But by the end, it was.

That tells you something about this question. It sounds simple, and it is exactly the kind of question that makes for a good conference panel title: how much bitcoin do you actually need to retire?

But the reason people kept filtering into the room was not because they expected four people on stage to hand them a magic number. They came because almost everyone who is serious about bitcoin eventually asks some version of this question. Maybe they ask it directly, maybe they ask it through a spreadsheet, or maybe they ask it every time bitcoin rips higher and their retirement date suddenly feels a little less theoretical.

The internet seemed to have the same reaction. From what I can tell, this panel has been one of the strongest Bitcoin 2026 uploads on YouTube, even outperforming panels with much bigger names. That doesn't surprise me. The bitcoin + retirement question has pull because it sits right at the intersection of money, time, risk, and freedom.

And, as a little bonus, Peter Schiff even showed up in the comments with some choice words.

I don't want to overdo the Schiff thing, but come on. The guy took time out of his day to watch a bitcoin retirement planning panel and leave a comment. Bitcoiners live rent-free in Peter Schiff's head.

🎥 The Panel

Here is the full conversation:

The panel title was click-friendly, but the conversation itself was not cheap. We took the question seriously without pretending there is one universal BTC number that works for every person, every age, every spending level, and every balance sheet.

At one point, I gave the inside-baseball joke answer: 6.15 BTC. If you were around for the old American HODL meme, you know. If you weren't, don't worry about it. The better answer came right after that, because the useful question is bigger than “how much bitcoin?” in isolation.

The useful question is what expenses you need to cover, how much liquid capital you already have, how much of that capital sits in bitcoin, and what your plan can survive when the market stops cooperating.

That is less meme-able, but it is a much better retirement plan.

🔢 The Question Everybody Wants Answered

A single BTC number feels clean because it compresses a messy life into one target.

That is why traditional FIRE latched onto the 25x rule. If you spend $100,000 a year, multiply by 25, and your retirement number is $2.5 million. It is clean, easy, and useful.

I still think that framework matters. The Trinity study gave the FIRE movement a practical starting point by asking what withdrawal rate survived a 30-year retirement across different historical stock and bond markets. The common version became the 4% rule: if your portfolio can support a 4% withdrawal rate, then you need roughly 25 times your annual expenses to retire.

But bitcoin changes the asset side of that equation.

A portfolio of stocks, bonds, cash, and bitcoin should not be modeled exactly like a plain stock-and-bond portfolio. Bitcoin has a different return profile, different drawdowns, different custody considerations, different tax consequences, and a completely different psychological effect on how people save.

The answer still starts with expenses. But once bitcoin enters the plan, the retirement number becomes less of a single target and more of a framework.

🧱 Six Takeaways From the Panel

I think the panel can be boiled down to six useful points.

1. The wrong number is zero. Shawn made this point well. Bitcoin doesn't have to be 100% of the plan for every person, but ignoring it completely is getting harder to defend if your goal is long-term purchasing power and financial independence. A zero allocation is still an allocation decision.

2. The 25x rule is a starting point, not scripture. Annual expenses multiplied by 25 is a good baseline because it ties your retirement target to your spending, which is where every serious FIRE plan should begin. But the rule was built around traditional assets, and your asset mix matters.

3. Bitcoin may deserve a different withdrawal lens. On stage, I talked about applying an 8% withdrawal lens to the bitcoin portion of a portfolio. That should not be read as “spend 8% forever and everything will be fine.” The better use is a different planning assumption for the bitcoin sleeve, especially if you are modeling it separately and giving it time to compound.

4. Saving in bitcoin changes behavior. This point can get underrated because everyone wants to debate CAGR. Bitcoin gives people a savings asset they want to hold. That can change spending behavior, increase savings rates, and turn accumulation into something more durable than a brokerage account balance that gets mentally earmarked for the next purchase.

5. The Stacking Sprint is the practical bridge. I wrote about the Stacking Sprint as a way to frontload four years of intentional accumulation. The idea is simple: compress the hard savings effort into a focused window, build the bitcoin position early, and let your balance sheet start doing work your income used to do.

6. Flexibility matters when volatility shows up. Bitcoin drawdowns happen, and a FIRE plan that assumes nothing can flex is too brittle. You can cut spending temporarily, consult, work part time, move, borrow carefully, or change withdrawal order. People are more adaptable than retirement calculators.

If you want to play with your own assumptions, the FIRE BTC Compass is at calc.firebtc.io. Put in your expenses, assets, and bitcoin allocation, then see how the retirement number moves.

The panel landed on the honest answer: there is no magic number, but zero is probably the wrong one.

But a 25-minute panel with four people on stage is just not long enough to get into all the nuance this question deserves. Just when it felt like we were getting into the good stuff, we ran out of time.

So for paid subscribers, I want to dig into the planning layer: how to turn that idea into an actual FIRE plan around your expenses, your liquid assets, bitcoin volatility, and the tradeoffs between selling, borrowing, and earning.

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That number stuck with me because it points to a choice many people drift into instead of making deliberately. They keep working because work still feels responsible, their portfolio could always be a little larger, and "one more year" sounds like the safe thing to do.

But after 60, one more year isn't just another year of income. It's another year of good health, another year of flexibility, another year of weekday mornings that could have belonged to you, and another year spent waiting for a level of certainty retirement planning will never give you.

If you're over 60 and still working because you think you need to, I want to help you look at your decision more clearly. Run it through three filters: your numbers, your health, and your actual portfolio. Don't let a generic rule of thumb, or the vague feeling that more is always safer, make it for you.

I also recorded a YouTube video on this same idea, walking through why "one more year" after 60 can be more expensive than it looks. If you prefer to watch, or want to share it with someone who's wrestling with the decision, you can check it out here:

🧮 One more year

The conventional advice is simple: work longer, save more, build a bigger margin of safety, and retire when it feels safe. Sometimes that advice is right.

After 60, though, the extra paycheck has to be weighed against the healthier years you're giving up.

Say you're 62, you spend around $80,000 a year, and you're thinking about working two more years for extra padding. On the surface, that sounds obvious. You get two more years of income, two more years of saving, and two fewer years of withdrawals.

However, the benefit from those extra years may be smaller than it looks. You may be earning at a higher tax rate than you'll face in retirement. You may be giving up lower-income years that could have been useful for Roth conversions or capital gains planning. Depending on your income and timing, you may also create Medicare premium ripple effects that don't show up when you only compare two more paychecks against two fewer years of withdrawals.

More importantly, the extra retirement income bought by those working years may be modest relative to the time you gave up. A lot of people look at the total portfolio balance and assume working longer paid off. The better question is what those specific years bought you.

If the answer is a slightly higher monthly withdrawal, a fatter buffer, and some psychological comfort, fine. But name what you're paying for it: fewer healthy years, fewer flexible mornings, and less time to enjoy the life you built. At some point, the extra paycheck isn't buying more freedom. It's buying reassurance, and you're paying for it with time you can't get back.

One more year also has a funny way of rolling forward. Markets feel shaky, inflation sticks around, maybe your bonus is coming, and there's always another reason to give work one more lap around the track. Then one becomes two, two becomes five, and suddenly you're in your late sixties still trying to buy certainty from a world that doesn't sell it.

The money side matters, obviously. But it isn't the whole story.

❤️‍🩹 Your early 60s aren't your early 70s

When people talk about retirement, they usually reduce it to a portfolio question: do you have enough, what withdrawal rate can you support, and how much cushion do you need?

Those are the right questions, but they're incomplete. Time, health, and energy belong in the retirement decision too.

Your early 60s are different from your early 70s. That should change the way you think about work. Those may be the years when you can still travel hard, walk 18 holes, hike without making the whole day about your knee, get on the floor with your grandkids, or take a long trip and enjoy it instead of recovering from it.

Health doesn't decline in a neat line. Sometimes it changes gradually, and sometimes it changes all at once. That uncertainty is exactly why the retirement decision can't be measured only by your ending portfolio balance.

The TIME piece on the New York Life survey points to a specific kind of regret. People weren't looking back and wishing they had spent more time at work. They wished they had taken more of those flexible, energetic years while they still had them.

Some people retire too early and create problems for themselves. I don't want to hand-wave that away. But financially responsible people often make the opposite mistake: they keep optimizing for safety after the biggest benefits of waiting are already behind them.

People are also more adaptable on the spending side than they think. If you retire a bit earlier than what feels financially optimal, you can make adjustments: trim spending for a while, push a purchase out, pick up some consulting, or change your travel plans. You can respond to a budget problem. What you can't do is get back lost years of good health.

Retiring a bit earlier than your retirement projection says is perfect can create a manageable downside. Retiring too late can create a permanent one.

📐 The 25x ruler may not fit your portfolio

If the 25x rule is too blunt for your portfolio, you may be staying at work longer than you need to.

Most retirement planning starts with the 4% rule. Take your annual spending, multiply by 25, and you have a rough retirement number. Spend $80,000 a year, and the simple version says you need about $2 million. Spend $100,000, and it says you need about $2.5 million.

That framework traces back to work like the Trinity study, which looked at historical stock and bond returns and asked a practical question: what withdrawal rate would have survived a 30-year retirement across different market periods?

For a traditional portfolio, 25x is a useful starting point. But it was built around traditional assets and traditional assumptions. Bitcoin is much more widely owned than it used to be, but plenty of people still run retirement projections as if bitcoin either doesn't count or has to be treated exactly like every other asset in their portfolio.

I think that's the wrong way to look at it.

Bitcoin has had a completely different return profile than stocks and bonds over its short-ish history. That doesn't mean I assume it compounds at insane rates forever. I don't. In my own planning, I use much more conservative long-term assumptions than bitcoin's historical CAGR.

But if part of your portfolio behaves differently, your retirement assumptions should at least make room for that difference.

That's why I built the FIRE BTC Compass in the first place. It lets you run your retirement number with your actual asset mix instead of forcing everything through a generic 60/40 lens.

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Google's March 2026 quantum computing paper was the latest trigger. "Google cracks bitcoin in 9 minutes" was the version that traveled. The paper itself described a hypothetical machine that does not exist, running an algorithm against a type of math problem that bitcoin's mining does not even use, under conditions that assume every unsolved engineering challenge has already been solved. But most people who share links never click through to read them, so the headline becomes the message.

I've stayed on top of the quantum computing topic as it relates to bitcoin over the years, so I had enough baseline knowledge to avoid panicking when the headlines hit. But when something like this surfaces and smart people are taking it seriously, it is healthy to re-question your assumptions, look carefully at the new information, and update what you know. So that is what I did. And I want to share what I found, because this topic clearly keeps some people from moving ahead with buying bitcoin after they have become interested in it, and that can be an expensive mistake if the fear turns out to be overblown.

Case in point, last year I presented to the CEO and CFO of an S&P 500 company about bitcoin. The CEO is an engineer by background, and the quantum question was one of his major blockers, both for buying personally and for putting bitcoin on the company's balance sheet. That conversation happened before Google's paper even came out. The fear was already there.

