Making a Baby (Bitcoiner) — Christmas 2020 edition
By: Stealth Node
Tags: Saving, Bitcoin, Gift Ideas, Christmas, Covid 19

The year 2020 has been a revelation for all of us. In the wake of a global pandemic, a smorgasbord of policies designed to curtail the contagious spread of the virus has disrupted every waking moment of human life, a shared experience that draws parallels universally but with asymmetrically unique aspects to each individual’s station in life. As a full-time employed manager for a corporation with an annual top line of $5 billion, whose core business is considered an essential service, my experience could be characterized as minimally disrupted — both professionally and personally. My 19-year old daughter on the other hand saw the pandemic through a wholly different lens.

She started the year on a high note, having been accepted to her top choice university, poised to graduate high school in June. She was working part-time at a local sandwich shop to build some savings, and my wife and I would occasionally go days without seeing her walk in or out of the house as she and her friends embarked on a “last hurrah” campaign in their waning days of high school. Even as the nation found itself mired with grocery store shortages, cities became engulfed in Black Lives Matter protests, and gloomy clouds of uncertainty loomed over the horizon, she dutifully continued to participate in makeshift Zoom Video classes by day and prepared sandwiches in the afternoons/evenings. Where things really started to go off the rails for her was when we dropped her off for college. The excitement she felt at the prospect of living on her own in a dorm quickly dissipated when the university announced all students were to be sent home, a single week after move-in. She grappled with video learning all semester; by Thanksgiving it was apparent that she would fail two out of five courses, and she expressed utmost distaste at the experience of professors she contended did not put half the effort into lecturing that they did into their research. She decided to not return to school for the Spring 2021 semester.

My daughter finds herself at a crossroads in her young life — something many of us have had all too much experience encountering. So as she continues to re-build her confidence, conduct some much needed soul searching, and seek ways to get back on her feet, I decided to give her a gift that might give her fresh perspective on life, renewed energy, and a previously missing sense of optimism for a bright (orange!) future, as it once did for me during a trying time in my professional career: Bitcoin. Below is the note that accompanied my gift.

December 25, 2020

Dear Gaby,

Merry Christmas and welcome to the global community of Bitcoin HODLers! I’m thrilled to gift you this Opendime, which is a starter Bitcoin wallet I’ve pre-loaded with 269,231 satoshis — I’ll get to an explanation of this sum, which seems to be oddly specific, shortly. But first, let’s talk about this USB device that’s holding the key to your newly-minted Bitcoin wealth. An unsealed Opendime is essentially cash in hand in the sense that if you have it, you can spend it; if you’ve lost it, had it stolen, or break it, there is no way to restore your savings. Treat this device as if it was a physical piece of gold! This leads me to what I’d like to address next, which is to provide you a distilled explanation of what Bitcoin is.

Bitcoin is a lot of things to a lot of people, but at its foundation, it is a digital manifestation of the world’s oldest continuously running money, gold. Bitcoin is the hardest form of money ever invented. Why is this important? Well while the US Government can print US dollars ad infinitum (this year alone the Federal Reserve has printed 20% of all the USDs ever circulated), and mandate that citizens use it for legal tender, Bitcoin is controlled by nobody, used by anybody in an uncensorable manner, and will have a final circulating supply of 21 million bitcoins. The significance of this from a societal standpoint is profound. For decades since the US Government went off of the Gold Standard (1971), generations of wealth have been stealthily robbed from U.S. citizens through inflation, which is the concept that with every year that passes, each US dollar will buy less and less. At this point in our history, we accept inflation as a totally normal and acceptable part of life, but how can you calculate how much you need save for the future when you don’t know how much what you’re saving for will cost in the future? Furthermore, WHY would you save money when you don’t know that you’ll be able to buy anything of consequence with that money in the future? Bitcoin’s immutable issuance schedule and its final circulating supply of 21M bitcoins, cannot be manipulated by any entity, which ultimately makes it the most stable and predictable form of savings ever invented.

So this brings me to the reasons I’m so excited to give you the gift of your first bitcoin. First, on a personal level it’s well-known that you’ve had difficulty finding the discipline to save money. My suggestion to you is when you get back on your feet with a job, the first thing you do with each paycheck is buy a set amount of bitcoin on Cash App, whether it’s $50 or $100, etc. and deposit it directly to your Bitcoin address in this Opendime. Only then do you go forth and spend a dime out your paycheck on anything else. Opendime is designed to be a savings vehicle, and thus the bitcoin you accumulate while using it will not be easily spendable, which is exactly as savings should be.

Second, I believe Bitcoin aligns very well with your principles. Saving in Bitcoin represents freedom from a government whose oppressive monetary policy in conjunction with the incumbent financial system favors those that are already wealthy, while masquerading this disposition by claiming to provide protections and a social safety net (welfare) to the downtrodden. If you’re looking for why economic injustice and dislocation exists, look no further than this dynamic, and indeed it is a dynamic has existed through many administrations without respite. As nice as it may sound for wealth to just be “given” or “re-distributed,” in a fair, free, and open economic system this is simply not possible without long term ramifications that exact its toll in human misery by way of a subsistence level standard of living for everyone and ultimate loss of liberty/human rights (read about Cuba, Soviet Union, North Korea, Nazi Germany, Communist China, etc.). Look further downstream to the social implications of the economic injustice wrought by our Government’s current policies and think about some of the most vile moments in our history. Ask yourself if perhaps any of those moments could have been avoided — for example could an alternate present exist where George Floyd is still among us if prior generations of his family were afforded a fair opportunity to save for a better future? As a Bitcoiner, I’m an eternal optimist and thus my answer would have to be a resounding yes — fix the money, fix the world!

On that note I will leave you with an explanation of why I’m starting your “sat stack” off with 269,231 satoshis (100,000,000 satoshis = one bitcoin). As I previously mentioned, there will only ever be 21M bitcoins in circulation. Today there are 7.8 billion people in the world. If you took the 21 million bitcoins and divided them equally amongst 7.8B people, everyone could have 269,231 satoshis. If you embrace the responsibility of custodying and protecting your savings that are currently allocated to the Bitcoin address in this Opendime, you are forever guaranteed to be at least of average wealth, in Bitcoin terms. But why stop at average? Here are some milestones to aspire to:

· 1M satoshis: satoshi millionaire

· 3M satoshis: guaranteed 90th percentile of wealth in BTC terms for the rest of history

· 27M satoshis: guaranteed 99th percentile of wealth in BTC terms for the rest of history

· 100M satoshis: whole coiner (recall 1 BTC = 100,000,000 satoshis)

· 210M satoshis (2.1 BTC): multicoiner and part of the 10 million club (no more than 10M people can ever own 2.1 BTC or more)

· 615M satoshis (6.15 BTC): 6.15er (you’re sure to come across this within hours of perusing the vibrant thought ecosystem that is Bitcoin Twitter)

· 10 BTC (1B satoshis): satoshi billionaire

· 21 BTC: part of the 1 million club

If none of that makes sense to you yet, here is what those 269,231 sats I’m gifting you have historically been worth, in US dollars:

· Today: Approximately $65

· Christmas 2019: $19.37

· Christmas 2018: $10.18

· Christmas 2017: $37.45

· Christmas 2016: $2.40

· Christmas 2015: $1.22

· Christmas 2014: $0.86

I think you can see a clear trend here (yes, the 2017 bull run was wild!), which I don’t think will ever abate as long as governments are in control of their own money printers. Bitcoin is the life raft that offers all of us the opportunity to take our fair share of the wealth distribution, in a way that cannot be diluted or censored by anybody.

Stay humble, stack sats, & HODL!

Dad