Michael Saylor likes to say this and over the last few years I’ve come to understand a little bit more about what he means when he says it. When voices like his first started coming into the space I had to do some soul searching about whether there was still room for me here. I’m much more comfortable on a picket line than in a boardroom. I’ve come to believe he genuinely wants to give people hope but not the empty sort that comes from unrealistic expectations. I think he wants to give them the tools they need to become strong and resilient so that if they do the right things, put in the work, they can believe that better days are possible. He created a website called hope.com devoted to giving people the tools to build lives full of potential. He created an entire free online school for people who are willing to hone those skills and focus them on creating a brighter future. I think that kind of hope, the kind that comes from knowing that there is something beyond your struggle, something worth fighting for, is a good thing. I know that there are irrational merchants of Hope, scammers, who prey on desperate people who feel trapped in hopeless situations. There are lots of people who see the whole Bitcoin community that way. I don’t. I believe Michael Saylor created these things and made them freely available because he believes in Hope and knows how hard it can be to find and how easy it can be to lose.
I understand those who are skeptical. In fact, I have not always been the biggest fan of Hope myself. There was a decade of my life, ironically leading right up to the creation of bitcoin, that I was starting to feel a little bit beaten down. Over that period both of my parents died far too young and far too soon, our house burned down, and a business that I had run for many years was bankrupted in the Great Financial Crisis, costing us well……a lot of money and turning what I once thought would be our legacy to our children into a smoldering pile of debt. At the end of that time I’m not certain that I had the courage to Hope. My mom used to say that hope is what bridges the gap between Faith and Grace. When the second decade of the 21st century began, I really didn’t have much Faith and I wasn’t sure that I was worthy of any Grace, so to me Hope felt like a bridge to nowhere.
Now I want to admit something that no HODLer is ever proud to admit.
I have sold Bitcoin.
Did we sell it because we lost hope? Well, I guess that really is the point of this little commentary.
We have not sold all of it, but we’ve sold bits and pieces along the way that were meaningful to us at the time. We sold some in 2015 because, coming on the heels of a decade full of nothing good, I just needed to book a win. My son and I had originally gotten into Bitcoin mining together when he started college. Our goal for that all along was for him to buy a house after he graduated so we sold some to make his down payment. (This was by far our biggest dollar denominated sale ever). I sorta regret selling some in 2018 to buy a beat-up old Volvo that I now realize was the most expensive car I’ve ever owned. (I know how to spin a wrench so I’ve never paid more than \(10,000 for a car. I’ve bought several for under \)500 that lasted for years). We sold some in 2021 because I’m getting to be an old guy and….life. But all together these sales (other than the down payment) have been a small piece of what we have. We would be perfectly happy if someday our children spent the majority of our Bitcoin.
Now that Bitcoin is in the middle of another Bear market I’ve been having these discussions with other Bitcoiners about when and why we have sold or might sell. No one can know the future but when we look back on the past few years, the money has certainly mattered. My wife and I are both in public education and of moderate means. Our kids did without a lot of things when they were young, especially right after our house fire, that a lot of their friends did not go without. I think we’ve passed along our relatively frugal ways to them. We may also have unintentionally passed along a certain sense of insecurity that many of their peers do not have. It is entirely possible that we have far too many canned goods in our pantry and I’m certain my kids wondered why none of their friends had stockpiles of powdered dry milk. We didn’t do this entirely as a result of a single house fire and a few bad business decisions or because we were starting to feel desperate and hopeless. It’s not pessimists who plan for hard times, it’s optimists. Pessimists assume that they will simply crumble in hard times and that will be the end of it. Optimists know there is something beyond the hard times, something to get through them for.
During the 10 years after High School that I spent partly in the Army Reserves and occasionally trying to earn a 4 year degree, I traveled to other countries that did not enjoy our American Standard of Living. I saw suffering that I had not seen growing up in rural Minnesota. I saw places that once had hope and lost it, and were struggling to find it again.
My wife and I met in the Peace Corps in West Africa and we watched a country unraveling as it descended into Civil War. I lived in a cinderblock house with a tin pan roof that was plumbed for water and wired for electricity. The people who built that house had the hope that it takes to create things. The people who diverted the water supply to the house of a “Big Man” and rolled up the copper wires to sell on the black market knew only the desperation that comes from destruction.
For the last 27 years I’ve worked with Refugees from all across the world who have just arrived here and are beginning to put their lives back together. Every day I listen to stories of people who have either recently lost every material thing they owned or may fear losing what they hold most dear. But they didn’t just give up, instead they came here because they still have one thing. They came because they still have hope.
When I’m telling my other rural Minnesotan friends, the ones who have not seen a country dissolve in the blink of an eye, about the people I work with and the horrific circumstances that caused them to leave their homelands, my local friends often ask, “If things were so bad, why they didn’t leave sooner?”. Nobody plans to stay until it’s too late. They stay too late because they don’t know what time it is. I know a woman whose mother sat in a school board meeting one night with the mother of a soldier who would come to their street two days later to remove them from their home at gunpoint and send them to the camps. For years I shared my office with two people whose close relatives had killed each other back home and most likely, given the chance, would have tried to kill them as well. I work with a man who guided hundreds of people through the landmine checkered rice paddies of SE Asia into Refugee camps where he knew assassins with his picture would be waiting for him. So when I tell people that I think it’s a good idea to have 3 - 6 months of expenses available for emergencies, I’m not just repeating something I read in one of my Certified Financial Planning courses. We know people who have survived tremendous hardships they could not have expected. We have needed those emergency funds for actual emergencies that we could not have avoided because, just like the people I work with, we simply didn’t see them coming. So we stocked our pantry to get through hard times that we knew we would also not see coming. And because, like the Refugees I’ve met over the years, we know that on the other side of an unexpected crisis there can still be hope.
I was raised by generations of people who read these words of Rudyard Kipling and took them to heart.
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
Our parents and grandparents also came here with nothing and stopped to build a new life in a land that for three months out of the year is a frozen hellscape where the air sometimes hurts your face. They may also have left their homes out of fear and desperation but they stopped here because every Spring the ice melts to uncover bountiful rolling hills and vast fields with fertile topsoil that reaches down over 15 feet deep. There are some who say that the essential characteristics of these people were Stoicism or Bravery but I personally believe it was hope. Hope that somewhere in that 15 feet of topsoil there lay the potential for rich fruits and vegetables for their families and ample grain for their livestock. Every spring they were surrounded by reminders that hard times pass and good things are still possible.
And now we find ourselves in another Bitcoin winter, one that many of us thought might already be over, fearful about whether that topsoil has survived underneath the blowing snow. Every spring seems to bring one last snowfall long after you’ve worked up the courage to put away the boots and hats. Winter gives you one last opportunity to stand in an icy puddle in your flip flops looking like a fool. One last chance to wonder….should I sell…more?
These are the times that I truly appreciate every other Bitcoiner who has the courage to dream of a brighter future. I never bought Bitcoin to someday simply own a better car or “sell the top” and walk back into the world that beat me down a decade ago with a few more dollars in my pocket. I bought Bitcoin because I believed a better world was possible, an abundant world full of the boundless optimism of builders and planters, a world that produced steamer ships and Golden Gates, railroads and Saturn Rockets. There have been times, during that dark decade, that I needed that bridge, that I stood alone and shivering in a parking lot and I needed more than just a set of jumper cables.
More than money, I needed Hope.