People have been warning about the quantum threat to bitcoin for a very long time, and it has not really progressed in the way the headlines or the doom peddlers suggest.

The pattern is always the same. Google's Sycamore chip caused a panic in 2019. The Willow chip did it again in December 2024. The resource-estimate paper in March 2026 kicked off another round. Each time, a few weeks pass, the actual researchers weigh in, and the timeline turns out to be roughly what it was before, a decade or more away, give or take a lot of uncertainty.

That does not mean you should ignore it. It means you should understand it well enough to know what is actually at risk, what is not, and what you can do about it right now.

⚡ What Is Actually At Risk

The single most important fact that mainstream coverage consistently misses is that bitcoin uses signatures, not encryption. Nobody is decrypting your bitcoin. There is no vault to crack open, no file to unlock, and no harvest-now-decrypt-later scenario where someone records your transactions today and breaks them open with a future quantum computer. That applies to encrypted communications like email or messaging. Bitcoin does not work that way.

What bitcoin does use is a digital signature, a mathematical proof that you own what you are spending. Your wallet has a private key and a public key derived from it. When you send bitcoin, your public key gets revealed on the blockchain, and the signature proves you have the corresponding private key without actually showing it.

The quantum threat boils down to one specific attack. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could, in theory, reverse-engineer your private key from your public key using something called Shor's algorithm. Think of it like someone figuring out your password by watching you type, except they would need a computer that nobody has built yet, running a program that has never been executed at the required scale.

There is a second quantum algorithm called Grover's that theoretically speeds up the brute-force guessing bitcoin miners do. This sounds scary until you run the numbers. You would need roughly 3% of the Sun's total energy output to use Grover's algorithm to outcompete a $2,000 mining machine. Bitcoin mining is not at risk from quantum computing, not now and not in any foreseeable future.

One more thing worth knowing. The largest number ever factored by a quantum computer running Shor's algorithm is 15. Not a typo. The commonly cited "21" was a 2012 experiment that hardcoded the answer into the circuit, which made the result circular. A 1981 Commodore VIC-20 could factor 15. We are a very long way from the kind of machine that would threaten bitcoin's signature scheme.

🧅 Layers of Exposure

Not all bitcoin is equally at risk. There are layers to this, and where you sit depends on what kind of addresses your bitcoin lives in.

• Satoshi-era addresses (2009-2012): public key permanently visible, oldest address format, about 1.7M BTC at risk, mostly presumed lost. These are the canary in the coal mine.

• Addresses you've spent from before: your public key got exposed when you sent a transaction, about 5.2M BTC in this bucket. Move funds to a fresh address you have never spent from.

• Newer Taproot addresses: public key visible by design, a newer format with a known tradeoff. This bucket is growing, and a fix is in development.

• Modern wallets (SegWit, single-use): your public key stays hidden until you spend. This is the majority of active bitcoin, and you are not in the acute risk tier.

Add it up and roughly 35% of the total bitcoin supply is quantum-exposed in some form. That sounds alarming until you look at what exposed actually means in practice.

Take Satoshi's coins, the most commonly cited doomsday scenario. His roughly 1.1 million bitcoin sits across approximately 22,000 separate addresses, each holding about 50 BTC. Even if a quantum computer existed today that could crack one key per hour, draining all of Satoshi's coins would take roughly two and a half years of continuous, uninterrupted operation. At one key per day, it is about sixty years.

Your situation is probably better. If you are using a modern wallet with SegWit addresses and you do not reuse addresses, which is the default on platforms like Unchained, your public key is not exposed on-chain until the moment you spend. A quantum attacker would need to intercept your transaction in the mempool and crack your key before it gets confirmed in a block, which is a roughly ten-minute window. And if you are using multisig, they would need to crack two or three keys within that same window. Multisig does not make you quantum-proof, but it raises the difficulty significantly.

Exchanges, by the way, have historically been some of the worst offenders when it comes to address reuse. If you are holding bitcoin on an exchange that reuses deposit addresses, your exposure is higher than it needs to be, and that is true regardless of quantum.

⏰ How Far Away Is This?

The best quantum computers publicly known today operate at roughly 1,000 physical qubits. Google's 2026 paper estimates you would need fewer than 500,000 physical qubits to break bitcoin's signature scheme. That is a gap of three orders of magnitude, roughly 500x.

The institutional consensus from Google, IBM, Microsoft, and NIST converges on the mid-2030s as the earliest realistic window for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. Individual researchers spread wider. Craig Gidney at Google Quantum AI puts a 10% probability on a machine by 2030, Bruce Schneier targets around 2039, Scott Aaronson flatly refuses to give a date, and Daniel Bernstein, the founder of the post-quantum cryptography field, has publicly said he hopes quantum computing somehow fails. When the founder of the field that exists specifically to defend against quantum computers says that, it tells you something about the current state of play.

There is an important nuance here called the step-function problem. Quantum computing will not give us gradual warning by cracking progressively larger numbers like 15, then 50, then 200, then bitcoin's key size. That is not how the physics works. You get nothing for years, then a small demonstration, then at some point a machine capable of attacking real-world cryptography. As Scott Aaronson put it, you do not get a small nuclear explosion before the big one.

But "at some point" is doing a lot of work there. Google's own estimates show a 30x increase in physical qubits and a 32,000x increase in the number of operations needed to go from a small demonstration to an actual bitcoin-threatening attack. That is a massive engineering gap. The step is not vertical. It has real width, probably measured in years, during which the bitcoin community would see the threat developing and have time to respond.

And there is a meaningful cohort of serious physicists, including Tim Palmer at Oxford, Gil Kalai, Mikhail Dyakonov, and Leonid Levin, who argue that large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing may be fundamentally impossible, not just difficult. These are not cranks. They are credentialed skeptics raising structural objections to whether the error-correction scaling that fault tolerance requires can actually work.

One last data point. The quantum computing industry has received over $40 billion in funding and generates less than $1 billion in revenue. Corporate insiders are selling stock at a 216-to-1 ratio versus buying. Follow the money, not the press releases.

🔑 The Bigger Risk Might Be Classical Math

Bitcoin developer @reardencode has pointed out that the number of production cryptographic systems broken by quantum computers is zero. The number broken by classical mathematicians with pencil and paper is long: DES, MD5, SHA-1, RC4, Enigma. Every cryptographic casualty in history was killed by a mathematician, not a physicist.

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A token tied to the Trump-adjacent World Liberty Financial orbit was suddenly wrapped up in allegations about blacklist powers and frozen access, and my first reaction was basically, Of course. Who didn't see that coming? Much of crypto is decentralized in name only, and every cycle seems to produce a fresh reminder that plenty of these projects are just grifts wrapped in technical language.

That story is useful, but only as a spark. The broader point is much more important, especially for the FIRE community.

The FIRE crowd spends a lot of time thinking about savings rate, withdrawal rate, diversification, taxes, and sequence risk. All of that matters. But there is another category of risk that almost never gets serious attention, and it can wreck your life just as fast if it hits at the wrong moment.

What if your savings rate, withdrawal plan, and portfolio allocation all look solid, but someone else still controls access to the assets your plan depends on?

🔍 The blind spot

The basic FIRE formula is pretty simple. Live below your means, invest the difference, and build a portfolio large enough to cover your expenses. That framework is powerful, and it has helped a lot of people reclaim years of their lives.

The problem is that traditional FIRE thinking is almost entirely focused on what I would call mathematical independence. It asks whether the numbers work, whether the portfolio produces enough return, and whether the withdrawal rate can hold up. Those are good questions, but they are not the only questions.

There is another layer, and I think it gets ignored because most FIRE people, especially in the United States, have grown up inside a financial system that feels functional enough to trust by default. They have never really had to ask whether the money they "own" is actually under their control in a meaningful sense.

You can be financially independent on paper and still be exposed to systems that can delay transfers, freeze accounts, block transactions, halt trading, close accounts, or force you to ask permission to move your own money. In other words, your plan can be sufficient on paper while still being deeply permissioned in practice.

That does not mean the system is always hostile, and it does not mean everyone is one bad day away from total confiscation. It means your wealth may still sit behind gatekeepers, policies, filters, and institutions that reserve the right to intervene.

If financial independence is the goal, I think that deserves a lot more attention than it gets.

🏦 TradFi has back doors too

This is where some readers will be tempted to roll their eyes and think, sure, crypto is sketchy, but that has nothing to do with my brokerage account, bank account, 401(k), or index funds. I get the instinct, but I think it misses the point.

Crypto is not the only place where you live in a permissioned environment. The fiat financial system the FIRE community is almost entirely exposed to has many of the same issues, just wrapped in more legitimate packaging.

Take the GameStop episode in early 2021. The SEC's own staff report noted that several retail broker-dealers temporarily prohibited certain activity in some of the meme stocks and options during that period. I am not bringing that up to relitigate the whole thing or argue that every restriction was illegitimate. The simpler point is that a lot of people learned, in real time, that market access in brokerage systems is mediated access. You may have economic exposure to the asset, but there are still institutions in the middle that can change the operating conditions when stress hits.

Or look at what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) documented on the banking side. The agency described how Bank of America automatically and unlawfully froze people's accounts tied to unemployment benefits with a faulty fraud detection program, then gave them very little recourse even when no fraud had actually occurred.

Again, this is not a claim that the entire financial system is broken beyond use. It is a reminder that access risk is a real category of risk inside the mainstream system most people trust without much thought.

And you do not need to look at headline enforcement actions to feel it. Try walking into a bank and withdrawing a large amount of cash. Try sending a wire on the weekend. Try moving money quickly during a major life event like closing on a house. Most of the time, what you run into is not total lockout. It is friction, delay, scrutiny, and institutional control over the pace and terms of access.

That still matters.

🧠 Owning an asset is not the same as controlling it

Most people understand ownership in economic terms. If their name is on the account, or if they are the beneficial owner of the asset, they consider that good enough. Most of the time, that is good enough...until the moment it's not.

The difference between owning an asset and controlling an asset tends to reveal itself only when you actually need to move money, settle something quickly, survive a system failure, or operate outside normal business hours and ordinary assumptions.

The issue is easy to overlook because it usually does not show up in everyday life. It's often a tail event. But when it does happen, the delay can be expensive and stressful at best—and devastating at worst.

A lot of FIRE planning assumes that if you have enough wealth, access will take care of itself. I do not think that assumption holds up as well as people think it does.

There is also a psychological dimension here. Because most readers are used to a relatively high-trust environment, they do not spend much time thinking about false positives, compliance reviews, transfer holds, or account restrictions. They assume those are problems for criminals, scammers, or people doing something shady. Sometimes they are. But sometimes they are just problems caused by bureaucracy, automated systems, policy choices, bad luck, or plain old institutional incompetence.

If your path to FIRE depends entirely on permissioned assets held behind layers of intermediaries, then I do not think you have full financial independence. You have financial independence with conditions attached.

📱 I've been there

One reason I feel strongly about this is that I have lived a very ordinary version of the problem myself.

