They Wanted Me Dead

They Wanted Me Dead

Teeka, don’t come to Moscow anytime soon. It’s not safe for you here.

If it was easy to get rich from financial markets, we’d all be bathing in gold coins like Scrooge McDuck.

The truth is: Getting rich from investments is hard. Finding them isn’t the toughest bit. It’s holding onto them when their prices suddenly and sharply drop.

Even Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has had three occasions when its stock price dropped 50% or more. And that’s the most conservatively structured company in the world.

So the first step to truly understanding what it takes to get rich from financial assets is knowing you’ll see large and sudden price drops.

I can’t change that. You can’t change that. That’s the reality of getting rich with financial assets. Every now and then, you’ll get punched in the face by the market.

This is far worse to go through when you’re in the public eye, like I am.

I remember back in early 2018, I had been invited to Moscow to give a talk on bitcoin to a select group of high-net-worth individuals and tech entrepreneurs. At the time, bitcoin was at about $12,000 after being as high as $20,000.

I strode into that meeting with my PowerPoint presentation and boldly proclaimed that bitcoin was going to $40,000.

Except that didn’t happen.

Instead, bitcoin hit $4,000 shortly after my speech. A year on from my talk, and it was still languishing at $3,500.

That wasn’t a punch in the face – that was an old-school a$$ kicking. And I was quietly told not to visit Moscow anytime soon.

I made the same proclamation in front of five million people when Glenn Beck interviewed me later that year.

I was the butt of every joke you can imagine. I got hate mail beyond count. It was rough.

Back in 2018, I had a few million to my name… But I wasn’t rich. And I wanted to be rich. I still believed bitcoin and crypto assets were the single best way for me and my subscribers to get rich.

From my view, nothing had changed with bitcoin. Or the adoption cycle of crypto assets in general. I was even more bullish.

So I had to ask myself, was I being delusional? Why was I right and everybody else wrong?

What I had figured out was that the traditional finance world had not yet come to terms with the idea of engineered digital scarcity.

Wall Street still hasn’t fully figured this out – because if it had, bitcoin would be trading at over $1 million per coin.

Detractors say bitcoin has no value because it’s manmade engineered scarcity. That same logic can be applied to the $17 trillion art market.

Art is manmade physical scarcity. Yes, you can see and touch art. But why should one painting be worth $300 million and another be worth $300?

It’s all in the eye of the beholder. What we place value in (outside of essential commodities) is very much based upon our shared beliefs about the item.

Art has been used as a store of value for centuries, much like gold. Bitcoin is the next iteration of manmade engineered scarcity for the digital age.

Unlike gold and art, bitcoin can’t be counterfeited. It is infinitely divisible. It also comes with its own storage and transfer network that no one owns, controls, or can censor.

What’s to stop someone from just spinning up another version of bitcoin? Nothing.

There have been thousands of bitcoin clones – the same way there have been thousands of Picasso clones.

And yet, the market still pays millions for a Picasso and ignores all the imitators. The same is true for bitcoin.

Volatility Is the Admission Price