On the lifestyle/retirement subject.
I was not in as early as many of you. I do not have retirement or fuck you levels of BTC stashed away. Fortunately, I am what I consider to be "very young" with a very well paying career. My sole objective has always been a responsibile early retirement. Retirement in the sense of not needing to work if I dont want to, no daily agenda of things I need to do other than necessities, and a comfortable lifestyle. I'll add that I will also be an unofficial expat once retired.
I am fortunate enough to have existing retirement assets such as pensions, annuity, 401k, (ect). All of those are not reasonably accessible to me until later in my life when social security is also available. Simply put, 60-death I should have more than enough even if I make a few poor decisions or have an emergency or two. My focus has been on filling the gap between retirement and "retirement age" with personal assets. By current conservative estimates I am on target to reach my goal in 8-10 years which puts me at an age many would consider an unsually young retirement age.
My personal assets are composed of approximately 80% Bitcoin. I have treated it as an asset that I want as much as possible of because I believe it's value will be much higher in the future than now. I project it's increase in value as the average stock market increase of 7-9% per year to keep myself conservative. Meanwhile, it's proved to smoke those estimates to date.
I have not worked out or planned what I will do with my bitcoin once I have achieved retirement level funds. I do plan to run through everything else before touching it though. Honestly, I have hoped once I am at that point I won't need to sell it for cash to use. I am hoping I can actually make direct purchases with it instead. With planning to do a bit of traveling it adds the utility of a being a worldwide currency as well.
I thought I would share this as a truthful post on how bitcoin fits into my life. I know I and others tend to post extreme "hold till I'm dead" type of comments but, that's just the fun side of WO for me. Thought this might be a helpful point of view for others who did not start buying BTC at $10 a coin.
You might consider
my sustainable withdraw thread to be helpful in terms of the kinds of ideas regarding how to consider withdrawing bitcoin and valuing it, and
my fuck you status post (and chart) for how many BTC you might need to have by certain points in your bitcoin journey.
Of course, if you end up retiring 20-30 years prior to your normal retirement age, and maybe we can use 60 as that age (since that is what you mentioned as the age in which your normal retirement money would come in), then surely you would have to have bitcoin sustain you for the time that you stop working and the time that those other sources of income (cashflow) start to become available to you... so yeah, if you end up retiring 20 to 30 years early.. (so maybe at the age 35 to 40?) then you would have to make sure that whatever you are doing, including your withdrawal rate is meaningful, because it probably would not be a good thing to deplete your principle, even if you get to the age 60 and more funds come available.. those extra funds that come available when you are around 60 should be considered as supplements rather than something that rescues you because you had overly depleted the withdrawal rate on your investment (namely bitcoin in this case).
I personally attempt to consider that we should be attempting to value bitcoin in terms of today's dollar value, so we should be attempting to presume that any future projection of how much we need is accurate in terms of today's dollars, but at the same time, it is quite likely that the way that the dollar (and other fiat currencies) have been so heavily debased in the last several years, there are vary low odds that various kinds of hyper-inflation are not going to kick in at various times, so surely it may well be better to be earning money during those kinds of times rather than being stuck with cashflows that come from various kinds of fixed income sources.. and perhaps bitcoin might be one of the ONLY assets that have any kind of decently good chances of both being able to keep up with inflation (and the ongoing degradation of money) and being able to have some sort of price appreciation on top of it.
There have been many assessments of both stocks and property values that likely show that they have not really gone up in value over the past 20-30 years, but instead have merely been keeping pace with the ongoing degradation of the dollar, so it is kind of a misconception and even a lopsided way in which the ONLY people who have not lost as much are those who are invested, versus anyone who has been relying on cash and income and other ways of saving (not talking about bitcoin) have not really been able to keep up at all, and so bitcoin so far seems to be one of the ONLY ones that is regularly outpacing the degradation of the dollar.. and sure there are some stocks and properties that outperform the others, so there are some ways that you could have had selected stocks that generally outperform index funds and the rest of the market.. but we know that many times asset managers do not even have much luck in terms of just being able to out perform index funds.
[edited out]
For what it's worth, my experience with people of faith (mainly Christians, bus some from other religions), has been pretty negative, on average. I find many of them to be among the most aggressive, intolerant, arrogant, stubborn, closed-minded, bitter, toxic individuals I've ever met. For me, the fact that someone is deeply religious is a pretty accurate predictor of one or more of the above traits. There are exceptions, of course, but the norm seems to be like that.
It's sad, really... I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
I don't really like to subscribe to the theories of Bitcoin as a religion, but it seems that some of us can become the same way about bitcoin, and so to the outsiders (or the non-believers) or those who do not get bitcoin, we can come off in those kinds of similar ways in terms of our having a kind of vision that might not be shared by others - and so many times, even when people are seeming to be closed-minded and stubborn, they frequently will still like to consider themselves as being reasonable and open to a variety of views, but at the same time, are going to be wedded towards seeing the world through their own ways of framing matters... ..
so I am not sure, I am feeling mixed on the topic regarding how strongly even some people feel about their beliefs, because they might actually be open in regards to some topics, while at the same time being stubborn in other topics... and yeah, sure, I have met people who are irritating to be around.. and sure sometimes it might go back to seeming to be about religion, but I am not sure the difficulties of dealing with others is merely religion.. Of course, in recent times, we have been seeing a lot of political divides, and so worship of the state or being anti-state and then dividing of camps on these kinds of grounds, but then how much anyone divides or how much they believe their party might resolve their issues might depend upon which issue(s) we are discussing.. and looking towards leaders to rescue us from our broken money system while not necessarily recognizing that the various aspects of the broken money system might be the cause of the problems and/or disagreements about not getting enough, while at the same time blaming the problem on other kinds of ways that there are inequalities and differences of opinion regarding how the pie should get divided.