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Whether you're a new subscriber (welcome), or you've been here since Issue #1, this is a curated tour through the articles that resonated the most with readers. Some cover core concepts that the rest of the newsletter builds on, and others sparked the best conversations in the comments.

If you missed any of these the first time around, now's a good time to catch up.

Mr. Money Mustache, the godfather of the modern FIRE movement, appeared on the Bigger Pockets Money podcast and doubled down on his stance that bitcoin is stupid and you shouldn't "invest" in it. This was my response — a point-by-point breakdown of why the most influential voice in FIRE is wrong about the best-performing asset of the last 15 years. It remains the most-commented article in FIRE BTC's history.

FIRE is often framed as a decades-long grind, but what if you treated it more like a sprint? This article introduces the concept of a focused 4-year stacking sprint — a concentrated period of aggressive saving and bitcoin accumulation that creates lasting momentum for your FIRE plan. The idea is that a few years of intense effort early on can compress your timeline dramatically, especially when you're stacking an asset with the growth profile of bitcoin.

The 4% rule is the cornerstone of traditional FIRE planning, but it was designed for a portfolio of stocks and bonds. Does it still work when your primary asset appreciates at 25-40% annually instead of 8-10%? This article examines how to think about safe withdrawal rates and your FIRE number when bitcoin is a significant part of your portfolio, and why the math looks very different from what the Trinity Study assumed.

This was the most-liked article of the year by a wide margin, and it's easy to see why — it reframes something every reader deals with every day. The core idea: stop thinking of your job as your career and start thinking of it as the funding source for your personal balance sheet. Your W-2 is a tool, not an identity. This mental shift changes how you negotiate, how you spend, and how aggressively you stack.

Strategy's perpetual preferred stock caught my attention at a bitcoin conference, and I decided to buy it with borrowed money. This article walks through the carry trade, the tax treatment, and the stress test I ran before pulling the trigger. It's the most personal financial decision I've shared in the newsletter, and it drove more paid subscriptions than any other article.

Where are you on the ladder? This framework breaks financial independence into 9 distinct stages, from living paycheck to paycheck all the way through generational wealth. Most people think of FIRE as a binary — you're either financially independent or you're not — but the reality is more nuanced. Knowing which level you're at helps you set the right goals for the next one.

What would you do if everything went sideways tomorrow? This is one of the most practical articles in the archive — a deep dive into how your emergency planning should work when bitcoin is a core part of your financial life. It covers liquidity strategy, spending hierarchies, and how to build a safety net that doesn't require you to sell your stack at the worst possible time.

Should you pay off your mortgage early? The conventional wisdom says yes — it reduces risk and gives you "peace of mind." This article makes the financial case for why that peace of mind might be one of the most expensive financial decisions you ever make, and why carrying a low-rate mortgage while deploying capital into bitcoin can dramatically accelerate your FIRE timeline. It generated some of the best reader conversations we've had.

That's the highlight reel. If any of these sparked something for you, hit reply and let me know which one resonated most — I'm always curious what lands.

Back next week with new content.

Until next time,

Trey ✌️

That's Michael Saylor's Rule #12 from his 21 Rules of Bitcoin keynote at BTC Prague in 2024, and it might be the most useful thing he's ever said about the asset. Every framework we've used to project bitcoin's future price — Stock-to-Flow, rainbow charts, four-year cycle maps — has eventually been humbled by the market. The models don't survive. The question is whether they were useful before they broke.

I can tell you from personal experience that they can be.

Back in 2019 and 2020, Stock-to-Flow was the dominant model in bitcoin. PlanB's framework argued that bitcoin's halving-driven scarcity would produce predictable price increases, and while I wasn't a true believer, the logic was compelling enough to change my behavior. I stacked significantly more sats during that period than I would have otherwise. The model came under heavy criticism in the last few years, as PlanB's predictions fell short. If you look at the S2F chart over the last few years, cracks are showing. For most of bitcoin's history, the price tracked above the S2F line. Since 2022, it has spent more time below it than above it, and the divergence has been growing. S2F implies exponential growth forever, with each halving producing higher and higher peaks, and there's no mechanism built in for the kind of deceleration you'd expect from a maturing network. That structural weakness is becoming harder to ignore.

However, the sats I accumulated because of it are worth considerably more today than when I bought them.

So what do you do when you know models break, but you also know they can be useful? That's the question this article is about, and it's why I just built something into the FIRE BTC Compass that a lot of you have been asking for.

🎯 Your Growth Assumption Is Made Up

Every FIRE calculator asks you to plug in a growth rate for your portfolio. If you're using bitcoin as your primary savings vehicle, you probably picked something between 20% and 30% because it felt reasonable. Maybe you back-tested it against BTC's historical CAGR, or maybe someone on X said 25% was conservative. Either way, you plugged in a flat annual rate and let the math compound it forward indefinitely.

I've done the same thing. The Compass originally shipped with a flat 25% default, and I've used that assumption in my own planning for years. It's a reasonable starting point, but I've always known it was a simplification, and I've been looking for something more grounded.

There's a problem with that: bitcoin is not going to compound at 25% annually until the heat death of the universe. At a 25% CAGR, a single bitcoin would be worth over $132 million by 2060. Could hyperinflation technically produce that dollar number? Sure, but that doesn't tell you anything about purchasing power, which is what a FIRE plan actually depends on. The dollar figure is meaningless without knowing what it buys.

But what do you replace it with? You need some number to plan around. The question is whether you pick one that has a methodology behind it, or one you made up in the shower.

Traditional FIRE planners do the same thing. They assume historical stock market returns will continue, roughly 8-10% nominal for the S&P 500, and project that forward forever. They're not predicting the future; they're extrapolating the past and assuming the pattern holds. Bitcoin doesn't give us a century of data to extrapolate from, which means the range of plausible outcomes is wider and the need for a grounded growth assumption is that much greater.

📊 A Better Wrong Answer?

Giovanni Santostasi is an astrophysicist who applied a physics framework to bitcoin's price history in 2018. His work, known as the Bitcoin Power Law Theory, fits a power law regression to BTC's price as a function of days since the genesis block on January 3, 2009.

The basic idea is that bitcoin's price grows proportionally to a power of time — not at a constant percentage each year, but in a way where the growth is baked into the relationship between price and how long the network has existed. As the network ages, price continues to rise, but the rate of that increase gradually slows. It's the mathematical signature of a maturing system: early adoption is explosive, and doubling the user base from 100 million to 200 million is a much heavier lift than doubling it from 1 million to 2 million, even though the network is more accessible than ever.

How well does the model fit? Across 15+ years of data, from $0.10 to over $100,000, through multiple boom-and-bust cycles, the power law accounts for about 96% of bitcoin's historical price movement. In practical terms, it implies roughly 39% annual growth in 2026, declining to about 31% by 2030, and settling around 15% by 2050. If you've spent time around network effects or technology adoption curves, that trajectory makes sense — early adoption is explosive and cools as the base grows larger. As it relates to FIRE, your earliest years of stacking deliver the biggest percentage returns.

The power law doesn't share S2F's fatal flaw: it inherently models deceleration. S2F projected an exponential moonshot that never materialized because 40% annual growth can't last forever. The power law bakes that in from the start. Santostasi has also been transparent about his falsification criteria and has stated clearly what would invalidate the model, which gives it more intellectual honesty than S2F had.

That said, the critics have reasonable points. Adrian Morris has called the model a "horoscope" and argues that Santostasi is overfitting historical data to create the illusion of predictability. The core of his argument is that bitcoin's price is driven by human behavior — ETF flows, regulation, market psychology — and fitting a physics-style regression to that data can look impressive without actually predicting anything. When the model's price range for 2045 spans $200K to $10M, the critics have a point about precision. I take these criticisms seriously.

For those who want a more rigorous version, Plan C's Quantile Model uses the same underlying power law relationship but produces probabilistic bands instead of a single line — a more honest way to express the uncertainty. Instead of saying "bitcoin will be at $X," it says "there's a 70% chance bitcoin will be above $X by year Y."

One concept you'll hear in power law discussions is the "floor," and it's worth understanding what it actually means before you see it thrown around on X without context. The "floor" is the lower bound of the regression's confidence band: it represents the statistical lower edge of the historical price distribution on the log-log scale. It's not a hard support level in any engineering sense, but historically, when bitcoin's price has touched this floor, it has coincided with cycle lows and strong accumulation zones. Price has never sustained below it for long before recovering.

As I write this, bitcoin is trading around $67,000, which puts it near the power law floor and means the model is being stress-tested in real time. If you're planning your FIRE timeline, being near the floor means you're accumulating at prices that are historically cheap relative to the model's fair value estimate, and that has asymmetric upside implications for your plan.

🧭 Why I Built It Into the Compass Anyway

So if I'm skeptical, why did I add a power law toggle to the Compass?

I added it for two reasons. First, a lot of you asked for it. The power law has a lot of believers right now (probably because it hasn't yet been invalidated), and this was one of the most requested features since I launched the tool. Second, I needed something better than a flat rate for anyone who wanted it, and this is the least arbitrary option I could find.

The BTC Growth toggle in the Compass settings is a calibration tool. It shows what your FIRE plan looks like under different growth assumptions so you can stress-test your own numbers. If you think the power law is a reasonable framework, toggle it on and run your projections. If you prefer the simplicity of a flat CAGR, keep using that. The flat rate mirrors what the traditional FIRE community uses for stocks: it assumes ongoing exponential growth at a steady rate, which is also an average that doesn't tell you the path the market will take to get there. The two approaches aren't that different in spirit.

The power law doesn't need to be exactly right to be useful. Decelerating growth is probably a better assumption than constant growth for a maturing network, and this is the least arbitrary way to model that deceleration. Nobody knows whether bitcoin's annual growth will settle at 15% in 2050 or keep declining from there — the model gives us a curve, not a guarantee. Like the flat CAGR, it's a tool for thinking about the future, not a prophecy.

To make this concrete, I ran a 30-year comparison. Take $10,000 and grow it under two scenarios: the power law model (using the Compass's default parameters) versus a flat 25% CAGR:

The power law starts hotter — nearly 40% in 2026 versus 25% flat — and peaks at roughly 59% ahead of the flat assumption around 2035. Then it decelerates, the gap narrows, and by 2047 the flat 25% CAGR catches up entirely. After that, the flat assumption pulls ahead because it never slows down.

What does this mean for your FIRE plan? That depends on your timeline.

Read more

For as long as most of us can remember, property has been the default answer to the question of where to store wealth. Your parents told you to buy a house. Financial advisors told you to build a rental portfolio. The FIRE community told you that cash-flowing properties were the ticket to early retirement. And for generations, that advice made sense, because real estate was the best available option for preserving and growing purchasing power over long periods of time.

But there is an important distinction that rarely gets discussed: how much of that $393 trillion represents the value of actual shelter, commercial space, and agricultural land, and how much of it is simply people using property as a savings vehicle? In other words, how much of the price you pay for a home or an investment property is about the building itself, and how much is a monetary premium — value that exists because people are storing wealth in property because they had nowhere better to put it?

