The Church of Bitcoin
And it's far-out congregation
People need something to believe in. Without it, they revolt.
The leaders of any group know this. From benevolent to tyrannical, they know the people looking back at the podium need to believe in a simple narrative. It’s a human truth - a fact of life. A convicted congregation is well-behaved.
It’s why the biggest beliefs rely on a simple message. Group leaders stick with it. They get the congregation into a foxhole, and keep them there. From the afterlife to the political fix that’ll straighten out everyone else… the best ones keep the messaging simple, fiery, and on repeat.
The problem with beliefs is they morph into movements. They become difficult to control. As they grow in size, they move like a murmuration rather than a group of rational individuals. They take on a new meaning, and topple things in their way during the process.
The last thing you want to do is get in the way of one of these. Intellectually that is. To the convicted believers, anyone who disagrees is a heretic. We all know what happens to those…
Plus, true believers need to share their insights with you. Your buy-in validates their decision to fully convict themselves. They find it reassuring. If you resist their pitch, they’ll first defend it. If that doesn’t work, they may amp things up in an effort to force it on you.
Either way, the deluded believer’s message has little to do with you. Let them talk. Respectfully observe. Notice the near-possessed look in their eyes as they ask you loaded questions, develop an increasingly smug glare, and carry on what you’ll soon notice is a one-sided conversation.
To the person with a hammer, everything is a nail. To the person with divine insight, everyone else is a fool.
Last Week in Las Vegas, NV
Nobody does anything they think is wrong. Even criminals tell you under the circumstances, the way they saw it, whatever they did made sense.
It’s why to understand an investment movement, you need to meet the people behind it. That’s the only way to predict where it’s headed.
You can read articles, study reports, and think about it endlessly. But spending a day around an industry puts a finger on the pulse of the ideas fueling the movement.
When it comes to Bitcoin (XBT), that’s a whole new experience. To get a sense of the frenetic energy behind it all you had to do was get within 50 miles of Las Vegas last week.
Most conferences are boring. Take the gold industry as an example. Many of these events in recent years saw convention centers drape off ~70% of the available space due to weak booth sales. Making matters worse, executives look tired, feeble in some cases. Booth workers are second-tier, visually-speaking. The overall feeling is, something good might eventually happen, but nobody knows when. Everyone hopes they’ll live long enough to see it.
Contrast that with the Bitcoin conference, where you’ll struggle to navigate the entrance due to excessively large and numerous high-volume electronic music DJs in what looks like rows of mega-booths or sponsored lounges with tantalizing talent clogging the actual entrance.
Once inside, you’ll see things like:
A Formula One car with pit crew allowing attendees to participate in a timed pit stop
Spaceships on the ceiling
People dressed completely in orange
The current Vice President of the United States
A climbing wall
The adult children of the current President of the United States
Evangelical people talking to you about salvation
A punching machine
Chances to win more than one Tesla Cybertruck
Extremely wealthy people with no gray hair
Ways to generate excessive crypto profits
Congressional candidates promising support for crypto
Ways to avoid tax on excessive crypto profits
Credit cards borrowing against crypto
People wearing shirts reading, “Ask me how to 10x your Bitcoin”
Corporate exhibitors promising to buy and never sell crypto with company cash
The last one is telling…
Shame on Us
The one way to alienate yourself at Bitcoin 2025 is tell people you bought XBT two years ago because the chart looked good. (XBT is the Bloomberg mnemonic for Bitcoin)
It’s finance parlance for getting involved in a bull market. Soros famously said when you see one, get involved and help make it bigger. But the most convicted crypto believers don’t like that one bit. You clearly don’t get it. Or, you’re an outsider, a poseur, or worse.
In fact, buying XBT two years ago because you thought it would go higher is almost a slight against the community. Even though it’s up some ~283% over that period.
TTL readers know we did this ~18 months ago as it hugged ~$40k yielding only 153% as of our last issue. With XBT sitting at ~$107,000 during the conference, it’s hard to believe we’re subject to social rebuke.
