The guest commentary below was written by Tomer Strolight of Swan.com. This piece does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Hedgeye.
Bitcoin, The Invention and Opportunity of the Century
Bitcoin – Wow! What an invention that was. It came straight out of the blue. Nobody was expecting it. And for the very few people who mined it in the early days, and didn’t lose it, and never sold it, they got pretty rich.
But almost everybody missed out on that. Even the people named in the white paper missed it. Most of the early miners either abandoned their coins altogether, sold them cheaply, or traded them for some early altcoin that no longer even exists.
And be honest – if you had mined or bought bitcoin in those early days do you really think you would have held it all when it first reached $1, or $10, or $100?
You’ve probably also thought “Too bad I missed the boat on Bitcoin.” And maybe that’s what led you to try to get in early on another “boat” by playing the “Crypto” markets.
Stop Fooling Yourself and Others About “Crypto”
Now, many are trying to pretend that they are at the beginning of something by getting into the latest craze in blockchain, DeFi, NFTs, or DAOs – which all fall under the heading “Crypto.”
But getting into something when there are 20,000 other somethings like it is not actually getting in early. Stop fooling yourself. You simply can’t turn back the clock and you can’t recreate the invention of Bitcoin through a knock-off.
Calling something “decentralized” doesn’t actually make it decentralized. If it has leaders, a corporation or foundation, venture capital funding, or is controlled by “stakers,” then it’s not decentralized.
Things like this that claim to be decentralized are not – they’re frauds: frauds preying on people’s regrets that they didn’t get in early on something truly great; frauds luring people towards something that’s neither early nor great. So stop fooling yourself – and stop fooling others.
Don’t use terms like “web3” and pretend that there’s something new there. Don’t pretend that centralized, VC-backed corporations, with leaders and founders, who have given themselves lots of tokens, and who plan to dump those tokens on suckers are beneficial.
Don’t pretend they’re democratic, peer-to-peer, decentralized innovations in a “new world of finance.” They are nothing of the sort. They are destined-to-fail frauds. And you probably know it – or at the very least you suspect it. So stop fooling yourself.
Look at the empty and broken promises of the crypto space.. Look at the lies of the characters who have managed to get rich. They have not done so by enriching the world and others, but by selling something worthless on a false promise that got everyone who bought into it wrecked.
If you’ve been fooled, hold yourself accountable to yourself for your mistakes. If you were naive, learn not to be the next time. If you were greedy, own up to it.
And, if you are still thinking “I’ll find the next one and this time get out early enough” admit that you’re trying to get rich by dumping something on someone else who will get poor from listening to you, and then ask yourself “do I want to be such a person?”
Maybe you do. If that’s the case, there’s nothing more for you in here. Go on pretending and see if you can fool others before you get fooled yourself.
The Real Opportunity Still Is Bitcoin!
But if you actually want to participate in something that helps you and your fellow human beings, I’ve got good news, but you’ll have to stop fooling yourself about one more thing. And that lie you need to stop telling yourself is that you missed the boat on Bitcoin.
Because that boat has not even started to pull away from the harbor yet, let alone gone out to sea, or arrived at its destination.
“Look at how expensive a whole bitcoin is,” you might worry. Well, for one, it takes 30 satoshis to add up to just one cent right now. That’s the base unit of Bitcoin. You can still buy 30 of those for a penny. But this is only a minor point.
But do you know where the good ship Bitcoin is headed? It’s not to $100,000 or $1 million a coin. Not even $10 million or $100 million. Where we’re going, they don’t have dollars. We’re going to the future.
And you don’t have to look too far into the past to see that the dollar’s future is in big trouble, because the incompetent, corrupt, and dishonest people who administer that centralized shitcoin project are trying to fool you and to fool themselves with claims that everything is fine, when the house is actually on fire.
In the future, there truly are no people in charge of the money. It’s not a battle over who can seize power over some territory and then use that power to print money for their armies of soldiers, bureaucrats, and tax collectors to seize the wealth produced by those who do actual work.
Look around though. That’s not the present. So you haven’t missed the boat. But if instead of getting in that boat, way early still, you’re pretending that a jpeg of a rock or an ape is the future, or that some staking, algorithmic, yield farming, smart contract blockchains do anything besides fooling people into investing in them, well then, stop fooling yourself!
Bitcoin is here. It’s waiting. It’s waiting for you. Come aboard and experience what it’s like to stop fooling yourself, and to stop fooling others, and to stop fooling around.
Editor's Note
Tomer Strolight is Editor-in-Chief at Swan Bitcoin. He completed bachelors and masters degrees at Toronto’s Schulich School of Business. Tomer spent 25 years operating businesses in digital media and private equity before turning his attention full time to Bitcoin. Tomer wrote the book “Why Bitcoin?” a collection of 27 short articles each explaining a different facet of this revolutionary new monetary system. Tomer also wrote and narrated the short film “Bitcoin Is Generational Wealth”. He has appeared on many Bitcoin podcasts including What Bitcoin Did, The Stephan Livera Podcast, Bitcoin Rapid Fire, Twice Bitten, the Bitcoin Matrix and many more.
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