This week on the FIRE BTC podcast, I sat down with Chris Drzyzga, a commercial real estate broker with over 275 transactions and $300 million in total deal consideration, who has been selling off most of his real estate to buy bitcoin. Chris lives and breathes the CRE market every single day, and his perspective on where things are headed was one of the most honest and grounded conversations I've had on this topic. You can listen to the full conversation here:

This newsletter will explore the ideas that came out of that conversation and what they mean for your FIRE plan.

💰 The World's Biggest Savings Account

The reason real estate has been such an effective store of value for so long comes down to a handful of attributes. Property is tangible and relatively scarce. It can be purchased with leverage, which amplifies returns on a small initial investment. There are favorable tax treatments like mortgage interest deductions, depreciation, and 1031 exchanges. And people have an intuitive understanding of it. You can see a house. You can walk through it. You can point to comparable sales down the street and feel confident about what your property is worth.

These characteristics made real estate the world's dominant savings technology for centuries. When currencies were unreliable or inflation was eroding purchasing power, people bought land and buildings. When families wanted to pass wealth to the next generation, they bought property. The logic was simple and deeply embedded in culture: they're not making more land.

When you buy a home, part of what you are paying for is the physical structure and the utility it provides. You need somewhere to live, and there is real value in having a roof over your head in a good neighborhood with good schools. I think about my own home primarily as a utility. I own it because my family needs to live somewhere, and I want that somewhere to be in a good area with growth potential around us.

However, part of what you are paying for is something else entirely. A significant chunk of the price reflects the fact that real estate has functioned as a savings vehicle, a place where people park value because it has historically appreciated faster than inflation. That is the monetary premium, and in some markets it is substantial. Manhattan penthouses, London townhouses, and coastal California properties are not priced on utility alone. The gap between what it would cost to build those structures from scratch and what they sell for on the open market tells you how much of the price is about storing wealth rather than consuming shelter.

I wrote about this in detail in Homeward Bound, where I broke down the math on levered housing returns versus simply investing in index funds. The conclusion was clear: homeownership succeeded historically not because housing was a better asset, but because it combined leverage, forced savings, inflation protection, and lifestyle consumption into a single vehicle. When you separate those components and compare them honestly, the returns are much less impressive than they appear.

This distinction between your primary residence and investment properties matters, because they have very different economics and very different roles in a FIRE plan. Your home is a utility purchase that you should make intelligently, using leverage and buying in a good area, and the equity you build can be borrowed against to invest in other assets. But the ongoing costs of ownership — maintenance, property taxes, insurance, repairs — are expenses that factor into your FIRE number, and the appreciation of your home is largely offset by those costs over time.

Investment properties are a completely different conversation, and that is where things get much more complicated.

🔧 The "Passive Income" Problem

One of the most persistent narratives in the FIRE community is that rental properties generate passive income. Buy a few houses, rent them out, collect checks every month, and eventually those checks cover your living expenses. Financial independence achieved.

There is no such thing as passive income in real estate. Stock dividends are passive. You buy shares, and the money shows up in your account. You don't have to fix a broken water heater at 2am or deal with a tenant who hasn't paid rent in three months. But managing rental properties is running a business, and it needs to be treated as such. This is something Chris and I spent a good amount of time discussing on the podcast, because he sees it from both sides — he brokers real estate transactions for a living and he's experienced firsthand the demands that come with owning investment properties.

What concerns me is when people who are early in their FIRE journey decide that rental properties are the way to go. You are taking your savings, tying them up in an illiquid asset, layering on a significant amount of leverage, and doing all of this with no experience operating a rental business. The learning curve is steep, the costs can be surprising, and the margin for error is thin when you're stretching to make the numbers work on your first property. I think it is genuinely dangerous for people to start their wealth-building journey with real estate investing. You need to already have some capital to play that game effectively, and you should expect that it will take time to figure out how the business actually works.

Full disclosure: I've had my own bad experiences with rental properties, so take my perspective with a grain of salt. I know people who have made it work, and I respect what they've built. But even the success stories come with chapters that don't make it into the highlight reel. A buddy of mine bought an AirBnB last year and was fired up about it being fully booked through the summer. Then winter hit, and the bookings dried up. Now he's staring at an extra mortgage payment every month with nothing covering it, and he told me he's worried the property isn't going to perform the way he thought. That part of the story never shows up on the YouTube thumbnail.

The other thing that strikes me about the rental property approach is the math at the individual level. People get excited about generating $100 or $200 a month in cash flow from a single-family rental, and they are doing a tremendous amount of work for that. You have to find the deal, secure financing, manage the rehab, find tenants, handle maintenance, deal with vacancies, and navigate the occasional nightmare scenario. Then you have to do it again and again and again, stacking property on top of property, just to build anything meaningful in terms of monthly income.

And the focus on that monthly cash flow is often misplaced, because the real wealth in rental real estate comes from having your tenants pay down the mortgage and building equity over time. But that equity is extremely illiquid. You can't access it without selling the property and eating a significant transaction cost, or taking out a new loan against it. Either way, the wealth is locked up behind a wall of friction.

Meanwhile, if you do what I advocate for and buy bitcoin, or even what most traditional FIRE people do with index funds, you can achieve very similar long-term returns without the leverage, without running a business, and with all the liquidity you could want. That doesn't mean there aren't real advantages to owning rental properties. There absolutely are, particularly for people who have the capital, the experience, and the appetite to run that kind of business. But if you are going in thinking it will be easy or passive, you need to be aware of what you are actually getting yourself into.

🏚️ Cracks in the Foundation

Beyond the individual-level challenges of owning investment properties, there are structural shifts happening in the broader real estate market that are worth paying attention to.

The US office vacancy rate hit 18.2% in January 2026. That is not a cyclical blip caused by interest rates that will recover when the Fed eases. This is structural. Hybrid and remote work have permanently reduced the amount of office space that companies need, and that shift is accelerating as AI tools compress headcount further. You need fewer desks when you need fewer people, and many of the buildings that were designed for a pre-AI workforce are becoming functionally obsolete faster than anyone expected.

An estimated 330 million square feet of US office space could become stranded by 2030, and roughly half of all commercial buildings in this country are over 50 years old. In 2025 alone, more than 35 million square feet of office space was removed through conversions and demolitions. They are not filling these buildings — they are tearing them down.

Chris sees this every day in his work. One of the most interesting things he talked about on the podcast was the extend-and-pretend problem in commercial real estate lending. Lenders are keeping zombie assets alive on their books rather than forcing the write-downs that would clear the market and allow recovery to begin. This isn't a correction that resolves in a year or two. Chris believes we're looking at a decade-long structural rebuild of the commercial real estate market.

And it's not limited to offices. AI is changing what industrial and warehouse space needs to look like as automation reshapes logistics and fulfillment operations. Retail has been evolving for years. The sectors that appeared resilient are facing their own versions of the same question: were these buildings designed for the economy that's emerging, or the one that's fading?

The performance numbers tell a similar story. In 2024, bitcoin returned over 120% while real estate as measured by VNQ returned roughly -1%. The S&P 500 returned about 25% and gold about 27%. In 2025, national home values grew by just 1.3%, which actually trailed inflation, meaning that in real terms, most homeowners got poorer. Commercial is the canary in the coal mine, but residential is not immune to the same dynamics. The monetary premium that has been embedded in property values for decades is starting to face real competition.

⚡ A Better Savings Technology

When you break down the specific attributes that have made real estate a good savings vehicle, bitcoin matches or exceeds nearly all of them.

Start with scarcity. "They're not making more land" has been the foundational argument for real estate's value for as long as anyone can remember. And it's relatively true — building new properties takes time, capital, and regulatory approval. But "relatively scarce" is not the same as "absolutely scarce." They are really, genuinely not making any more bitcoin. There will only ever be 21 million, and that supply schedule is enforced by mathematics rather than zoning boards. If scarcity is what you value in a savings vehicle, bitcoin wins this comparison decisively.

Liquidity is where the gap becomes enormous. Selling a property takes months and costs 5-6% in transaction fees. Selling bitcoin takes minutes and costs a fraction of a percent, and the market is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You can sell 0.00000001 BTC if that's what you need. You cannot sell one percent of a duplex. For someone building toward FIRE, this liquidity advantage is massive. You can draw down $500 worth of bitcoin in a month without restructuring your entire portfolio. Good luck doing that with an investment property.

One of the things I find most interesting about the volatility comparison is that real estate is significantly more volatile than people realize. It just doesn't look that way because property values are not marked to market on a continuous basis. You only discover what your property is actually worth when you try to buy or sell it, and those transactions happen infrequently. In between, you're carrying an asset at whatever you think it's worth, but the market is constantly shifting underneath you. Each individual property is extremely bespoke, influenced by its unique characteristics, location, neighborhood dynamics, school districts, and a dozen other factors that make pricing it accurately very difficult. The overall real estate market may appear relatively stable, but your specific property has its own volatility profile that sits beneath the surface, invisible until transaction day.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, is more visibly volatile for two reasons. First, it's a much smaller market — less than $2 trillion compared to over $300 trillion for global real estate. Price moves are amplified when the market is that much smaller relative to the capital flowing through it. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the world is still in the early stages of understanding what bitcoin is and why it is valuable. We are in a price discovery phase where adoption and comprehension are still spreading, and as both deepen over time, volatility has been compressing cycle over cycle. Both of these factors are features of where bitcoin sits on the adoption curve, and both resolve over time.

On the maintenance side, the comparison is almost unfair. Owning property means paying property taxes, insurance premiums, maintenance costs, repair bills, and capital expenditure reserves, and dealing with tenants if you're renting it out. Owning bitcoin means holding your keys. That's it.

Now, I want to be honest about where real estate still has genuine advantages. Mortgage leverage is a powerful tool. A 30-year fixed rate mortgage at current rates is one of the cheapest forms of long-term leverage available to regular people, and I've written about using that leverage as a feature rather than a burden. Rental income is real cash flow that shows up every month. And the tax code offers meaningful benefits to property owners through depreciation, 1031 exchanges, and mortgage interest deductions. These are not trivial, and anyone thinking about this comparison needs to weigh them honestly.

But the migration is already underway. Chris sold most of his real estate to stack sats, and he is someone who brokers commercial real estate transactions for a living. When I heard him say that, I was not surprised, because I have a lot of clients at Unchained who are real estate investors and have been doing the same thing. They understand the liquidity advantages, the growth potential, and the simplicity of owning bitcoin, and once they reach that conclusion, divesting from real estate and moving into the asset they're more bullish about becomes a straightforward decision.

🧭 What This Means for Your FIRE Plan

If you are building a long-term wealth plan, I think the framework is pretty straightforward.

Your primary residence is a utility. Buy in a good area, use leverage wisely, and borrow against the equity to invest in assets with better growth potential. But be honest with yourself about what the house is earning you after you account for all the costs. Don't confuse the mortgage paydown and modest appreciation with strong investment returns.