The reason is, we’re not laser-eyed, woolly, and unable to talk about anything but crypto. In fact, we don’t even care about the industry. Worse, we’re happy to own the rising tokens even if it’s a big set up for FedCoin. Even worse… we think the loudest, proudest pocket-stuffers who vow to never, ever sell a coin may end up with little to show for their evangelism. We’ll talk in more detail about this one in a future issue…
For now, excuse us while we book triple-digit returns and stay busy attending to other matters consistent with a broad and interesting suite of lifestyle interests.
As the hot early-summer day in Vegas wore on, it seemed more and more like making money is secondary in the Bitcoin community. Ideology trumps the old-fashioned concept of buying something and selling it later for a higher price.
It’s why Bitcoin itself might one day look like the flameout of a once-bright star called capitalism. The end of an era. With it goes free markets, individual autonomy, and eventually, meritocracy. For now, all things the crypto congregation claims to stand for.
If that take proves right… Bitcoin might be the best holding pin imaginable for otherwise disaffected people who’d be in the streets if they saw the transition from a once free market to a managed system for what it is.
Hoarders
Another strange fact about this movement is the almost across the board tendency to hoard Bitcoin. Few attendees seemed flush with actual cash. This is in contrast to other investment bull markets.
The fluffy tech start-up scene sees exits, cash buyouts, and public listings. The winners dump piles of money on name-brand asset managers like Morgan Stanley (MS) after a big success. Crypto bulls buy other tokens and hoard them off-grid.
Again, think back to the resource bull markets of last century and the early 2000s. Those winners bought everything from apartment complexes to farms in other countries. They kept playing their game, but used windfalls to de-risk the day-to-day ups and downs of their industry.
In the case of crypto, success seems to widen the gap between the industry and traditional finance. Holders become hoarders. People don’t seem to sell and return to the old economy, ever.
Plus, the profile of many attendees appears to be the low deca-millionaire type. Meaning ~$10-50 million net worth. This is someone who bought 100, 200, 300 Bitcoin and held on to them. They’ve got major wealth to display in a phone app. Or, have the digital coins etched into the memory of a USB stick stored in some location ideally protected from fire, flood, and kidnapping risk…which is recently a serious concern.
These reluctant-to-sell hoarders do however seem willing to borrow against their coin wallets. Since it “always goes up” only a fool would sell. Numerous conference booths offered lending products built on the back of the hoarders’ portfolios.
It’s useless to suggest they sell a few tokens for monopoly money which would in turn allow the purchase of any number of tangible assets. Forget about suggesting that real copper-gutter, slate-roof type of wealth might create a more advanced lifestyle, etc. They just laugh.
Unless of course one of the unusually large number of evangelicals is within earshot. Then you get a lecture about the sinful nature of profit-seeking. Which is odd because all you did was listen to the stranger boast about the $50-million-dollar thumb drive buried in their yard…
Then there’s credit cards…orange of course. Nobody knows why Bitcoin took on the color orange. But it certainly did. One of the Winklevoss twins has a hat that says, “Orange is the new gold.”
Maybe it is… But you’ve gotta wonder why these twins are here, with three former Mossad agents guarding them. They lost out on Facebook to Zuckerberg, and it seems like they’re just not going to let this one get away.
Oddly, they’re not in great shape, the twins. At a combined net worth of ~$13.2 billion according to Bloomberg, you’d think they’d travel with personal trainers and chefs. But maybe it’s better to hoard the coins than spend them living in real time.
They look more brotherly than identical. The way to tell them apart is one has blepharospasm, or some similar optical condition that causes compulsive blinking. We took half-a-dozen pictures before getting one with his eyes open.
As for the Orange is the new Gold hat, everything related to Bitcoin is orange. But gold is still the symbolic image representing digital wealth.
Nobody knows why people picture Bitcoin as a gold coin… when the community largely scoffs at the idea of owning gold.
