Key Insight from Bitcoin for Institutions:
4. KYC/AML regulations are weaponized —while most crime happens in dollars, these regulations strangle innovation and honest business.
Chapter: Bitcoin Users Value Privacy
📝 Most people have likely never heard of a GoFundMe or a GiveSendGo campaign being hijacked and redirected by a government. This was an unprecedented display of financial surveillance and control over peaceful citizens.
From: Bitcoin Users Value Privacy
Key Insight from Bitcoin for Institutions:
2. Freedom to transact is an extension of free speech —monetary transactions in the digital world are just messages.
Chapter: Bitcoin Users Value Privacy
Key Insight from Bitcoin for Institutions:
5. 100% allocation is justified for pensions that will survive the next two halving cycles (eight years).
Chapter: Pensions
Why NQDC is Perfect for Bitcoin
1. Long Time Horizon: Executives typically defer for 10-20+ years, aligning with bitcoin's optimal holding period. 2. Tax-Deferred Growth: Bitcoin's volatility becomes less relevant when gains compound tax-free for decades. 3. No Contribution Limits: High earners can allocate significant amounts to bitcoin exposure. 4. Company Alignment: Creates shared interest between company and executive in bitcoin's success.
From: Bitcoin for Institutions
Innovation Strangled
These regulations have strangled innovation and made it untenable for companies to operate honestly, causing many to leave the US for friendlier jurisdictions.
From: Bitcoin for Institutions
📝 The Ultimate Trojan Horse: BlackRock's mutual fund complex is the vehicle that finally brings institutional bitcoin exposure to pensions and retirement accounts - by making it indirect and almost invisible.
From: BlackRock (Redefining Portfolio Construction)
Key Insight from Bitcoin for Institutions:
4. New metrics are essential - each institution type needs bitcoin-specific measures of success to make adoption sustainable.
Chapter: Epilogue
Personal Power
Like learning to drive and no longer depending on others for rides
From: Bitcoin for Institutions
External Pressure
Activist investors and political pressures can override pure profit motives.
From: Bitcoin for Institutions
Key Insight from Bitcoin for Institutions:
1. Institutional resistance is ruthless - incentives, not logic, drive corporate decision-making. The LDI story proves this.
Chapter: Epilogue
Key Insight from Bitcoin for Institutions:
1. Mastery takes time —just as learning guitar requires years of dedicated practice, understanding bitcoin requires sustained commitment.
Chapter: Bitcoin Requires More Patience and Time than Institutions Have
📝 The diamonds are no longer an incentive when an executive sees themselves needing that first glass of water again. The author foresees a scenario where executives face similar pressure to "adopt bitcoin" at their companies over the next five years.
From: HODL'ing Bitcoin is Irrational
ℹ️ Deciding to "master" bitcoin is accepting a lifetime of study as well as being likely fated to never completely understand it. The type of person who takes on such a challenge is in quite a predicament.
From: Bitcoin Requires More Patience and Time than Institutions Have
ℹ️ Small Employers: It would make sense for owners of small companies (under 100 employees) to offer a defined benefit plan and maximize their contributions in bitcoin. Before the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of such companies offered pensions as a great tax shelter that also provided compensation to employees.
From: Pensions
Short-Term Thinking
Quarterly reporting cycles create pressure to show immediate results rather than long-term value creation.
From: Bitcoin for Institutions
Key Insight from Bitcoin for Institutions:
1. Ordinary bitcoin holders outperformed every professional fund - fund managers who ignored bitcoin have explaining to do.
Chapter: Mutual Funds / ETFs - Wielding the Blade
""Guitar, piano, drums, horns, and you've got to know how they all come together. You also need to learn music theory, how to conduct an orchestra, and understand why music exists in the first place.""
— Brian Hirschfield
From: Bitcoin Requires More Patience and Time than Institutions Have
Key Insight from Bitcoin for Institutions:
2. Bitcoin is the most powerful bearer asset ever created —non-physical, easy to validate, and impossible to seize without consent.
Chapter: Bitcoin is a Bearer Asset
Key Insight from Bitcoin for Institutions:
3. Fiduciary risk is shifting - the greater liability may now be from NOT including bitcoin rather than including it.
Chapter: Mutual Funds / ETFs - Wielding the Blade
Asymmetric Bet
If bitcoin appreciates 30%+ annually (as history suggests), the cost of borrowing is negligible by comparison.
From: Bitcoin for Institutions
Key Insight from Bitcoin for Institutions:
3. Physical bearer assets have prohibitive costs —gold requires military-level security and expensive assaying for validation.
Chapter: Bitcoin is a Bearer Asset