Rental properties are optional, not foundational. If you have existing capital, real-world experience, and a appetite for running a property management business, they can be a valuable piece of your overall financial picture. But they should not be the starting point for someone who is new to their FIRE journey, and they should certainly not be treated as passive income. The people who are successful in real estate investing will be the first to tell you how much work it takes.

Bitcoin is where I believe your savings should live. It is the best savings technology available today — liquid, perfectly scarce, globally accessible, and requiring zero ongoing maintenance. I've laid out the case for this across dozens of issues of this newsletter, and the thesis only strengthens as adoption grows and the monetary premium that has historically been stored in other assets continues to migrate.

If you are currently a real estate investor and you're curious about bitcoin, my advice is simple: set up a dollar cost average using some of the cash flows from your properties. Get skin in the game and keep learning. If you decide it isn't for you, the bitcoin is liquid and you can sell it and reinvest in what you know. But odds are, once you start doing the research, you'll come to the same conclusion that Chris and many other real estate investors I've spoken with have reached — that bitcoin is a superior savings vehicle, and the logical move is to start shifting your portfolio in that direction.

The hybrid approach makes the most sense for most people: own your primary residence and use the equity strategically, stack bitcoin as your primary savings vehicle, and use real estate for income only if you have the capital and the desire to operate that business. What you don't want to do is treat real estate as your savings vehicle, your income strategy, and your retirement plan all at once. That is too much concentration in a single illiquid asset class, and it leaves you exposed to exactly the kind of structural shifts we're watching unfold right now.

That $393 trillion in global real estate value is not going to zero. Property serves real human needs, and it always will. But the monetary premium that has been baked into those prices for generations — the portion of value that exists because people used property as savings in the absence of a better alternative — that premium is starting to move. The question is how much.

Even a small percentage of that premium migrating into bitcoin would be extraordinary for its valuation, because bitcoin has a perfectly fixed supply. When capital flows into real estate, developers can build more. When capital flows into bitcoin, the supply doesn't change. We are potentially watching the largest asset class on earth begin to leak monetary premium into the hardest money ever created, and the math on what that means for bitcoin's price over the next decade speaks for itself.

If you want to hear the full conversation with Chris Drzyzga, check out this week's podcast episode. Chris brings a perspective that's hard to find — a commercial real estate professional who has put his money where his mouth is and chosen bitcoin.

If you're ready to start modeling what a bitcoin-forward FIRE plan looks like for your situation, check out the FIRE BTC Compass — it's built for exactly this kind of planning.

That's it for this week. Thanks for reading!

Until next time,

Trey ✌️

Recorded: March 20, 2026

Episode Summary

Chris Drzyzga has spent 15 years brokering commercial real estate deals in Southern California — over 275 transactions and $300M+ in total consideration. He’s also a convicted Bitcoiner who sold off most of his real estate portfolio to stack sats.

In this episode, Trey and Chris dig into how bitcoin is dethroning real estate as the world’s default store of value, why 62% of U.S. commercial property is functionally obsolete, and Chris’s four-pillar framework for integrating bitcoin into real estate operations. They also get personal — covering Chris’s journey from flipping repossessed motorcycles in high school to running his life on a bitcoin standard, and how he’s teaching his kids to save the good money and spend the bad money.

Topics Covered

• Chris’s origin story: flipping repoed motocross bikes into a seven-figure business as a teenager

• Using those proceeds to buy a four-unit multifamily property and launch a 100% commission brokerage career

• Why commercial real estate cycles are broken — year 13+ and still no clearing

• The extend-and-pretend problem: lenders keeping zombie assets alive

• Bitcoin as the apex store of value, displacing real estate’s monetary premium

• Secular trends reshaping CRE: AI, demographics, obsolete building stock

• Chris’s four-pillar framework for bitcoin-native real estate:

  • Capital strategy— Treasury management (cash / spot BTC / STRC), bitcoin-integrated financing, capital raising

  • Energy optimization— Bitcoin mining integrated into building mechanical systems (HVAC, water heaters)

  • Technology integration— Accepting bitcoin payments, signaling forward-thinking operations

  • Tenant improvements— Modular buildouts to preserve capital and reduce downtime

• The liquidity premium of bitcoin vs. the illiquidity trap of real estate

• STRC as a medium-term savings tool (4–12 month bucket)

• Running your life on a bitcoin standard — budgeting in sats

• Teaching the next generation: “save the good money, spend the bad money”

• Why human-to-human skills will be at a premium in the AI era

• The power of just doing things — putting one foot in front of the other

Chapters

00:00 — Introduction & How Trey Met Chris

01:02 — Chris’s CRE Career & Origin Story

02:23 — The Motocross Bike Business

05:31 — Just Do Things: Taking Action Creates Opportunity

08:52 — From Broker to Landlord: Building a Real Estate Portfolio

11:39 — The Broken Money Revelation & Finding Bitcoin

12:39 — Where Is Real Estate Headed?

15:02 — The Extended CRE Cycle & Extend-and-Pretend

17:50 — Secular Trends: AI, Bitcoin, and Obsolete Buildings

29:06 — The Four-Pillar Framework for Bitcoin-Native Real Estate

36:55 — Chris’s Personal Finance Journey: Divesting RE for Bitcoin

42:13 — Managing Volatility: Short, Medium, and Long-Term Buckets

45:48 — STRC & the Carry Trade

46:01 — Teaching Kids About Money on a Bitcoin Standard

49:52 — Preparing the Next Generation for an AI World

54:57 — Closing Thoughts: Consistency, Living Below Your Means & Where to Find Chris

Guest Links

• X/Twitter: @ChrisDrz

• Website: chrisdrzyzga.com

• Linktree: linktr.ee/chrisdrz

• Podcast: The Real Estate Standard

• Voit Real Estate Services: voitco.com

Connect with FIRE BTC

• Newsletter: firebtc.io

• Compass Calculator: calc.firebtc.io

• X/Twitter: @ts_hodl

Related FIRE BTC Content

• Why I Bought STRC With Borrowed Money — Issue #68, the STRC carry trade referenced in this episode

You've stacked for years, hit your number, and you're ready to walk away from the paycheck. And then bitcoin drops 50%, then 70%, then 80%. You still need to pay your mortgage, feed your family, keep the lights on. So you sell at the worst possible time because you have no other choice.

I've written about the 4% rule and bitcoin before and how to calculate your stacking goal. Those pieces gave you the means to calculate a target portfolio size. This one gives you the plan for when the market tests your resolve. Conviction matters, and I wrote about that when it got tested earlier this year. But conviction is an ongoing test, not a box you check once. You need structure behind it.

🧱 The 4% Rule — Quick Refresher

The Trinity Study (1998) backtested retirement portfolios from 1926 to 1995. A balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds, withdrawing 4% in year one and adjusting for inflation after, survived 30 years in 95% of historical start dates. It became the default FIRE formula: multiply your annual expenses by 25, and that's the portfolio size you need to hit to retire.

The 5% of scenarios where it failed are worth understanding. They were driven by sequence-of-returns risk: retiring right before a major downturn. For example, the late 1960s and early 1970s brought stagflation, oil crises, and a decade of miserable returns. If you started withdrawing during that window, you may have run out of money in your retirement.

Big ERN at Early Retirement Now has the definitive deep dive, a 60-part series with over 6.5 million simulated withdrawal rates. His take: prescribing one withdrawal rate for everyone is "about as ludicrous as suggesting that we should all wear size 10 shoes." For early retirees with 50+ year horizons, 4% might be too aggressive. For retirees with pensions and Social Security coming, too conservative.

The 4% rule is a useful starting point, not a guarantee. And it was built for a portfolio of stocks and bonds that doesn't look anything like what most of us hold. (For the fundamentals, see FIRE Fundamentals.)

₿ A Different Playbook

Bitcoin's drawdowns make stocks look tame. The S&P 500 dropped about 55% during the 2008 financial crisis and roughly 86% during the Great Depression. However, bitcoin has routinely dropped 75-85% over its short-ish history. The 2017 cycle brought an 80% crash that took three years to recover, and the 2021 cycle dropped 76% over 28 months.

The other factor is how you fund withdrawals. With a stock portfolio, dividends cover part of your spending automatically. With bitcoin, every dollar you need means selling. I've argued before that dividends are overrated as an investing thesis — a company paying dividends is really just forcing you to take cash out of the business — and I still believe that. But when you're modeling withdrawal rates, the math cares about whether you're selling units of the asset or not, regardless of the philosophical debate.

And we're working with 15 years of history instead of 100. We can't run the same exhaustive backtests. We're applying similar methodology with informed growth assumptions (reasonable, I believe) but we should be honest about the difference.

On the other side of the ledger, bitcoin's expected returns blow stocks out of the water. I use a conservative 25% annualized growth estimate, compared to 10% for stocks. That growth rate is what makes the Goalseek framework work: the withdrawal rate model from Issue #59 that backs into your BTC target number based on expected asset returns. It implies an 8% withdrawal rate for the bitcoin portion, double the traditional 4%.

Bigger upside, bigger downside. The strategy needs to account for both, and I just shipped a new Bear Market Stress Test in the FIRE BTC Compass that does exactly that.

📊 Stress Testing Your Portfolio

I ran four scenarios through the new Bear Market Stress Test in the Compass. The assumptions: a $1.5 million starting portfolio at today's prices (BTC at ~$74,000), $100,000 per year in expenses, and the only variable being how that $1.5 million is split between bitcoin and stocks.

Read more

If you told me a year ago that I’d be writing enthusiastically about a dividend-paying instrument, I would have pointed you to Coal in Your Stocking, where I made the case that dividends are a drag on wealth building. The “dividend bros” are still wrong about that, by the way.

But STRC isn’t a dividend stock. It’s something structurally different — and it deserves a hard look from anyone on the FIRE path.

⚡ FIRE BTC covers bitcoin through the lens of financial independence — the strategies, the math, and the mindset shifts that most finance writers miss. If you’re not subscribed yet, join us. If you’re already here, consider upgrading to paid to support the work and unlock the full archive.

🔍 What Is STRC?

STRC — “Stretch” — is a perpetual preferred stock issued by Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy). Here’s the short version:

• Variable dividend, currently at 11.50% annualized

• Paid monthly, based on a $100 par value

• Return of capital tax treatment (more on this — it’s a big deal)

• Not convertible into common stock

• Backed by a company sitting on 738,731 bitcoin

Michael Saylor described it on Natalie Brunell’s podcast with a line that stuck with me: “Would you like a bank account that pays you 11% that’s tax deferred? STRC. That was a thousand hours of engineering. This is ten seconds to explain.”

He’s not wrong about the simplicity. But the “thousand hours of engineering” part matters too, and that’s what I want to unpack through a FIRE lens.

🤔 Why I Care About This

So why am I now talking about a yield instrument after writing an entire issue of the newsletter about why dividend investing is sub-optimal?

