Welcome to Think Bitcoin™!

Aug 01, 2021

Welcome to Think Bitcoin™!

If learning more about Bitcoin (and also crypto, generally) is what you want to do, you are in the right place. Let me tell you why I decided to create this Substack and what you can expect from it going forward.

First and foremost, my goal is to help educate more people about Bitcoin. In the process, I will also seek to help educate more folks on crypto, generally. My goal is not to convince you to buy bitcoin (bitcoin with a lowercase ‘b’ refers to the currency, while Bitcoin with a capital ‘B’ refers to the network and protocol as a whole), but rather to help you understand how this new technology works, the problems it seeks to address, and the potential impact(s) it can have on society. The space has a comparatively high informational barrier to entry, and it’s fast-moving, which makes it difficult to keep up with key developments while simultaneously learning the basics.

Why am I doing this?

Well, I consider myself a member of both the personal finance (PF) and the Financial Independence Retire Early (FI/RE) communities in the sense that I care about empowering people to take control of their own finances and I enthusiastically endorse the pursuit of financial independence. These communities overlap and produce a treasure trove of useful, mostly free information on budgeting, spending, saving, debt repayment strategies, opening basic investment accounts, cutting expenses, index funds, and other fundamental concepts and practices.

What I’ve personally found conspicuously missing, however, is quality, educational information about Bitcoin and other digital assets. When it comes to these assets, credible, well-researched information is scant in the PF and FI/RE communities. The prevailing posts and tweets, whether dismissive or supportive, tend to be cursory, shallow, and not very helpful for folks looking to actually learn about Bitcoin.

With respect to Instagram, which is a popular platform for PF and FI/RE influencers and consumers, I’ve personally found the posts and hot takes on Bitcoin to be almost uniformly un-nuanced, regularly under-researched, and emphatically illustrative of the lack of understanding and/or interest prevalent in these spaces. What I generally see is folks taking (at most) a few hours or maybe a weekend to do some research in order to produce a post for their followers in order to meet the demand for commentary and opinion on the space.

Now, there’s a good reason for this current state of affairs in the PF and FI/RE communities. First, developing an understanding about Bitcoin requires one to engage with a web of complex subjects like cryptography, macroeconomics, computer science, law, geopolitics, economic history, and even physics. In other words, the process of learning about Bitcoin is interdisciplinary, which makes it comparatively challenging to wrap one’s intellectual arms around.

Second, most PF and FI/RE creators are focused on other, more straightforward topics like those mentioned above (budgeting, spending, index funds, etc.). For such a creator, the idea of taking six months or a year to do a deep dive into the complex, intellectually demanding world of Bitcoin, with all the interdisciplinary learning it entails, is not particularly attractive. And I get that. I do.

Third (and let’s be honest here), the PF and FI/RE communities generally adhere pretty strictly to a set of beliefs about finance, investing, and the economy, without allowing much room or rewarding any appetite to question those underlying beliefs, regardless of how credible the questioning may be. Learning about Bitcoin necessitates an examination of this set of beliefs, as well as an examination of the traditional financial system itself. Which, again, is not the kind of intellectual exercise on which most content creators in the PF and FI/RE spaces are looking to spend significant time.

And this is precisely why I’ve created this Substack. I’ve tried to use my own Instagram and Twitter pages (@TheWhyOfFI) to educate and share information about Bitcoin and the crypto space, but these platforms, while ideal for shorter infographic-y posts, are not optimal for longer, more rigorous content, nor are they optimal as places to collect and share resources.

Who am I?

I’m a thirtysomething practicing lawyer, licensed in three states, who has fallen down the proverbial Bitcoin rabbit hole. I used to be a corporate and securities lawyer in a very large city. Now I’m a litigator in a small town. Before I took up the law, I was a high school teacher, and before that I was a graduate student in Chicago. Yes, I am stereotypically overeducated.

My first brush with Bitcoin was in 2017, during the last bull run. At the time, I had no idea what all the fuss was about or what the hell Bitcoin even was. So I did what I always do in such situations – I ordered a book about it and started reading. The book was Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper. I was certainly interested, but I wasn’t totally hooked yet. Law school required (and demanded) my attention, as did the job application process, and eventually Bitcoin slipped off my radar.

