So you’ve taken the orange pill. You understand that political money moves the world in the direction it’s been heading, and you are ready to protect your wealth by exchanging easily printed political coupons for the hardest money of all time. Excellent decision. And big decision… congratulations! This article is meant to answer some questions about what to do about your new knowledge.
More detail will be covered below on the motivation for these recommendations, but I know this is the most pressing question, so we might as well get right to it.
Swan Bitcoin has the best onboarding experience, customer support, and educational media, in addition to lowest fees, in the biz. I am biased, as I work there, but those qualities of Swan are what attracted me to the company in the first place.
Beyond Swan, you can’t go wrong with River Financial and Unchained Capital, who also offer great products and education.
You should buy no more than your conviction warrants, and your conviction should be a reflection of your knowledge. ie, don’t be emotional. Learn about Bitcoin, and buy an amount that your knowledge tells you is right. While Bitcoiners share a belief about the long-term direction of the price of Bitcoin, most honest Bitcoiners will tell you that short-term movements are unpredictable. Over the years, long-term Bitcoiners have witnessed a notorious amount of short-term volatility, and you don’t want to end up in a situation where you need to sell your Bitcoin at a low price - buy what you can afford. And remember, you don’t buy Bitcoin to turn a profit when you exit. Bitcoin is the exit.
Many recommend that you allocate 5-10% of your investments to Bitcoin. I think this is a good starting point, and as you learn more and develop deeper understanding and conviction, maybe you’ll be comfortable with more. For what it’s worth, quantitative models seeking to optimize portfolio returns vs the associated portfolio volatility of those returns recommend 20-30%. And then of course, in contrast to advisors who say something like “only invest what you can afford to lose,” the most zealous Bitcoiners will say things like “only keep in fiat what you can afford to lose.”
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but it is clear that there is a wrong answer, and that is 0. For safety, remember that you are buying Bitcoin for the long term, so only buy what you can afford to hodl for years without pressure to sell.
Also worth noting, although the price of 1 Bitcoin may be high, Bitcoin can be transacted in subdivisions of a full Bitcoin, down to the 100,000,000th, known as a “satoshi”. Most platforms will let you purchase as little as $10 worth of Bitcoin.
If you come across products that offer you a return on your Bitcoin - something like “if you hold your bitcoin on our platform, you’ll get a 10% annual return” - do not signup. These are scams. The history of Bitcoin is sadly littered with failed scams, from Terra Luna to Blockfi to Celsius to FTX, all of which were able to raise serious money and present themselves as legitimate companies. So it goes in new fields of innovation. Find the trustworthy companies and stick with them. That is, stick with Bitcoin-only companies that do not offer you a yield. Swan, River, and Unchained have proven to be reliable. However, ultimately you ought to progress your knowledge and comfort with the technology to be able to take self-custody. Not you keys, not your bitcoin.
A close cousin of scammers are price pumpers and hype bois. Ignore them. Just like scammers there are inevitably people on the internet trying to draw some of the hype around Bitcoin to themselves, but these people are not what Bitcoin is about. If you, for example, attend a Bitcoin conference like Bit Block Boom or Pacific Bitcoin, you will not be running into these folks. You might run into them if you went to a crypto conference, though…
Along with avoiding Bitcoin scams, stay away from other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Solana, and Doge. Bitcoin is a movement, separation of money and state. None of these other projects claim to be money (though they used to). None of them are decentralized - they are projects run and marketed by organizations who have the ability to make changes to the protocol and steer the direction of the project over time. They’ve raised money from investors looking for a return, and pre-mined huge portions of the tokens for founders and early investors. They are not supply-capped. In contrast, Bitcoin stands to separate money and state by running only on computers of users; lacking a founder, managing organization, or marketing department; and implementing a fixed supply of 21 million bitcoin.
There’s Bitcoin and there’s shitcoins. Stick with Bitcoin.
Knowledge of Bitcoin is a rabbit hole that no one has reached the end of. There are tons of Bitcoin books, podcasts, Youtube shows, etc to get your hands on, if you want to go deeper. Check out the Recommended Resources page to peruse a list of some of the best.
You don’t need to go down the rabbit hole, but you should learn more than you know now, for a few reasons:
One step at a time is all you can do! It is easy to feel like you don’t know jack sh*t about Bitcoin, especially when you start digging in. You might start listening to a podcast and hear terms relating to economics, trading, software, energy, Bitcoin wallets, etc that you’ve never heard before. There are people who have been involved in the space for a decade, and even the ones who’ve only been around Bitcoin for half that time have spent a lot of time learning about Bitcoin and its related subject matter (especially the ones who are making podcasts to talk about it publicly). I’d recommend two starting points for your learning journey:
When you subscribe to Casual Bitcoiner, you’ll be alerted when new articles are published. The point of these articles will always be to get someone from “new to Bitcoin” to where they ought to be - no more, no less!
In addition to educational articles, Casual Bitcoiner is first and foremost a weekly newsletter in a simple, engaging, easily digestible format - just a few tweets from the preceding week in Bitcoin, some educational, some news, but all easy to quickly digest and contribute to your Bitcoin knowledge, one small step at a time.
Many cities have meetups on https://meetup.com that get together on a monthly (or so) basis to hang out and discuss what’s happening in Bitcoin. This is a great place to go meet other folks who are at your level of understanding or eager to help. Bitcoiners have proven again and again to be wonderful people to hang out with in person, despite what stereotypes may come to mind. Give it a shot!
As you likely know, Bitcoiners love Bitcoin because it is verifiably scarce, you can own it yourself, and you can send it to someone without a 3rd party. If your Bitcoin is on an exchange, then these benefits are not true for you - you don’t know if you actually have the bitcoin, or if they are telling two customers that they each own the same bitcoin. You don’t own it for yourself, as the exchange is holding it for you. And you can’t send it without passing that instruction to the trusted third party that is your exchange. If you believe everything that you must believe to see the value in Bitcoin, then you should make it a goal of yours to learn enough about Bitcoin to take self-custody. Don’t think of it as a dreaded responsibility - it is incredibly empowering to know with confidence that your wealth is untouchable, totally portable, and can be sent to a friend without the help of a bank. Reading my article on the Bitcoin meme “Not your keys, not your cheese” (coming soon!!) and having a look at the linked resources will get you there. And if you work through them and don’t feel confident, reach out!
No need to rush this! You’ll want to take your time and learn enough to develop confidence before you make this next step. I’m just offering a look at a reasonable goal - not too much, not too little.
Now you enjoy living through one of the most significant revolutions in human history. The literary printing press as a technological innovation destroyed the church’s monopoly on knowledge and truth, and societies that had revolved around the power of the church transformed as a result. Now, governments’ monopoly on money is threatened, and the implications for reorganizing society could be just as significant. What a time to be alive! To take advantage, aim to learn more about what is happening by reading the articles on Casual Bitcoiner to get you up to speed on Bitcoin, maybe look at some of the recommended books, checkout your local meetup, and share your curiosity and knowledge with your loved ones. Bitcoin is a grass-roots, pleb-led movement. Communal growth is how we win.