🧘 The Hardest Thing About Being in Bitcoin Is Doing Nothing
FIRE BTC Issue #89 - Why building wealth often requires maintaining your perspective—and leaving the compounding engine alone.
Most things in life deteriorate if you don't maintain them. Houses, cars, relationships, jobs—we spend our lives learning that moving forward requires us to keep doing something. The fiat financial system reinforces the lesson because standing still financially means losing purchasing power over time.
It is natural for that instinct to carry over into investing. When a plan feels slow, doing something feels more responsible than sitting still.
But once your FIRE plan is working, changing it every time you feel restless can do more harm than good. The hardest part about being in bitcoin is often sitting tight, continuing to accumulate, and letting time do the work.
The recent Coldcard security advisory is an obvious exception: when a real custody problem appears, you fix it. The harder cases are the ones where nothing is broken, but waiting has become uncomfortable.
🎢 Fighting FOMO
There are two market environments where I have to fight the urge to do something in order to gain more beta than I am getting from my current strategy, which is buying and holding bitcoin in large amounts over a long period of time.
In a bull market, when bitcoin is ripping, there is always some related opportunity where other people seem to be outperforming bitcoin. In the last bull market, the main examples were bitcoin treasury companies, MSTR options, ETF options, and leverage. It looks like everybody else is making an absolute killing. You are doing well, too, but it feels like you could build wealth even faster if you made one of those other moves.
When bitcoin is down or has been down for a while, the temptation is different. I look outside bitcoin and see the trade that now appears obvious in hindsight. Recently, that has been AI and chip stocks. It is very difficult to sit on your hands, stick to your plan, and continue to accumulate while another part of the market is moving without you.
James Check calls that second experience time pain: the boredom and opportunity cost of watching other assets rise while yours doesn't. Time pain can make patience look like ignorance. Maybe the plan is no longer working. Maybe the world changed and you missed it. Maybe rotating now is the only way to catch up.