Three reasons.

The yield is structurally different. STRC dividends are classified as return of capital, which means they aren’t taxed as ordinary income or qualified dividends. You aren’t taxed when you receive them. Instead, your cost basis goes down. Tax is deferred until you sell, and if you hold until death, your heirs get a stepped-up basis.

To put it concretely: a qualified dividend taxed at 15% turns an 11.5% yield into 9.8% after tax. An ordinary income dividend at a 32% marginal rate nets you 7.8%. STRC nets you the full 11.5% until you sell. That’s a meaningful edge for the same headline rate.

The backing is bitcoin. Strategy holds over 738,000 bitcoin. At current prices, that’s north of $60 billion backing roughly $13.6 billion in total obligations. The BTC Rating — their overcollateralization metric — sits at 4.5x. STRC isn’t a corporate bond backed by a chain of Applebees. The primary asset underneath it is the hardest money ever created. If you believe in the staying power and growth potential of bitcoin, that should go a long way toward understanding why STRC is promising.

The volatility profile is manageable. STRC launched around $88 and quickly moved toward par, with only brief dips (to around $90 as the lowest) before recovering. And if you look at the chart, the volatility appears to be dampening over time.

Saylor has pointed out that STRC’s volatility is lower than both the Nasdaq and the S&P. For someone building a FIRE portfolio, that kind of stability in a yield instrument is meaningful.

🔢 The FIRE Math

The traditional 4% rule says you need 25x your annual expenses saved to retire. If you spend $80,000 a year, your target is $2 million.

What if part of your portfolio is throwing off 11.5%?

A $400,000 position in STRC generates roughly $46,000 per year — enough to cover more than half of that $80K spend. And because it’s return of capital, it doesn’t push you into a higher tax bracket.

Another way to think about it: to generate $40,000 in annual income, you need $1 million in index funds (at 4%) or about $348,000 in STRC (at 11.5%). That’s 65% less capital required.

But the bigger point here is the comparison to your stock allocation. If you’re holding index funds that have historically returned around 10% annually with significant volatility — 20-30% drawdowns in bad years — why wouldn’t you prefer an instrument returning 11.5% with a fraction of that volatility and tax-advantaged treatment on top? All other things equal, a 10%+ return with minimal volatility beats a 10% return with stock-market-level volatility every time. For FIRE practitioners, the reduced sequence-of-returns risk alone is worth considering.

I’m not saying dump your index funds and go all-in on STRC. But as a tool in the FIRE toolkit — particularly for bridging early retirement expenses while your bitcoin stack appreciates — the numbers are hard to ignore.

⚔️ The Carry Trade: Real Numbers

In Speculative Attack, I wrote about borrowing in a weak currency to invest in a stronger one. Using debt strategically to accelerate FIRE — the Aikido finance approach.

So what does a speculative attack look like with STRC?

This is something I’ve done personally. I’m not going to share my specific dollar amounts, but I can illustrate the approach using my actual economics — the same entry price, the same rates, the same timeline — with a $50,000 example to make the math tangible.

Read more

For anyone unfamiliar, Marks is the co-founder of Oaktree Capital, one of the most respected investors alive, and the author of some of the best writing on risk in the history of finance. When he writes a memo, people pay attention. Warren Buffett once said "When I see memos from Howard Marks in my mail, they're the first thing I open and read."

His latest memo is called "AI Hurtles Ahead." In it, he describes using Claude (Anthropic's AI model) to build himself a nine-module crash course on AI — and walks through what he learned. His conclusion: AI is real, it's moving faster than anything he's ever seen, and we're already at the stage where AI agents can work autonomously — not just answering questions, but completing entire tasks on their own, checking their work, and presenting finished output.

Marks breaks AI capability into three levels:

• Level 1: Chat — ask a question, get an answer.

• Level 2: Tool use — AI that can search, analyze, and perform tasks you assign it.

• Level 3: Autonomous agents — you give the AI a goal and parameters, and it does the rest.

He believes we crossed into Level 3 in early 2026.

The speed of this transition is what really stands out. Computers took 40 years to go from ENIAC to home PCs. AI went from "interesting experiment" to 400 million users and 80% of companies actively using it in under two years. Nothing in the history of technology has moved this fast.

Marks is "terribly concerned" about what this means for jobs and human purpose.

I'm not going to pretend I know how AI plays out. But when one of the sharpest minds in finance is rethinking his assumptions about the future of work, I think it's worth asking: what does this mean for your FIRE plan?

⏳ What If Your Biggest Asset Has an Expiration Date?

The math behind FIRE is straightforward: earn income, save aggressively, invest wisely, compound over time. It works because you have years of saving (usually 10 to 15) to front-load your portfolio before pulling the plug on full-time work.

Your income is your biggest asset during the accumulation phase. It's the fuel that powers everything else. Without it, there's nothing to compound.

AI threatens that assumption directly.

I want to be careful here — I'm not saying your job disappears tomorrow. I'm not saying everyone should panic. But the data is hard to ignore:

• 55% of supply chain leaders expect agentic AI to reduce entry-level hiring needs, with 51% expecting overall workforce reductions (Gartner)

• 300 million jobs globally are projected to be impacted by 2028 (Goldman Sachs)

• 57% of US work hours could be automated with current technology (McKinsey)

• 35% of reasoning and decision-making tasks could be automated by 2027 (World Economic Forum)

Matt Shumer, whose blog post "Something Big Is Happening" has been viewed over 80 million times, put it bluntly: "I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job." He went on: "AI isn't replacing one specific skill. It's a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously."

The FIRE community spends enormous energy optimizing savings rates and debating index fund allocations. Those matter. But maybe it's time to ask a harder question: what if your accumulation window is five to seven years instead of fifteen? How does that change your strategy?

🔀 Three Scenarios, Similar Outcomes

I don't know which path AI takes. But I can walk through the most likely scenarios and ask what each one means for your money. Think of this as a stress test, not a prediction.

Scenario A: The Inflationary Path

AI displaces jobs faster than the economy can absorb the transition. Millions of people lose income. Political pressure becomes overwhelming. Governments respond the only way they know how: spend. Universal basic income programs, retraining subsidies, stimulus checks, expanded safety nets.

We've seen this before, and recently — it's the 2020 playbook, but sustained over years instead of months. And it's layered on top of a government that's already running a $1.9 trillion annual deficit.

If you're holding a FIRE number denominated in dollars, what happens to that target when governments spend aggressively for a decade? Can you assume your portfolio can keep up by providing positive real returns?

Scenario B: The Deflationary Shock

AI causes genuine demand destruction. Consumers pull back. Businesses fail. Markets crash. Everything goes down in the short term, including bitcoin.

Governments can't tolerate deflation, neither politically nor economically. Deflation increases the real burden of debt, and governments are the biggest debtors on the planet. The entire financial and monetary system is levered to the hilt, by design. We should expect that the response to a deflationary shock would be the biggest fiscal and monetary stimulus in human history.

This is the scenario that tests conviction the most. If you're holding index funds and bonds through AI-driven demand destruction, what exactly are you betting on?

Scenario C: The Productivity Miracle

The optimist case. AI dramatically reduces the cost of goods and services — healthcare, legal, software, manufacturing — by replacing expensive human labor with near-zero marginal cost AI labor. Companies that adopt AI see margins expand, driving market returns. Real purchasing power increases even without wage growth, and the economy absorbs the labor transition smoothly.

But do governments stop spending in that world? Have they ever?

Global debt hit a record $348 trillion at the end of 2025, according to the Institute of International Finance — with $29 trillion added in that single year alone. US federal debt stands at $38.4 trillion, growing at $8 billion per day. The CBO projects annual deficits will reach $3 trillion within a decade — and that's before accounting for any AI-related displacement spending.

Even in the best-case scenario, the fiscal trajectory is already locked in. A productivity boom just gives governments more GDP to borrow against.

If your portfolio only works in one of these scenarios, you have a problem.

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On the pure math of that comparison, he's right. Someone who bought bitcoin at the February 2021 peak of $57,000 and held until today made 18% over five years. About 3.3% annually. Their savings account briefly offered better risk-adjusted returns.

But that comparison has a buried assumption: that you bought once, at exactly the worst moment, and never invested another dollar. That's not how pursuing FIRE works.

📉 The Lazy Comparison

Point-to-point price analysis only describes one type of investor: someone who made a single lump-sum purchase on a specific date and held indefinitely. Maybe that describes you. Mostly, it describes nobody in the FIRE community.

What FIRE practitioners actually do is systematic, automated accumulation. A fixed amount — whatever you can commit — invested on a recurring schedule, regardless of what the price is doing. Dollar-cost averaging. Month after month, year after year. You set it up, you forget about it, you keep stacking.

I've written about DCA before and why it's foundational to any FIRE strategy. But this time I want to run the actual numbers with real historical price data, because the math is more interesting — and more powerful — than most people realize.

The experiment: $100 per month, every month, for 60 months. February 2021 through January 2026. Just consistent stacking without timing, panic, or price-watching.

Total invested: $6,000.

🧮 Running the Numbers

Here's what the DCA buyer ended up with, using monthly closing prices from each of those 60 months:

Same starting and ending points, but one investor shows up every month; the other bought once at the peak and held.

The DCA buyer's return is 3.6x higher.

And here's what surprises most people: the DCA buyer's average cost basis is $41,109 per bitcoin — lower than the February 2021 monthly close of $45,138, even though they were still buying through prices as high as $115,000 in July 2025. Every month of buying through the 2022 bear market dragged that cost basis down.

The reader who saw 18% was measuring from the top of a previous cycle to the bottom of a new one. The DCA buyer was measuring something entirely different.

🐻 The Bear Market Gift

2022 was ugly. Bitcoin fell from $43,000 at the start of February to $16,548 by December — a 62% decline over the course of the year. Every month felt like another punch in the gut.

But for the DCA stacker, each of those punches was a buying opportunity.

Here's what $100 bought in the worst months:

• Dec 2022 ($16,548): 0.006043 BTC

• Nov 2022 ($17,169): 0.005825 BTC

• Sep 2022 ($19,432): 0.005146 BTC

• Jun 2022 ($19,785): 0.005054 BTC

Compare that to February 2021 at $45,138, where the same $100 bought just 0.002216 BTC. Those bear market months accumulated nearly 3x more bitcoin per dollar than the starting price.

By the end of December 2022, the DCA buyer had invested $2,300 across 23 months and accumulated 0.07266 BTC — a cost basis of $31,654. Well below the starting price. Well below what the lump-sum buyer paid. And sitting on a stack that, when bitcoin eventually recovered, would be priced in at a significant discount.

This is the compounding dynamic of DCA through volatility. You're not just averaging down — you're systematically accumulating more units when prices are suppressed. The months that felt worst were the months that mattered most for the long-term stack.

The FIRE community knows this pattern from decades of stock market investing. Every drawdown — 2001, 2008, 2020 — was a gift to the automated investor. Bitcoin's volatility is more dramatic, but the mechanics are identical. You stay the course. You trust the system. You keep buying.