In March of 2020, with COVID-19 becoming ubiquitous, Bitcoin entered my purview again. This time, I was hooked. I started to follow it, learn about it, read books about it, listen to podcasts about it, and devour interviews of people in the space, all with a pretty implacable appetite. I’ve been on this thrilling, challenging intellectual journey ever since.

Here's what you can expect from this Substack:

First and most centrally, I’m going to share the best Bitcoin content I consume each week. This addresses two problems I see in the PF and FI/RE communities with respect to Bitcoin:

1. Folks who are relatively new to the space don’t know where to go to get quality information and have trouble distinguishing between the credible/well-researched stuff and the misleading or useless stuff.

2. There’s a truly prodigious amount of Bitcoin and crypto content out there, so it can be paralyzing to even think about where to begin.

Personally, I am constantly consuming Bitcoin and crypto content, some of it extraordinarily helpful and edifying; some of it not as much. Some of it is quite advanced, and some of it is great for beginners. Each week I’m going to round up the best of it and point you to it. This will hopefully improve and refine the informational diet of new crypto-curious folks out there.

This will also keep you from having to rely on the PF and FI/RE communities for your Bitcoin and crypto content. Which is not to knock those spaces or those creators. But well-intentioned as many creators in each space are, the focus is not on Bitcoin or crypto. So not a lot of quality Bitcoin or crypto content is being produced in those spaces.

The best Bitcoin content is being made by people in the Bitcoin space. Ditto for crypto, generally. A lot of these folks share some beliefs and affinities with the PF/FIRE communities, but they are very much different, distinct spaces. Getting one’s Bitcoin education from creators in that space, as opposed to an adjacent space, is getting it from the most direct source of expertise.

What else can you expect from this Substack?

I’ll run though Bitcoin news headlines of the week, comment on noteworthy developments, and offer thoughts on the state of the ecosystem. I will also provide helpful elementary resources for those coming to the space for the first time - we’ll start at the beginning and build an understanding from scratch, one fundamental concept at a time.

Down the road, there will be more. But we’ll start with this.

Ultimately, I want this to be a home base for Bitcoin education (and also crypto education) for all the crypto-curious folks in the PF and FI/RE communities who want to really dig in and start learning about this space from the best voices in the space.

How often can you expect posts from me?

To start, I’ll post once a week, every Sunday. Perhaps the thrill of learning about Bitcoin will mitigate some of your Sunday scaries.

When can you expect the first substantive post?

Next Sunday!

There is going to be a lot to talk about next Sunday, as there is a lot going on in the Bitcoin world at the moment.

What I’ve been following this past week:

I’ve been closely following the various regulatory developments over the last few weeks, and I expect this week will be a similarly busy one on that front. It very much appears we have entered the phase of Bitcoin’s history in which regulatory bodies, governments, and even international organizations, have begun to take it seriously, and while this can feel a little scary and unnerving, it’s ultimately inevitable. Regulation of some kind and of some degree was always going to arrive. When a new technology and financial asset emerges, seemingly out of nowhere, and captures a $780 billion market cap (as I write), you can bet regulators and governments will start to take notice.

But we shouldn’t be scared of or resist regulation, categorically. We should embrace smart, tailored regulation that adequately protects stakeholders while continuing to allow and encourage innovation and growth in the space. We should resist and lobby against hastily constructed, overbroad regulation that would unnecessarily frustrate and hamper innovation.

Last week, a last-minute provision was added to the new bipartisan infrastructure bill in the United States, which is currently being debated. This provision would alter the tax code definition of “broker” to include almost every party providing any type of economic service in the crypto space, well beyond just the exchanges (like Coinbase, Gemini, etc.). (It’s worth noting, as an aside, that these exchanges in the U.S. are already very heavily regulated and have to comply with numerous laws and regulatory bodies - and this is a good thing). Parties falling under this newly proposed definition of “broker” are subject to certain reporting requirements. The issue being fought about here is that the proposed definition of “broker,” with respect to crypto, is so overbroad that it will encompass parties who do not perform any function even remotely similar to a traditional financial intermediary and require reporting that is, for many of these parties, impossible to do.

The fight is not, as some are framing it, about the crypto community not wanting to pay taxes. It is about the definition of “broker” in the tax code and making sure it applies to folks actually performing broker-type functions and not to everyone performing any function at all in the space. In other words, it’s just about pursuing smart, nuanced regulation that serves all stakeholders, including the American public itself – not avoiding regulation altogether.

