🗓️ 2025 FIRE BTC Year in Review
FIRE BTC Issue 60 - Broken models, better frameworks
There’s one thing that’s hard to ignore about 2025.
If you had asked me coming into the year what my base-case expectation was, I would have told you we’d almost certainly end with bitcoin much higher, and that a move toward $250k wouldn’t have been surprising. Instead, we got volatility, chop, and a lot of disappointment.
Bitcoin made new all-time highs this year — yet still ended the year slightly lower.
That outcome broke almost everyone’s models. Mine included.
Meanwhile, stocks screamed higher. Gold ripped. And bitcoin languished.
There’s no real enthusiasm right now. And that’s despite enormous progress on the regulatory front, broader institutional access, improving infrastructure, and clearer adoption pathways than we’ve ever had. By almost every measure, bitcoin’s fundamentals strengthened — and the price refused to cooperate.
Some combination of the AI trade soaking up marginal liquidity and long-term holders selling into strength turned 2025 into a frustrating year to live through if you were anchored to price.
In a strange way, that tension shaped much of what I wrote this year.
When markets don’t behave the way you expect, you’re forced to interrogate your assumptions. About money. About risk. About the fundamentals of what actually matters.
The work in FIRE BTC throughout 2025 was largely an attempt to do exactly that — to separate signal from noise and focus on what holds up regardless of short-term outcomes.
What follows is a guided tour through the ideas that shaped the newsletter throughout the year.
⏪ Looking back
Most of what I wrote for FIRE BTC in 2025 started from the same place: trying to get clearer about what financial independence actually requires — and where commonly accepted personal finance perspectives start to break down — especially once bitcoin enters the picture.
A good example is the question almost everyone asks at the beginning of their FIRE journey: How much is enough?
The 4% rule has become the default answer. It’s simple, widely cited, and easy to apply. But simplicity can hide assumptions, and assumptions matter. In Is the 4% Rule Relevant to Bitcoin?, I went back to first principles — where the rule comes from, what it assumes about assets, volatility, time horizons, and inflation — and then asked how those assumptions change when part of your savings is held in bitcoin. The goal wasn’t to discard the rule entirely, but to understand when it applies, when it doesn’t, and how to adapt it rather than blindly follow it.
That same line of thinking carried into GoalSeek. While the 4% rule is anchored to dollar-denomination, this piece was an attempt to reprice retirement math — a way to translate expenses, assumptions, and time horizons into an actual bitcoin target. It’s an extension of the traditional FIRE approach, but adapted for a world where savings behavior, volatility, and long-term expected returns look very different.
And in Trim and TurboCharge, the focus shifted from the asset side of the equation to the expense side, showing how cutting $800 from a monthly budget doesn’t just save money in the short term, but permanently lowers the bar for financial independence and accelerates the entire plan.
Once the fundamentals are in place, the questions tend to change. Instead of asking how much do I need?, people start asking what actually matters from here? A lot of the work this year explored that transition — the point where progress comes less from doing more and more from seeing things differently.
In Making Your Job Your Side Gig, I looked at what happens when your accumulated savings and investments begin to grow faster than your paycheck. At that point, work stops being the primary engine and becomes optional — not necessarily something you quit, but something you relate to differently.
The Stacking Sprint explored a similar idea from another angle: instead of spreading effort evenly across decades, it argues for intensity over a finite window. Bear down early, stack aggressively, and then let compounding do the heavy lifting later. The end result often looks like Coast FIRE, but reached deliberately rather than accidentally.
Other pieces pushed the reframe even further. Working Backward from Death flipped the usual planning order entirely, starting at an assumed endpoint and funding life in reverse. The exercise changes how you think about “enough” and clarifies when you’re actually done.
Instead of treating FIRE as a binary state, The 9 Levels of Financial Independence reframed it as a spectrum — one where meaningful freedoms open up long before full financial independence is reached.
Kane McGukin’s guest post, Time to Re-tire, took the same idea and applied it to retirement itself, not as stopping, but as changing direction once money is no longer the constraint.
Through all of this, though, was a consistent emphasis on running the numbers. Many of the most widely read pieces this year fell into this category, which probably isn’t an accident. A lot of popular financial advice sounds responsible until you actually look at the math.
Expected Value Thinking laid out the lens that underpins much of the rest: good decisions come from probabilities and expected outcomes, not from comfort or fear. That lens was applied directly in Peace of Mind, where I challenged the instinct to pay off a mortgage early simply because it feels safe, and in the analysis of Trump’s proposed 50-year mortgage, where extending mortgage debt — under the right conditions — can actually improve outcomes rather than worsen them.
The same principle showed up in more extreme examples. In The Most Depressing Lottery Win Ever, about a Canadian woman who chose $1,000 a week for life instead of a $1 million lump sum, the math makes it painfully clear how intuition can lead people astray.
Emergency Economics tackled a similar issue from another direction, questioning the standard advice around emergency funds and showing why holding large cash balances often fails an expected value test once opportunity cost and liquidity elsewhere are considered.
And then there was the hysteria around bitcoin treasury companies. In June, at the height of enthusiasm, I wrote mNAV Madness, a piece calling out how absurd the premiums had become for companies like Strategy and Metaplanet. It wasn’t a prediction — just an application of basic valuation discipline. In hindsight, it marked the top in that trade.
Taken together, these pieces were about being disciplined. About reducing dependence, increasing optionality, and choosing decisions with the highest expected value — even when they don’t feel good in the moment or go against long-held, emotionally-driven beliefs.
🛣️ Looking ahead
Despite the frustration felt by bitcoiners in 2025, it’s hard to look at the current setup and feel genuinely pessimistic.
The Fed has already started cutting. The administration is openly calling for lower rates and will install a new Fed chair. Midterms are coming, which historically creates incentives to run the economy hot.
And the bitcoin market absorbed an enormous amount of supply this year with only a modest pullback by historical standards.
Liquidity doesn’t stay tight forever. When it returns, I expect bitcoin to react accordingly.
More importantly, 2025 was a useful reminder for us FIRE practitioners and bitcoiners: the path to financial independence is not a straight line.
FIRE and personal finance are as much art as they are science. You build a plan based on probabilities, not certainties. And then you stick to that plan when reality goes against your expectations — because you know it’s grounded in sound fundamentals and built on sound money.
If nothing else, 2025 offered something extremely valuable: the opportunity to accumulate more bitcoin than most people thought they’d ever be able to again.
I hope you took advantage of it.
That’s it for 2025 — thanks for reading!
Until next time,
Trey ✌️