🪦 Bitcoin is Ded, Long Live Bitcoin
FIRE BTC Issue #84 - Rumors of bitcoin's death have been greatly exaggerated.
It's been a grueling bear market so far.
Bitcoin feels dead in the way that it always feels dead during stretches like this. The price is weak, $30k suddenly feels possible again, stocks are ripping, and AI has sucked almost all of the attention out of the room. In the most boomer-worded critique of all time, Jeremy Grantham recently claimed bitcoin "shouldn't be worth a bucket of warm spit".
But blocks are still coming. The supply cap is still there. People are still buying, selling, holding, spending, securing, and arguing about bitcoin every hour of every day.
Bitcoin's long-term thesis is intact and seemingly strong than ever, so why does it look so weak right now?
The short answer is that it is complicated and nobody knows for sure. Bitcoin's price reflects liquidity conditions, the market's understanding of the need for sovereign digital money, and the competition for attention from every other asset class people can allocate capital to.
In hindsight, selling all of your bitcoin in 2024 and aping into AI stocks would have been the right trade, but as FIRE practitioners, that is a different game than the one we are playing.
We are trying to save into assets that compound over long periods and help us reach financial independence without needing to become professional investors. I still think bitcoin is a better asset than stocks for that purpose, but that doesn't mean the road is easy.
The way I stay oriented in periods like this is pretty simple. I ask three questions: will fiat money continue to be debased over time, will the world continue becoming more digital from here, and is bitcoin's supply still fixed at 21 million BTC forever?
If the answer to those three questions is yes, the thesis is still intact.
🩸 The Feeling Is Familiar
One reason bitcoin bear markets are so hard to interpret is that the feeling in the moment always seems unique.
In 2018, bitcoin went from around $20k to $3,500, and it felt horrible. The memory of that period fades with time, but anyone who lived through it remembers the mood. It wasn't obvious at the time that it would become one of the great accumulation opportunities in bitcoin's history.
The 2022 bear market was objectively more painful from a drawdown standpoint. Bitcoin fell hard, major companies blew up, and the whole space felt radioactive for a while. It also offered a ridiculously good opportunity to increase your stack at much lower prices if you took advantage of it.
I did.
The same feelings are back now. Everyone and everything around you can make it feel like bitcoin is dead or dying, even though the absolute price level would have sounded absurdly bullish in prior cycles.
Sam Callahan's tweet resonated with me. We were here when bitcoin bottomed at $3,000, we were here when bitcoin bottomed at $15,000, and now we are here around $60,000. Maybe this is the bottom, maybe it isn't, and nobody knows.
But the floor keeps rising over a long period of time.
Bitcoin bear markets always feel darkest before dawn. The hard part is that dawn usually takes longer than anyone wants.
💸 Will Fiat Continue To Be Debased?
This is the first question because it is the foundation of the savings-asset thesis.
If fiat money were suddenly fixed, if governments stopped running large deficits, if central banks stopped expanding balance sheets every time the system cracked, and if dollars reliably preserved purchasing power over long periods, bitcoin's case would be weaker.
We don't live in that world.
