tax contribution, you get to buy the full $10,000 worth of bitcoin instead of $8,500.

For 10 years of stacking, you now get 0.41 bitcoin and avoided $15,000 in tax. At year 10, your stack is worth $540,000. If you decided to take this as income as a lump sum, your average tax rate might be 26%, so don’t do that, you’d spend $140,000 in tax.

Instead, you work another 10 years but just stop contributing and spend the money you would have contributed instead. At year 20, your stack is worth $3,600,000.

At a monthly draw down of $14,500 and assuming this increases at 3% per year, you take out $175,000 a year (at the beginning and the inflation adjusted equivalent after that) and pay a tax of say $25,000-$35,000/ yr.

Let’s say you draw down at the same $14,500 per month. You money lasts at least until year 65. If you want to die at year 65 from now with nothing left, you can spend $15,250 a month.

So the Roth wasn’t the better deal here. I thought it would have been the opposite. I guess it would have been a better deal if bitcoin price didn’t rise so rapidly during the stacking period (pretax stack is considerably larger than the post tax Roth stack).

Note, future bitcoin prices above are estimated using power law model, which fits historical bitcoin price data far better than other models and produces reasonable future price predictions over several decades.

Main take away from this long analysis, for which I used a very complicated spreadsheet I’ve been working on for over a year, can be summed up by the freely given wisdom of nostr:npub1rtlqca8r6auyaw5n5h3l5422dm4sry5dzfee4696fqe8s6qgudks7djtfs : nobody goes in hard enough the first time. If I re-ran these scenarios starting 5 years ago, one could contribute just for the first year and still end up ahead of the 10 year stacker today. That said, stacking moderately for 10 years beats slaving away for 40 in the current fiat system.