Don’t Fight the Trend
As for gold… it’s just too easy. In the world of what did stocks do in the last ten minutes, people can’t handle its simplicity.
Just imagine if you began working in 2000, aiming to spend less than you earn, and put ~5% of that monthly savings into gold. Just ~5%... which might seem like a small amount depending on your earnings.
Month-in, month-out, you stuck to the plan buying a small, measured amount of gold, regardless of price. Which by the way, climbed slowly from ~$300/oz to as much as ~$3,500/oz over 25 years.
People have all kinds of arguments against this type of steady behavior. The top one is, only people who already have money can save or invest in a measured way. Which is not true.
In 2002, your editor compulsively mailed monthly checks of embarrassingly small sizes to the direct-invest or DRIP programs offered by at the time undervalued American companies like Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM) and FedEx Corp (FDX).
In mid-2003, opportunity knocked down in Florida. Selling the accumulated shares, which increased in value due to a resurgence of blue-chip stocks after the post-2000 tech mess, funded the Florida move and then some.
Wealthy people don’t always start out that way. Or, end up wealthy by accident. It’s some combination of work, luck, and commitment to the cause.
Fight it as much as you’d like, but spreading out savings by percentage has a good track record. The portion allocated to wild speculations is smaller than you’d think for people who succeed. The biggest benefit of taking the time to set and tweak these percentages is better thinking. With that comes the ability to spot trends.
Trend Spotting
When you’re not looking for overnight success, you tend to avoid getting wrapped up in frenzies. That’s why Bitcoin to us looks different. It’s why when we’re telling the coin hoarders, evangelicals, and whooping masses we bought the chart, we’re answering the question honestly.
Plus, it’s impossible to know how things play out. When XBT sold for ~$10 it looked pretty goofy. Worse yet, when Lazlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 XBT in exchange for two Papa John’s pizzas, it looked even goofier.
Exactly five years before Lazlo paid what today equates to ~$1.05 billion for these two pizzas I lived ~10 blocks from the exact Papa Johns location…in adjacent Neptune Beach, FL. I didn’t like the area much, and moved after a year. When I saw the news, it seemed like something that would happen around there. It was a food-served-in-a-basket and skateboard kind of place back then.
However, ~$1.05 billion fifteen years later is worth waiting for. Those pizzas are long gone.
And the mystery of Bitcoin (XBT) is one that’s still with us. The chart is serious. The narrative is serious. And the current administration wants you to be involved…
While the mood on the ground is what you’d expect at an intergalactic carnival, it’s probably going to get crazier.
What people seem to miss is capitalism ended. We’re now part of a centrally-managed system.
XBT has a market cap of ~$2.1 trillion today with its token priced at ~$105,600. There are roughly ~21 million possible tokens on the original blockchain, which may go down as a historic or novel piece of antiquated code… revered by future generations as a sought-after collectable.
Meanwhile, the total value of world assets is ~$500 trillion. Gold sits at ~$23.6 trillion… or roughly ~11x the value of XBT.
Plus, add to this the deluded state of XBT hoarders versus the possibly more deluded state of non-XBT owners. It’s a clash of the titans. XBT could get a lot bigger as it captures converts.
The current crop of coin hoarders see the financial system as a farce. They have varied reasons, with the same theme.
They’re non-participants. They’re out, and not coming back. As the rest of the people committed to toiling away in life as they knew it growing up in capitalism one-by-one come to the same conclusion, they might jump on board.
~$105,600 or whatever the price is in the 24-7-365 traded market still in its infancy, can go much higher.
As for the objective observers, hopefully that’s us, let’s try to spot the delusion in both sides. You might get a sense for what’s next.
TTL subscribers remember how we got involved at the tail end of 2023. It’s worked out great…so far.
Instead of worrying about the price compared to ten years ago, we decided to be involved with a percentage of assets. As a holding worth having in an evolving financial world. And it worked.
I’ll show you below how the trust did it, and separately, how I did it… While the conference attendees ridicule people like us, it’s worked out pretty well so far yielding triple-digit gains…and then some.