Happy 17th Birthday BITCOIN!

Happy birthday, Bitcoin. Bitcoin just turned 17 years old on January 3rd. Bitcoin was launched on January 3rd of 2009. So, as of January 3rd of 2026, Bitcoin is 17 years old. And as a tribute to Bitcoin, I want to go back and process as though I had heard about Bitcoin the day the white paper was released on October 31st of 2008 or the day Bitcoin was launched on January 3rd, 2009. And I want to tell you what I think I would have thought had I been there. Because we all think we would have thought, "Wow, this is genius. I totally see the future and mind at least a few thousand coins just for us for practically free just for the price of electricity." That's what we all think we would have done. But almost nobody did that. And they didn't do it because they all responded or or almost all of them responded exactly like I know I would have responded. So let's play it out. This is 100% hypothetical. I did not buy or acquire any Bitcoin until 2017. I don't have any history with Bitcoin before 2017. But I know enough about myself and I'm honest enough with myself to know what I would have thought had I read the white paper back on October 31st of 20 of 2008 or if I had uh you know downloaded Bitcoin when it first became available in the first two weeks of 2009. Okay. So the first thing is you get you get Bitcoin, you read the white paper or you download it, you know the software. The first thing everybody thought, which is what I would have thought, is oh here we go again. We've been trying to solve the problem of digital cash for the electronic age for 40 years now from 1969 all the way to 2009. And I would have thought there is no way some random person named Satoshi Nakamoto has solved a problem that none of the rest of us have been able to solve for 40 years. Now, I was not one of the cipher punks. So, when I'm referring to all of the rest of us, I'm hypothetically teleporting myself back there and assuming I actually was one of the cipher punks, and I was on the mailing list, which I was not. Okay? But I know I would have responded like many of them did, which is to say, Satoshi Nakamoto, this is somebody nobody else has heard of. Nobody's heard of a brand new pseudonym, and he's proposing this novel approach that nobody's thought of before. And sure, it's decentralized, but you know, other than that, the technology is totally a headscratcher. When you first are exposed to Bitcoin, especially if you have any background in technology or computer science, the way Bitcoin is architected to work does not immediately resonate to you. It's like again I mean I don't know what a good example would be but like you know the people with a horse and carriage you know with the Model T Ford they're like wait where are the horses? Why is it not being pulled from the front? You know why is it rearwheel drive? Like why are the back wheels the ones doing the pushing instead of the front wheels doing the pulling? I mean it's just stuff like that. Anyway, so I would have read the white paper and f my first response would have been there's no way that this random guy that nobody's heard of and I don't know has invented something new after 40 years of trying. So I would have dismissed it right there because I just would have assumed there's no way that this guy actually cracked the code. Now we know in retrospect 17 years ago he did crack the code. He did solve for the very first time in human history the problem of digital scarcity which is how do we create something that is digital meaning it's electronic but you can't just copy paste it because the problem with things that are electronic is they can be duplicated and you can't use money that's electronic if you can duplicate it because then you have unlimited money so the genius of the invention of bitcoin was something called the blockchain and Satoshi Nakamoto invented the blockchain and without that you can't do electronic money without a central issuer. Uh, and of course, if you have a central issuer, then the government just takes it over, which is what had been happening for 40 years. Every time somebody spun up some sort of new electronic cash, the government would say, "We don't like that." And they'd shut them down for being an unlicensed money transmitter or whatever it was. You know, they'd come up with some reason that the the entity was not allowed to exist, and poof, they'd be gone. So, obviously, Bitcoin has the opposite because it is decentralized. But again, I would have dismissed it. So, I know I would have dismissed it. If I didn't immediately dismiss it because it was from a person I'd never heard of with a novel approach I nobody thought was going to work. I would have start started picking apart the technology. And I know I would have dismissed it as I encountered each piece of the technology. For example, I would have looked at Bitcoin and said it's got a 10-minute block time. That's never going to work for payments because payments need to be instantaneous. Now, I would not have realized, yeah, they effectively are instantaneous as soon as they hit the meool and second layer solutions like the lightning network are going to be get built on top of Bitcoin that offer even better privacy and faster throughput and lower fees. Again, my brain would have just said 10-minute block times. That doesn't make sense. Now, the truth is Bitcoin has to have 10-minute block times because they there has to be a time for all of the nodes, more than 100,000 nodes worldwide, to all be in sync. And if the block time is too fast, the the nodes cannot all synchronize, including the nodes that are running in space and on satellites, it takes time for those to synchronize. And even though it's only a few seconds, you want to be super sure that they all have the same record of truth. So, Bitcoin needs a 10-minute block time. But again, I would have dismissed it and said that's not the way money should work. When the truth is that's the only way electronic money can work. I also would have looked at the Bitcoin blocks and said, "Okay, if this thing's going to process transactions the way Mastercard and Visa process, the blocks of transactions for each block are going to get way too big." Again, I would not have contemplated that there would be second layer solutions like the Bitcoin Lightning Network or like Coinbase or Cash App or River that aggregate huge amounts of uh transactions on their own ledgers and then write them periodically to the actual Bitcoin ledger. Um, I just would not have understood it worked that way. Or that the Bitcoin Lightning Network