I remember when Bitcoin first broke $1,000 in 2013.

Back then, I was just testing the waters and learning to manage my PA, and Bitcoin (let’s be honest) was a bit of a wild card. I had just read a book about probabilistic thinking/ thinking in bets, so I thought there was probably a 1% chance that Bitcoin would make it.

The only use case for Bitcoin back then was to purchase certain ‘substances’ on the infamous online drug website, Silk Road. Across the waters, the white paper had already been translated into Chinese by the entrepreneurial Peking University student (later founder of Bitmain, Jihan Wu).

A charismatic high school teacher called Li Xiaolai was preaching Bitcoin to thousands of disciples in a school auditorium in Beijing; I flew over to see it and left the rally with my probabilistic thinking up to 3%. The sparks were ignited on both sides of the Atlantic.

Bitcoin wasn’t exactly being celebrated for its potential to revolutionize finance back then. Instead, it was painted as "drug money" or a way to circumvent capital control. Sentiment was down, but mindshare was up — and there is no such thing as bad press. The attention that came with breaking the $1k barrier saw an influx of users and builders who were genuinely curious about the tech.

Fast-forward to 2017, there were now over 1000 established altcoins and the ICO boom on Ethereum was beginning to take form.

For me, this was the time I first experienced extreme FOMO and decided to take the plunge and “do crypto” full-time.

It was a crazy time. Every other day, a new blockchain project would emerge, promising to “revolutionize” some industry. People were making fortunes overnight by releasing a one-page whitepaper and a token. I still have papers on my old hard drive with pitch decks to “tokenize all the fish in the sea” and “tokenize all the stars in the sky.”

This was Ethereum’s rise to prominence — but Bitcoin was still leading the way in terms of the general mindshare.

This period was Bitcoin’s cultural moment. Conversations about blockchain and decentralization were happening at family dinners and coffee shops.

I’d catch snippets of strangers debating crypto on the subway. It felt like the world was waking up to something we crypto nerds had been preaching all along – this isn’t another tech trend; it felt like a revolution.

A year later, the Chinese government banned Bitcoin mining, and we’ve hit a little reset.

In 2021, Bitcoin reached a new ATH. By this point, I wasn’t even surprised. I was head-down deep in my build mode at the early stages of my start-up venture.

However, I remember a friend sending me a screenshot that made me look up and stop for a moment:

Bitcoin had broken into the top 10 assets by market cap in the world — alongside giants like Tesla and Facebook.

I decided to make a little donation in Bitcoin to my Alma Mater, then back to building my “new thing.”

Yesterday, December 5, 2024, Bitcoin crossed $100,000.

The learnings for me at this point are:

1. Decentralization of ownership matters;

2. The Lindy effect is real;

3. Consistency in mission and messaging compounds;

4. Having a system where anyone new can come in and participate on equal footing matters/ empowerment and access;

5. Anything that can capture mindshare in both the US and China has twice the probability of survival.

As I saw many of my friends announce their retirement on socials on this day, I couldn’t help but wonder… Wen 1M?

Micheal Saylor famously predicted that Bitcoin will hit $13M by 2045:

The path to $1 million will depend on many factors, but the most important upcoming factor now is whether Donald J Trump will start buying BTC as a part of US treasury reserves.

Did we deserve this? Did we just get lucky?

As CZ said today… all I know is… everything just got cheaper today relative to Bitcoin…

I remember when Bitcoin first broke $1,000 in 2013.

Back then, I was just testing the waters and learning to manage my PA, and Bitcoin (let’s be honest) was a bit of a wild card. I had just read a book about probabilistic thinking/ thinking in bets, so I thought there was probably a 1% chance that Bitcoin would make it.

The only use case for Bitcoin back then was to purchase certain ‘substances’ on the infamous online drug website, Silk Road. Across the waters, the white paper had already been translated into Chinese by the entrepreneurial Peking University student (later founder of Bitmain, Jihan Wu).

A charismatic high school teacher called Li Xiaolai was preaching Bitcoin to thousands of disciples in a school auditorium in Beijing; I flew over to see it and left the rally with my probabilistic thinking up to 3%. The sparks were ignited on both sides of the Atlantic.

Bitcoin wasn’t exactly being celebrated for its potential to revolutionize finance back then. Instead, it was painted as "drug money" or a way to circumvent capital control. Sentiment was down, but mindshare was up — and there is no such thing as bad press. The attention that came with breaking the $1k barrier saw an influx of users and builders who were genuinely curious about the tech.

Fast-forward to 2017, there were now over 1000 established altcoins and the ICO boom on Ethereum was beginning to take form.

For me, this was the time I first experienced extreme FOMO and decided to take the plunge and “do crypto” full-time.

It was a crazy time. Every other day, a new blockchain project would emerge, promising to “revolutionize” some industry. People were making fortunes overnight by releasing a one-page whitepaper and a token. I still have papers on my old hard drive with pitch decks to “tokenize all the fish in the sea” and “tokenize all the stars in the sky.”

This was Ethereum’s rise to prominence — but Bitcoin was still leading the way in terms of the general mindshare.

This period was Bitcoin’s cultural moment. Conversations about blockchain and decentralization were happening at family dinners and coffee shops.

I’d catch snippets of strangers debating crypto on the subway. It felt like the world was waking up to something we crypto nerds had been preaching all along – this isn’t another tech trend; it felt like a revolution.

A year later, the Chinese government banned Bitcoin mining, and we’ve hit a little reset.

In 2021, Bitcoin reached a new ATH. By this point, I wasn’t even surprised. I was head-down deep in my build mode at the early stages of my start-up venture.

However, I remember a friend sending me a screenshot that made me look up and stop for a moment:

Bitcoin had broken into the top 10 assets by market cap in the world — alongside giants like Tesla and Facebook.

I decided to make a little donation in Bitcoin to my Alma Mater, then back to building my “new thing.”

Yesterday, December 5, 2024, Bitcoin crossed $100,000.

The learnings for me at this point are:

1. Decentralization of ownership matters;

2. The Lindy effect is real;

3. Consistency in mission and messaging compounds;

4. Having a system where anyone new can come in and participate on equal footing matters/ empowerment and access;

5. Anything that can capture mindshare in both the US and China has twice the probability of survival.

As I saw many of my friends announce their retirement on socials on this day, I couldn’t help but wonder… Wen 1M?

Micheal Saylor famously predicted that Bitcoin will hit $13M by 2045:

The path to $1 million will depend on many factors, but the most important upcoming factor now is whether Donald J Trump will start buying BTC as a part of US treasury reserves.

Did we deserve this? Did we just get lucky?

As CZ said today… all I know is… everything just got cheaper today relative to Bitcoin…