"I don't understand crypto!"

I just got back from lunch with my wife. She wanted a copy of the 4-Hour Workweek and I thought we go to a local-owned bookstore and pickup a copy and go to lunch. The bookstore didn't have the book, but we decided to go to a nice Thai place that we hadn't been to in a while. I had barely sat down at the table before I picked up on the conversation happening at the table adjacent to us.

"I just don't understand bitcoin. I don't understand this crypto". Now I'm not saying this guy was Grandpa Simpson, but it was table of four or five retirees wrapping up their lunch, and one of them seemed like he was in the middle of a pretty good rant. His back was too me, on my left, and I made bug eyes at my wife while he spoke, loudly enough that I couldn't ignore it.

My wife threatened to leave. I behaved, and so I didn't introduce myself. It took all of my willpower, for a few minutes anyways, until they had changed topic and our food was in front of us. I was almost tempted to give him this blog address, but anyways I'm not sure I want to be the boomer whisperer for bitcoin.

I've run meetups in past cycles, and met people that I still keep in touch with. I'm not sure I'm ready to start going down that road again; there are security reasons and I don't feel like I need to recruit for team crypto to the public. There a better areas for me to focus on. Truth is that there's enough quality information out there about crypto that one who's properly motivated could learn it if they wanted. Bitcoin is past the point where I need to shill it.

Educating politicians is probably a good place to focus right now, considering how much lobbying is going on and how much money went into this last election. Also, we can focus on dealing with the pushback that both crypto and AI gets from people on the left. The energy usage issue remains unsatisfactory still, there are people that just don't get it. Sure, we're utilizing vented methane and driving renewable energy usage, stabilizing the grid and all that, but industrialized bitcoin mining facilities are loud and causing health scares around the country. But this whole NFT's are boiling the ocean energy has got to go. I'll have no more of it.

We'll leave the energy usage of crypto and AI aside for another post when we're ready to compare that of the legacy petrodollar and finance systems.

I was at the library yesterday, and spied a dozen copies of The Truth About Crypto on a book shelf. The conspiratorial title grabbed my attention, and I while I was trying to ascertain the author's slant on the subject, I realized that the book had been chosen for the library's book club. I snagged a copy, and have until February to go through it and prepare my notes. I can't wait to go up there and tell them the real truth.

I remember one year I bought like ten copies of Chris Dixon's Cryptoassets and handed them out to my friends and the occasional stranger at meetups. I have a copy of A Progressive's Case For Bitcoin, which is entry level, and which we'll be coming back too, I'm sure. The author, C. Jason Maier, also recommends books by Jason Williams and Andreas Antonopolous for the basic. There's so much out there. I've forgotten all of the books that I've read on it, the podcasts I've listened to. I've written several articles over the years that I need to pull from the archives and repost up here, but we'll get to that later.

I just got off the phone with my dad. A few years ago we put six thousand dollars into a six-GPU mining rig. I mined all sorts of proof of work coins for a while before I switched over to ETH and left it there until the Merge. The proceeds on that got rolled into BadgerDAO, which blew up. That stack is worth more than five figures today, and he told me he wants to split it among his grandchildren.

Bitcoin is generational wealth. Your meme coins are not. I'd argue that tokenized real-estate might be an exception there, but I don't even think Solana and Ethereum are in the same class as bitcoin. They're fantastic in their own right, but they're not sound money like bitcoin is, only 21 million coins. Granted, there are amazing opportunities for wealth in the space today, but I feel like this cycle I've graduated to a place where I'm not going to be taking risks on short term bets. In the past I've set aside a small, small portion for the casino, but I can't see myself taking a huge bet on something wildly speculative, like throwing five thousand dollars on an NFT.

I've gone through a lot of trouble to protect my gains, even going so far to move assets into a self-directed IRA so that I can have direct access to BTC instead of having to rely on using something like GBTC. I went ahead and purchased some of the ETFs when they came out, just in solidarity, but I'm still strongly in the not your keys, not your coins philosophy when it comes to custody. In Satoshi we trust, but everyone else can go to hell. I've also got access to DeFi within this tax-shielded vehicle. The only downside to it is the rollover process is a bit slow, and tedious. Adding cash, not so much.

I've been hemming and hawing over taxes the last couple days. We're looking at strategies we can use in case my wife needs to take an unexpected retirement next year. If we stay under $90k or so we can live off of bitcoin with zero-percent on our long-term capital gains, forever and ever amen. Problem is the cycle doesn't work like that, sure as lean times follow fat, so I'm trying to figure out when and how to slaughter that particular hog. And the State will take it's tithe as well, sure as hell, and if I thought there was a way to roll things into real estate or business without taking that hit I would take it. I thought I had figured it out, last week, but, having checked again, realized my mistake. Hubris, but no harm this time, other than maybe feeling foolish to a couple of my friends. It happens.

There's a risk to writing publicly like this, it's like asking to be robbed. But it's an escape valve. I tried keeping it in, writing in a private journal for these last months. It's not the same. It's isolating. No man is an island, no man can stand alone and all that. So I'm going to do what I do best, explain, and write, find that ikigai center where I feel like I'm contributing to the whole human experiment.

I spent an hour today looking at one of my positions, just explaining what it is will take a lot, it's a doozy: Four years ago, I converted some wBTC into a Sushiswap LP position with a Flexible Leverage Index product, BTC2x-FLI. The thesis here was such that fluctuations in the BTC price in USD terms wouldn't matter much in the way of causing impermanent loss. In theory it was supposed to be a way for me to farm the trading fees while having a slightly leveraged position in BTC. Well, anyways, I just pulled a look at it today and so far it's worked out very well for me, generating a 70% gain in actual BTC holdings over the last four years. There's some risk here of course, so it represents a fraction of what I'm doing. I'm going to break it down in a later post, along with some details about how I'm positioned right now between IRA and non-IRA holdings; BTC, ETH, and SOL; and how I'm using reverse value averaging protocols to fund my income streams. There are probably some hits from the archives that I'll need to pull out of retirement for background. It's complicated.

The truth is, it's getting easier now. The infrastructure is a lot better now, with the ETFs you're starting to see the big money come in, and that makes it smaller for regular folks to get started. But I'm so far off in wizard land these days that it's hard for me to come back down to earth and explain it to them. I'm sure my family and in-laws got tired of me trying to explain it and help them understand it. I'm not going to bother them this time.

It's pretty crazy when something like 75% of your wealth is tied up in an asset that goes up 40% in one month. All time highs, baby, and clear skies to 100k. I think my Twitter account still has laser eyes, holding onto the dead meme with a promise that's almost here. This month, next?

This shit is complicated. The core of bitcoin is solid as hell though, fundamental. It just gets real fuzzy around the edges. Explaining the EVM and Solana... oh my god Solana is beautiful under the hood, but the fact of the matter is that UX on all of it is still way to arcane for boomers. We're not to the point yet where crypto systems are invisible, I think that might be happening very soon, once we have tap-to-pay solutions on our phones.

I'm going to be writing about the bitcoin corporation. Michael Saylor pioneered this, using BTC as your company's reserve treasury asset. Shareholder value tied to the amount of BTC per share, not the price in USD. Lot of people want to see America make it a reserve asset too. I'm all for it, of course. It's gonna happen, eventually, which is why I don't want to sell more than I have too. First I have to figure out how to use it as collateral, and how I'd earn it back. BTC yields 10% interest, whether or which side of the trade you're on. How can you use BTC to borrow dollars, then invest that money and earn fast enough to earn it back in the down cycle? Real estate? Small businesses? This is what we're going to be exploring, experimenting with in real time.

Stay tuned for more.