my blog know that I started dabbling in buying Bitcoin in late 2017. In fact, it was the best performing asset out of any of the names I was watching for. Similarly, and not to give away the suspense, I added Bitcoin exposure once again to my list of stocks I’m watching for. So it may not have been that much of a surprise when my subscribers saw me on X yesterday proclaim that my days of disparaging Bitcoin were over.
However, given that I have about more Twitter followers than I do Substack subscribers, it is safe to say there were still plenty of people who were caught off guard by my mea culpa and somewhat alarmingly even more people who were voraciously willing to immediately sing my praises and welcome me to the community. As far as the welcome goes, all I can say is I genuinely appreciate it. I’d be lying if I said that a large group of people proclaiming me to be making an intelligent decision didn’t make me somewhat nervous.
However, as I said in my post on X yesterday, I know I am also surrounded by people who are much smarter than I am. As I also said in my post yesterday, I have been watching people that I know are much smarter than I am, specifically those in the sound money community, sing the praises of having exposure to Bitcoin for years now. For me, that was the hardest thing to ignore. I felt like if I was looking to people like Lawrence Lepard, Luke Gromen, and Lyn Alden for their incredible insights on the broken monetary system, why couldn’t I at least try to take them semi-seriously when it came to their take on Bitcoin?
I knew deep down there was work they had done and an understanding they had achieved with Bitcoin that I wasn’t close to, despite understanding some of the basics. I started to get a taste of this understanding while listening to my friend Lawrence Lepard describe Bitcoin as an invention all its own on a December podcast, comparing it as a parallel to the Internet instead of just another Internet software application. He referred to it in this interview as “the invention of digital scarcity.”
Honestly, I had no idea what that meant, and the idea of “digital scarcity” didn’t seem too novel to me. I just shrugged and thought, “If Bitcoin can do it, other cryptocurrencies can do the same.” I asked myself, “How can something be scarce when it doesn’t exist tangibly and definitely didn’t exist years ago?” Of course, like a key uses multiple teeth in concert to open a physical lock, Bitcoin only started to make sense to me once I understood it in the context of how the network works – all of the teeth of the key, the ideology, the network, the cryptographic invention, line up together, helping unlock its understanding.
First, I had to understand how the cryptography of Bitcoin worked and why it is essentially unhackable and about as secure as something can be for the time being. I did that by watching a video. Next, I had to understand the system of checks and balances that the network creates to ensure the integrity of itself. Sure, I understood the idea of a decentralized ledger that everybody could check – that was relatively simple. What I didn’t really understand was how having a majority of the nodes on the network running the same code essentially kept Bitcoin sacrosanct for as long as people decided they wanted it to be.
I had heard about forks in the network, but now I understood them. They are points in time where people thought they knew best and should rewrite Bitcoin code. The majority of nodes rejected these changes, leading to the continued integrity of the network. This newfound understanding of Bitcoin’s technology and its potential as a store of value led me to change my stance on the cryptocurrency and embrace it as a valuable asset worth considering for investment.
In conclusion, my journey of understanding Bitcoin has been a transformative one, and I am grateful for the insights and knowledge shared by those in the Bitcoin community. I look forward to continuing to learn and grow in this space and am excited to see where this journey takes me.