would take all of the payments off of the uh chain and effectively aggregate hundreds or thousands of payments and then write them all at one time with just a single transaction to the Bitcoin uh main chain. Again, my brain would have read through the white paper and I would have come up with between five and seven reasons that Bitcoin just couldn't work. And so my brain would have said, uh, Bitcoin can't work for these five to seven technical reasons, which frankly were the exact same five to seven technical reasons that all the people who read the the white paper to start with said it couldn't work. That's why the vast majority of people uh dismissed Bitcoin rather than embracing it. Even the cipher punks that had been trying to solve this problem for 40 years when the Bitcoin white paper hit uh the cipher punk mailing list, which was where it was originally released, they read it and they came to the same conclusions I would have come to, which is, hey, it's unlikely that this guy none of us have heard of for, you know, has has solved a problem we've been trying to solve for 40 years. And it's unlikely his solution is going to work for the five to seven technical reasons that I would have come up with. Now, what do we know 17 years later? The answer is we know we were all wrong. So I know I would have been wrong. The vast majority of people early in Bitcoin were wrong. They turned it on. They played with the software. They said, "Hey, this makes my computer run hot. This thing's probably never going to work." And so they turned their computer off. They stopped the software running. And in the background, it would have accumulated a few thousand Bitcoin for them, worth a few hundred million dollar um today. But again, they turned it off because it made their computer run hot and they just didn't think it could really work in the real world. Again, for a million different reasons, including I'm not going to go into all of them, but I could outline all the five to seven most technical reasons that people objected and said, I just don't think this thing's going to work. And if you don't think it's going to work, there's no reason you would leave your computer on back then mining Bitcoin. Now, today, you can't mine Bitcoin by turning your computer on. You have to have massive data centers to mine Bitcoin right now. But back then, anyone with a computer could mine Bitcoin just by downloading the software and just leaving their computer running. And it made your computer run hot because it worked the uh microprocessor really hard. Uh but other than that, you just wake up in the morning and you know, overnight your bit computer had mined 50 Bitcoin or you know, even a year in you could mine, you know, 50 or 100 Bitcoin in a week. Um so anyway, I would have dismissed it. I I would have done what most people did. Even the ones that didn't completely dismiss it, they dismissed it near-term and then came back to it when they're like, "Wait, Bitcoin's still around." In 2012, 2013, and it had been three or four years, they're like, "This thing's still running." And then they would have gone and done what I would have done, which is they would have said, "Wait, what about the five or seven reasons that this thing couldn't possibly work? How did that actually work out?" And they would have researched it, and they would have been like, "Oh, I get it. It has to have the 10-minute block times for these reasons. It has to have a one megabyte size limit on the blocks for these reasons. It's going to work this way. The Bitcoin mining works the way it does for a reason. The difficulty adjustment works the way it does for a reason. The having works the way it does for a reason. All of those things are things that after 2, three, four years, everybody could figure out how they worked and why they were necessary and frankly why they they were the only way to solve the problem of digital scarcity. But again, that's why most people then came back, the very early people in Bitcoin were coming back and buying Bitcoin at $100 a bitcoin rather than mining it almost for free, only for the price of electricity. In fact, I know almost nobody that mined Bitcoin in the early days. I know almost zero people that did that because again, the vast vast vast vast majority of them did exactly what I would have done, which is they read about it, they dismissed it, they they played around with it, they decided it wasn't worth it, they moved on, and then they circled back later when Bitcoin was a lot more expensive. Now, my actual true story is I learned about Bitcoin probably first in 2014. Um, I dismissed it for all the same reasons I just described. I just did that much later in the process, uh, because I was too busy and wasn't taking it seriously. And so, when 2017, when Bitcoin was still around, I was like, wait, this thing I heard about in 2014 that I didn't buy any of is still here in 2017. I should probably go figure out what's going on. So, I did. I figured out what was going on. Bitcoin at the time was around $10,000 per coin or really $9,000 per coin. So, I acquired my initial Bitcoin at $9,000 per coin. I bought some additional when the price dropped. Uh the cheapest Bitcoin I ever bought was $6,400. I never mined any Bitcoin. I never got any Bitcoin for free. No one ever gave me any Bitcoin. Um, so that's why all the Bitcoin I own I bought for somewhere between $6,400 or $124,000 uh recently in October before the price came way down. Um, and again, I've just been acquiring Bitcoin long enough and at all the different prices that my average price is probably around $35,000. Uh, but that's just because I've acquired a bunch for a lot cheaper and that offsets the prices of the, you know, the Bitcoin that I've bought more expensively. But anyway, uh, so congrats to Bitcoin. 17 years later, Bitcoin is amazing. Uh, all of the things that people thought were technological problems ended up being technological features rather than technological bugs. Satoshi ended up being a genius. The way he solved the problem of digital scarcity ended up being the only way it could possibly be solved. And 17 years, congrats to Bitcoin. Happy birthday, Bitcoin. And congrats to everybody who did mine it early and held on to it. It's a very small number of people, but congrats to you for not being the skeptic like me who missed out on all of that because I would have just dismissed it. I know I would have. Thankfully, I didn't dismiss it in 2017 and thankfully I fully embraced it in the years following and you can still do that right now in 2026. Bitcoin is still