📊 Above and Below

Here's the clearest way to visualize what those 60 months of DCA actually produced.

Read more

For the past several weeks, I’ve been working on a tool that I wish existed when I started my own FIRE journey — something that takes the frameworks we talk about every week in this newsletter and makes them actionable.

Today, I’m excited to share it with you: the FIRE BTC Compass.

🤔 What is it?

The FIRE BTC Compass is a free, privacy-first tool that helps you track your progress toward financial independence using a bitcoin-centric framework.

You enter a few numbers — your annual expenses, bitcoin holdings, stocks, and income — and it shows you exactly where you stand on the FIRE Spectrum, how far you are from your target, and what milestones you’ve already unlocked.

If you’ve read my piece on the 9 Levels of Financial Independence, this is that framework brought to life.

👉 Try it now: calc.firebtc.io

🏗️ Why I built this

Every morning, I update a spreadsheet. I’ve done it every day since 2019. It tracks my bank accounts, bitcoin holdings, stocks, expenses — everything. It’s how I stay grounded in my financial reality and measure my progress toward FIRE.

That spreadsheet changed how I think about money. Seeing my portfolio value relative to my annual expenses — and watching that multiple grow over time — gave me clarity that no budgeting app or net worth tracker ever did.

But a spreadsheet isn’t something I can share with you. And the tools that do exist aren’t built for the way we think about financial independence.

Most FIRE calculators assume a 100% stock portfolio and the traditional 4% rule. They don’t account for bitcoin’s fundamentally different risk-reward profile or the way a blended portfolio of bitcoin and stocks changes your FIRE target.

The FIRE BTC Compass does.

🔍 What you’ll see

When you open the Compass and enter your numbers, here’s what you get:

Your FIRE Level — Where you stand on the FIRE Spectrum (Level 0 through Level 9). Not a vague sense of progress, but a specific level with a specific meaning. Hover over any level to see what it unlocks.

Two FIRE targets — The traditional 4% rule target (25x your annual expenses) and a BTC-adjusted target that accounts for your bitcoin allocation. If you hold bitcoin, your target is lower — because bitcoin’s asymmetric upside changes the math.

The Bitcoin Advantage — The dollar difference between the traditional target and your BTC-adjusted target. This is the head start that holding bitcoin gives you.

Key metrics — Your FIRE multiple, savings rate, progress percentages, and estimated time to FI under both traditional and BTC-adjusted frameworks.

Portfolio history — Save a snapshot each time you update your numbers and watch your progress over time. The chart tracks your portfolio value against both FIRE targets so you can see yourself getting closer.

🔒 Privacy first

I want to be very clear about this: your data never leaves your device.

The Compass runs entirely in your browser. There are no accounts. No logins. No cookies. No tracking. No server storing your financial information. Everything is saved locally using your browser’s storage.

I built it this way on purpose. Your financial data is nobody’s business but yours.

🎁 Free for everyone — for now

Starting today, the full Compass is free and open to everyone.

I want you to use it, explore it, and tell me what you think. What’s useful? What’s missing? What would make this indispensable for your FIRE journey?

Over the next month, I’ll be incorporating your feedback and refining the tool. After that, the full feature set will move behind the paid subscriber wall — but a free tier with core functionality will always be available.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll have full access, always.

If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, this is your chance to experience the full tool and see if it’s worth it. I think it will be.

🗺️ How to get started

1. Go to calc.firebtc.io

2. Click Settings and enter your financial numbers

3. Hit Save Snapshot & View Dashboard

4. Explore your FIRE Level, metrics, and the progress chart

It takes about 60 seconds. And if it’s your first time, there’s a guided tour that walks you through everything.

🚀 What’s coming

This is version 1. Here’s what’s on the roadmap:

• Projections — Model different scenarios and see how your FIRE timeline changes under various assumptions

• Expense tracking — A lightweight way to track spending categories over time

• Export — Download your snapshot history

• More charts — Additional visualizations of your journey

Your feedback will shape what gets built next. Reply to this email or use the feedback link in the Compass — I read everything.

🖼️ The bigger picture

I started FIRE BTC because I believe bitcoin changes the math on financial independence. Not in a speculative, “number go up” way, but in a fundamental, structural way. Bitcoin’s scarcity, its asymmetric return profile, and its role as a savings technology mean that a portfolio with meaningful bitcoin exposure needs less to achieve the same level of security.

The Compass is the first tool that makes that concrete. Enter your numbers and see for yourself.

👉 calc.firebtc.io

Stack sats. Track progress. Build freedom.

Trey ✌️

College education.

My daughters are 8 and 10. Roughly a decade from college. And when I try to picture what the world looks like when they're 18, I draw a blank. Can you picture it? Because I can't.

So I've been asking myself a question that would have been heresy when I was growing up: Would I even recommend college?

I've been running the numbers, and the answer is getting harder to justify.

💸 The Price Tag

In 2026, a four-year degree at an in-state public university runs about $109,000 all-in. Go out of state and you're looking at $183,000. Choose a private school and you'll clear $235,000 before your kid has earned a single dollar.

That's not a typo. A quarter of a million dollars...for a bachelor's degree.

There's $1.81 trillion in outstanding US student debt spread across 42.8 million borrowers. And the average repayment timeline is 20 years. You finish paying off your education right around the time your own kids are heading to campus. Poetic, isn't it.

Since 2000, college costs have risen 157%. Even after adjusting for inflation, that's a 37.5% real increase. At historical tuition inflation rates, a private four-year degree could hit $230,000 or more by the mid-2030s — right when my girls would be enrolling.

College costs inflate because of the monetary system. Cheap government-backed credit flows into universities. Tuition ratchets up to absorb it. Students borrow more. Lenders extend more. And the cycle repeats. It's the same fiat debt spiral that inflates housing, healthcare, and everything else the government gets its grubby little hands on to either regulate or subsidize with easy money.

You're paying 2026 prices with 2046 dollars to learn 2016 skills.

📊 The Shrinking Premium

The standard defense of college has always been the wage premium — graduates earn more over a lifetime than non-graduates. And that used to be a strong argument.

Used to be.

The college wage premium has stagnated since 2000. While costs skyrocketed 157%, the return flatlined. And it gets worse when you look at what happens after graduation. According to the Burning Glass Institute, 52% of college graduates are underemployed one year after finishing their degree. They're working jobs that don't require the credential they just spent four years and six figures acquiring. And 45% are still underemployed a decade later.

The public knows it, too. Only 22% of Americans say a four-year degree is worth it if you have to take out loans. Twenty-two percent. A vote of no confidence. Meanwhile, 53% of employers now claim to have dropped degree requirements from their job postings. The signal is weakening from both sides.

When I bring this up, someone always says, "But what about the socialization? The life experience?" You're paying $200,000+ for your kid to learn to live with roommates, go to parties, and figure out who they are.

Those are valuable experiences. Trust me, I enjoyed my time in college. But they're not $200,000 experiences.

Half of college grads are working jobs that don't require their degrees. Welcome to the credentialing racket.

🤖 The Intelligence Revolution

A few months ago, something shifted for me. I started building with AI in a way I never had before — not just prompting a chatbot, but working with agentic AI assistants that could actually do things. Write code. Build tools. Ship products.

I set up OpenClaw, an open-source, self-hosted AI assistant framework. I started vibe coding — sketching out ideas and letting AI handle the implementation. It has opened the door for me to create and build things that I never would have had the time, inclination, resources, or skill set to do before. And I've got something cooking for FIRE BTC readers that I'm really excited about. Stay tuned.

Read more

For context, that's "Extreme Fear" territory — the kind of number we haven't seen since the depths of 2022. Bitcoin is sitting around $79k, down nearly 30% from its highs. ETF holders who bought in at $84k on average are now staring at red portfolios. Even Michael Saylor's 712,000 BTC stack briefly went underwater.

And yet.

The S&P 500 is at all-time highs. Gold has been on an absolute tear. Silver just broke records. Traditional risk assets are partying like it's 1999, and bitcoin — supposedly the apex risk asset — keeps bleeding.

It doesn't make sense.

🤔 The Great Divergence

Let's talk about what's happening here, because if you're feeling confused or frustrated, you're not alone.

The fundamentals for bitcoin have never been stronger:

• Nation states are accumulating

• Corporate treasuries are adopting the Strategy playbook

• The ETFs exist and have pulled in billions

• The halving supply shock is working its way through the system

• The macro case (debt, deficits, debasement) gets stronger every quarter

And yet the price keeps falling.

Markets don't always make sense in the short term. Bitcoin trades 24/7/365 across the globe, which means it's often the first asset to get sold when uncertainty spikes. It's the most liquid thing in the world at 3am when someone in Asia needs to raise cash.

Right now, we're swimming in uncertainty. Tariff headlines. Fed policy questions. Political chaos. The bitcoin market, gold, and silver are telling us something is broken or in the process of breaking. We just don't know exactly what that is yet.

But I firmly believe that the divergence between bitcoin's price and bitcoin's fundamentals has never been wider. And historically, that gap doesn't stay open for long.

💪 What Conviction Actually Looks Like

Let's talk about Saylor for a minute.

Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) holds 712,647 bitcoin. That's roughly $56 billion at current prices. Their average cost basis is around $76k, which means their entire position briefly went red this week.

You know what Saylor did?

He bought more. Last week alone, Strategy added 855 BTC at an average price of $87,974. While everyone else was panicking, he was stacking.

Strategy also increased the yield on STRC, the company's preferred equity instrument that targets cash-like stability through monthly dividend adjustments. It now pays a robust 11.25% annually. He's sticking to his plan, despite the market pressure.

That's what conviction looks like. It's not about being right in the short term, but about having a time horizon that makes the short term irrelevant.

Most people don't have Saylor's conviction because they don't have his understanding. They bought bitcoin hoping it would go up. He bought bitcoin knowing why it will go up — and more importantly, why it doesn't matter if it goes down first.

😰 The Psychology of Fear

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Guest: Joe Burnett, Head of Bitcoin Strategy at Strive Asset Management
Host: Trey Sellers
Recording Date: January 23, 2026
Episode Duration: 56 minutes

Welcome to the inaugural episode of the FIRE BTC Podcast. This conversation with Joe Burnett explores what it actually looks like to build a life around bitcoin — from discovering it in college to navigating a career transition at the 2021 peak, surviving the bear market, and thinking through the real-world questions that come with trying to build wealth on a bitcoin standard.

We cover Joe’s journey from his first exposure to bitcoin at around $1,000 in 2017, through stacking sats on a limited income in college, to eventually leaving a traditional finance career to work full-time in the bitcoin industry. Along the way, we dig into practical topics that don’t get enough attention: how to think about spending when your savings are in bitcoin, why borrowing against your stack might not make sense even when it’s available, how to navigate bitcoin ownership in relationships and marriage, and whether the goal should ever really be to stop working entirely.