The crypto community has responded vigorously over the last few days in an attempt to educate lawmakers on (1) the roles of certain parties within the crypto ecosystem; (2) why compliance for many would be impossible; and (3) how overbroad regulations like this can harm the growth of the space and stifle innovation in the U.S., which would inevitably lead to innovation migrating to other more friendly locations and cause the U.S. to fall behind.

If passed (and not subsequently changed), the new definition of “broker” would go into effect in two years. So there would be time, even after passing of the bill, to try to get it changed and written more appropriately.

Two organizations that have been at the forefront of this educate-Congress effort are Coin Center and the Blockchain Association, both of which I recommend checking out if you’re interested in this area and other legal aspects of cryptocurrency. As a lawyer, I obviously find this side of things quite interesting.

Anyway, this is a developing story. Several lawmakers have noted they don’t agree with the provision as written and, increasingly, more are starting to discuss tailoring it a little better. So we’ll see what comes of all this. Next week I’ll round it all up and tell you what you need to know.

For the folks brand new to Bitcoin:

First off, welcome! Second, I’m still putting together next week’s post, in which we’ll start the journey of learning about Bitcoin from the beginning.

In the meantime, here are two good, short, very general intro videos from a project called Hello Bitcoin. I think they’re great starting points for understanding the promise of Bitcoin and its value proposition(s):

If you’re someone who doesn’t quite get how or why something like Bitcoin could foster greater economic access and promote freedom and human rights across the globe, this second video is a particularly good intro:

For more on Bitcoin and human rights, I recommend Alex Gladstein’s article, “Check Your Financial Privilege”:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-financial-privilege

Lastly:

I want to leave you with this article I re-read last week, because I think it touches on some of the more salient reasons certain folks find it initially difficult to engage with Bitcoin. It’s irreverently titled “Why the Yuppie Elite Dismiss Bitcoin,” and it’s written by an author pseudonymously called Croesus. As someone who has three degrees from three very fancy institutions of higher education, much of this article resonated with me:

https://www.citadel21.com/why-the-yuppie-elite-dismiss-bitcoin

While I could quibble with a few of the finer points in his/her categorizations, I think they’re largely spot-on, at least in my experience. Moreover, I think Croesus does a good job of pointing out why Bitcoin initially, on a surface-level, turns some folks off before they can meaningfully engage with it or learn about it.

Croesus splits the folks who think Bitcoin will prevail as a (and maybe the) major financial asset into two groups: the “moon bois” and “Bitcoin maximalists.” The former subscribe to “Bitcoin moonism,” which is the simple idea that Bitcoin is “going to the moon” because it has continuously risen in the past. Bitcoin maximalists, on the other hand, are those who have spent a significant amount of time and energy researching and learning about Bitcoin, monetary policy, game theory, etc., which has led them to the belief that Bitcoin’s success is a global inevitability.

Croesus considers the moon bois to be mostly morons, and the maximalists to be smart, intellectually rigorous people. The question then, Croesus asks, is why do some smart people subscribe to Bitcoin maximalism while other smart people think Bitcoin is a worthless scam?

He/she makes an additional distinction to explain this disjunction. Croesus distinguishes between those who trust that the current global economic system can work, provided we just install better, more benevolent leaders within the system, and those who fundamentally do not think the current global economic system is sustainable for a variety of reasons, many of which relate to monetary policy, governments printing money, and global debt.

Croesus then proceeds to draw some insights from these distinctions that, speaking personally, I think are notable. More importantly, I think he does a good job explaining how the process of learning about Bitcoin, which of course requires one to learn about current global monetary policy, can be a bit of a disorienting, Alice-In-Wonderland-type experience at first, when it comes to one’s present perspective of things. But deeper learning and perseverance through this stage is rewarded.

Anyway, thanks for reading this week! Next week we’ll start to really dive into things. In the meantime, internalize and remember that Bitcoin is for absolutely everyone. Especially you. You’re not too late to start learning, and there’s no required pace. All that matters is that you’re here and that your mind is open.

Let’s never stop learning.

See you next week,

Logan

DISCLAIMER: I am not investment advisor and this is not investment advice. This is not, nor is it intended to be, a recommendation to buy or sell any security or digital asset. This newsletter exists for educational and informational purposes. Do your own research before making any investment decisions.