This isn’t a conversation about macro narratives or price predictions. It’s about the personal finance side of bitcoin — the decisions, trade-offs, and mindset shifts that come with trying to align your financial life with a fundamentally different form of money.

About Joe Burnett

Joe Burnett is the Head of Bitcoin Strategy at Strive Asset Management, where he focuses on corporate bitcoin treasury strategy and institutional adoption. He discovered bitcoin in 2017 during college and has been working full-time in the bitcoin industry since 2021. His career path includes roles at EY, Blockware Solutions, Unchained, and Similar Scientific (acquired by Strive). Joe is known for his long-form research and educational content on bitcoin’s role in corporate finance and personal wealth building.

Follow Joe:
- X: @IIICapital
- YouTube: @JoeBurnett27

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to FireBTC Podcast
02:25 Joe Burnett’s Bitcoin Journey
06:18 College Years and Early Investments
12:27 Transitioning to a Bitcoin Career
18:21 Evolving Perspectives on Bitcoin and Spending
24:33 The Future of Bitcoin and Personal Finance
29:04 Navigating Bitcoin Ownership and Tax Implications
31:11 The Risks of Borrowing Against Bitcoin
33:01 Balancing Bitcoin and Personal Relationships
39:43 Career Aspirations in the Bitcoin Space
43:16 Financial Independence and Joint Financial Planning
51:01 Lessons Learned and Advice for Friends
55:23 Subscribe to FIRE BTC

Key Topics Discussed

• First hearing about bitcoin in 2017 when it was trading around $1,000

• Building a commodity price tracking Android app in middle school (2011-2012) and early exposure to markets

• Growing up with a value investing mindset before discovering bitcoin

• Stacking bitcoin in college on a limited income while managing traditional expenses

• The decision to quit a stable job at EY to join Blockware Solutions at the 2021 market peak

• Surviving the 2022 bear market with income directly tied to bitcoin and mining operations

• Natural spending habits and not needing to actively budget or restrict lifestyle

• The concept of declining “BTC yield” as your stack grows and what that means for stacking intensity

• The GBTC confession: why keeping bitcoin in a Coinbase account despite knowing better

• Perspective on borrowing against bitcoin and the real risk of forced liquidation

• Getting married and approaching joint financial planning with a partner

• His fiancée independently choosing to buy bitcoin without prompting

• Career aspirations in bitcoin corporate finance and treasury strategy

• Why full retirement might not be the goal — even with significant bitcoin wealth

• The importance of having purpose and meaningful work beyond just accumulating wealth

Notable Quotes

On discovering bitcoin:
“The market is kind of saying, hey, something is here. And I was like, well, I need to find out what this is.”

On spending and lifestyle:
“I live like how I really would want to live without too much excess. I’m not living below my means in a way that’s painful.”

On allocation strategy:
“It’s unnecessary to be all in on Bitcoin from a personal perspective. Like, you don’t need to be all in to have life-changing wealth from Bitcoin.”

On borrowing against bitcoin:
“I don’t want to be a forced seller at $30,000 Bitcoin. That’s the worst outcome for me.”

On career and purpose:
“If I had a hundred million dollars worth of Bitcoin, which would be incredible, I honestly might still be doing exactly what I’m doing right now.”

Resources & Links

People & Companies:
- Strive Asset Management
- Nakamoto Institute
- True North (Jeff Walton’s podcast)

Connect with the show:
- Subscribe to FIRE BTC newsletter: firebtc.substack.com
- Follow Trey on X: @ts_hodl

Subscribe to FIRE BTC

If you’re interested in exploring the intersection of financial independence and bitcoin, subscribe to the FIRE BTC newsletter at firebtc.substack.com. Each week covers practical strategies, mental models, and framework for building wealth on a bitcoin standard — from first principles thinking about the 4% rule to navigating career transitions, from expected value calculations to understanding when conventional personal finance advice breaks down.

This podcast is an extension of that work: real conversations with people who are actually living this out, making these decisions, and thinking through what it means to build a financial life around fundamentally different money.

Thanks for listening.

Until next time,
Trey

If you only knew him for the comic strip, you missed his real genius. Adams was one of the sharpest observers of systems, persuasion, and "talent stacking". His book "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big" became a cult classic in entrepreneurship circles because it was ruthlessly practical.

I became a fan of Adams leading into the 2016 election. While everyone else was writing off Trump's chances, Adams was predicting a win way before anyone else took it seriously. I was fascinated by his approach to thinking about the problem and the connections he was making between persuasion, branding, and voter psychology.

He saw what others were completely blindsided by.

I used that edge to make a bet on the 2016 election. I won the bet and bought bitcoin with the proceeds. That bitcoin purchase has been extremely profitable.

Adams also had underappreciated financial wisdom that aligns perfectly with the FIRE mindset. This week, we're diving into his best ideas and where I respectfully part ways with him.

⚙️ Systems vs. Goals

Adams' most influential idea:

"Losers have goals. Winners have systems."

This one sentence has done a lot to change how I think about my personal finances and career.

A goal is a specific outcome you either hit or miss. A system is something you do regularly with reasonable expectation that it improves your odds over time.

In the FIRE approach, we set a goal to reach financial independence, but the system is what really matters.

Adams explained: "Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems."

Think about that. If your goal is to hit $1 million in savings, you're "failing" every single day until you hit that number. Even at $999,000, you haven't achieved the goal. You're living in a perpetual state of not-there-yet.

But if your system is to automatically save 50% of every paycheck and stack sats weekly, you succeed every time you execute the system. The outcome takes care of itself.

This is the ultimate FIRE mindset.

Your DCA is a system. Your automatic savings is a system. Your side hustle is a system. Hitting a specific FIRE number is the goal that the system is designed to achieve.

Goals are useful for direction, but systems are what get you there. Focus on the system, and the number will materialize as a natural consequence.

Adams also understood that willpower is finite: "Willpower is a finite resource. Don't pick a model that has failure built into it."

You can't white-knuckle your way through 10-15 years of accumulation. You need systems that run on autopilot, that remove the need for constant decision-making. Set it up once, let it compound, and get out of your own way.

🧱 Talent Stacking

For me, Adams' second major insight is that you don't need to be world-class at one thing. You just need to be "pretty good" (top 25%) at multiple complementary skills.

His said as much: "I'm a perfect example of the power of leveraging multiple mediocre skills. I'm a rich and famous cartoonist who doesn't draw well."

Adams wasn't the best artist, writer, comedian, or businessman. But combining all four created Dilbert and made him a multimillionaire.

The FIRE application is obvious: You don't need an exceptional income OR exceptional savings discipline. Being pretty good at both compounds powerfully.

Multiple income streams beat a single salary. Combining skills—like coding + finance + writing—creates unique career moats that are hard to replicate.

Adams' talent stack philosophy is also why side hustles and freelancing work so well for FIRE practitioners. You're not trying to be the world's best developer or the world's best writer. You're building a portfolio of complementary skills that stack into something valuable and rare.

🔀 Where We Part Ways

Adams was brilliant, but, of course, there are places where his thoughts on personal finance and mine diverge. Here's where I respectfully disagree.

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You maxed out your 401(k) every year. You grabbed every dollar of employer match. You watched your balance grow into the hundreds of thousands—maybe even millions. You’re on track for FIRE.

Then reality hits: You’re 42, you’ve hit your number, and 80% of your net worth is locked in retirement accounts you can’t touch for another 17 years without getting slapped with a 10% penalty on top of ordinary income taxes.

Congratulations. You’ve built golden handcuffs.

This is one of the most common traps in the FIRE community. I’ve avoided it by design—I contribute just enough to grab the employer match, then direct everything else to Bitcoin in self-custody. My retirement accounts will cover later years, which is what they’re meant for. The rest stays accessible.

But I’ve watched plenty of people fall into this trap. Today we’re going to make sure you don’t.

🔒 Wealth You Can’t Use

I’ve written before about Tax Free FIRE. I hate giving the government more than I have to. But avoiding taxes isn’t the only goal—retiring early is. Sometimes those goals conflict.

401(k)s are designed for the average worker who needs guardrails. Auto-enrollment, auto-escalation, penalties for early withdrawal—these features exist because most people lack the discipline to save on their own. The system is built to protect people from themselves.

But you’re reading this newsletter, which means you’re not the average worker. You’re conscientious enough to understand nuance. You don’t need guardrails—you need optionality. And that changes the calculus.

The rules: withdraw before 59½ and you pay income taxes PLUS a 10% penalty. That penalty exists to keep you working and paying taxes until you’re old. Early retirement wasn’t part of the plan—their plan, anyway.

The standard FIRE advice is to maximize tax-advantaged accounts. And that’s not wrong—the tax benefits are real. But if you follow that advice too aggressively, you end up with a massive imbalance: tons of wealth you can’t access and not enough in taxable accounts to bridge the gap.

Think about it this way: If you retire at 45 and need $60,000/year to live, you need roughly $900,000 in accessible funds just to cover the 15 years until you can tap your retirement accounts penalty-free. Do you have that much outside your 401(k)?

Most people don’t.

🔓 Loopholes

There are a few legitimate ways to access retirement funds early without the 10% penalty. Each has trade-offs, and the right choice depends on your situation."

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Take money, for example. My kids recently looked at a one dollar bill and a hundred dollar bill sitting side by side. Same paper. Same texture. Same material. Identical in every physical way except for the numbers printed on them.

“Why is one worth more if they’re exactly the same?” they asked.

It’s the kind of question that exposes something adults have learned to ignore. We’ve accepted the premise so completely that we never question it anymore. But kids see the obvious truth: two pieces of identical paper with different numbers, yet we treat them as fundamentally different in value.

This innocent observation points to something deeper about how money actually works. And it becomes even more relevant when you look at what’s happening in the news right now. When the President of the United States threatens criminal charges against the Chair of the Federal Reserve to pressure him into lowering interest rates, you’re watching adults fight over who gets to decide what those numbers mean.

Kids would just see the absurdity.

🔍 The truth about all money

So why does that hundred dollar bill give you more purchasing power? The answer is simple and a little weird: because we all agree it does.

There’s no magic in the paper. No “intrinsic value” hiding in the ink or the cotton fibers. The hundred dollar bill isn’t made of anything more valuable than the one dollar bill. The difference is pure collective agreement. We’ve decided—together, as a society—that the number one hundred on a piece of government-issued paper is more valuable than the number one written on an otherwise-identical paper slip.

This is true for all money. Every form of currency that has ever existed derives its monetary value from one thing and one thing alone: collective belief. Bitcoin works the same way. A bitcoin isn’t valuable because it’s made of something special. It’s valuable because millions of people have agreed it is.

Value isn’t intrinsic. It’s subjective. It exists only in the minds of people who believe it does. This might sound unsettling, but it’s the foundation of understanding why some forms of money are better than others—and it’s exactly what we explored in our previous piece on the intrinsic value myth.

The real question isn’t whether money has intrinsic value. The question is: what constraints exist on the thing we’ve collectively agreed to believe in?

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Trey ✌️

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