I wouldn't call Bitcoin (or, perhaps, "Bitcoinism") a religion, although it may seemingly share some similarities with religion, mostly attributed to Bitcoin by those who don't understand it. It is not a religion, because it is based on objectively true, real-world, physical, repeatable, verifiable processes (i.e., math & science)
I can see that you are serious, especially since you use maths and sciences in the singular.
, and does not rely at all on dogma or faith in a metaphysical set of principles.
There's gotta be some faith in there, even though there is a lot of laden maths and science.. I am not going to deny the existence of maths and science, yet one interesting thing about bitcoin is that it has some ways in which it ties back to human behavior, human incentives, which is the proof of work part that can be gamed and manipulated, but it would have a lot of difficulties to overcome the built in incentives and even the presumptions that man will work in his self-interest.
Sure, many of us likely realize that satoshi came up with something that must be very close to a perfect design, but bitcoin is still man made and likely and invention and a discovery all at the same time.
Even the traditional (and scientifically acceptable) notion of "trust" is taken out of the picture ("Don't trust, verify!"),
remember the Regan statement. Trust, but verify. We have to have some of that going on, too. Surely not every normie is going to want to or be able to run a node, so we have to have some trust and faith that some of the open source aspects of bitcoin are going to be checked-and-balanced by some other people who have the skills to do the checking (the crowd sourcing idea) and if enough eyes are on bitcoin, then likely any flaws that exist are going to mostly get fixed... maybe not perfectly, but perfectly enough.. and surely the older people might not be able to change careers and learn how to code and to check code, but we still have to figure out the extent to which we are going to run some of the software and the extent to which are going to try to verify some of the matters for ourselves, to the extent that we are able to verify, and maybe those difficulties to verify matters scare away some of the older people, but some younger people may well be more than willing to go down the road of learning some of those kinds of bitcoin-related things.
But, you know that I have said to several young people that they should look into bitcoin and if I were younger, I may or may not choose to go to college, but I would like to spend some of my time learning about the world from a bitcoin related angle (bitcoin bitcoin bitcoin, not shitcoins.. stay away from shitcoins).. and so surely I might be too old of a person to be suggesting areas in which might be good for young people and I kind of remind myself about the movie "the graduate" in which the advice was "one word," "plastics" "There is a great future in plastics. Will you think about it?" Substitute "plastics" for bitcoin.
Or perhaps another perspective is to communicate the one word in this way:
https://twitter.com/frankiemacd/status/1731825464551821709and this is precisely what makes Bitcoin so important, so revolutionary, so scientifically significant. Contrast this with religion, where everything is based on metaphysics, dogma, and blind faith in some supernatural, all-knowing, all-powerful entity, whose existence appears to be unprovable by design.
Really hard to argue with any of that... but there are some religious people in bitcoin and bitcoin is for everyone, so there are going to be smart people, dumb people, evil people, religious people and not religious people in bitcoin, and sure some of them are going to know bitcoin better than others, but merely because some folks have a lot of religion does not necessarily mean that they are not somehow able to resolve some of that religiousness and still be smart about bitcoin. I am not sure if I should name any names, but there are are quite a few people who are pretty religious, but still quite prominent in bitcoin and even writing books on the topic that are not even dumb.
Blind faith in the success or superiority of Bitcoin, just because some fancy, self-proclaimed Bitcoin "priest" says so, is the wrong way to approach this
I don't really disagree with you, but there are a lot of us who do attempt to trust some people more than others, and I am not able to verify everything myself, so I kind of have some faith about some aspects of what people are saying about certain aspects of bitcoin, especially some of the technical - software and hardware matters.. and even lightning and there are so many areas in which bitcoin-related matters are being built and there is ONLY so much due diligence that I can do, and even many others seem to know even less than me in some areas, but then they seem to be way smarter than me in other areas.. I even seen some really smart people in bitcoin say some pretty dumb stuff, but then they seem to be right about a lot of other stuff.. I am not even sure if I can pinpoint the various differences, and some times there are some people who I believe that I agree with them about everything, then all of a sudden they say some really silly and/or dumb things.. and I don't necessarily take away from their credibility in all areas, even if I might have identified some areas in which I am not in agreement with them or that I believe that I know better in that particular area or way of framing matters.
(did you know that Craig S. Wright is [also] a
theologian, and calls himself a "
pastor"?).
Yes.. he is ridiculous.. and not really much of a good example of anything.. except for maybe being somewhat capable of convincing dumb people about things that they seem to want to believe.
Satoshi Nakamoto is no God, and the White Paper is not some Bitcoin bible to be worshiped and blindly accepted as truth, but a scientific paper, open to scrutiny and experimental evaluation.
Well, yeah, Satoshi went away, which does seem to lock in some aspects of what he did and said, and yeah there are several ways in which the current implementations of bitcoin goes beyond the whitepaper in several ways and some aspects of the whitepaper does not seem to capture very well some of the consensus based movements of bitcoin over the last nearly 15 years that it has been running (well it will be about 15 years on January 3).
This evaluation (which is extremely brutal, as there's big money involved) has been going on for nearly 15 years non-stop, and no fundamental flaws have been found. Even with such a great track record, I will be the first to reject Bitcoin the moment a weakness is discovered in its code base, that makes the code so fundamentally flawed that it cannot be patched. Surely, I will be deeply disappointed if this ever happens, but I don't expect it to happen any time soon, if ever.
Fair enough. I have maintained a similar position, yet there are people who get into shitcoins because they might not have enough confidence in bitcoin so they hedge their bets. I did not feel that way about Bcash, and so I did sell my Bcash soon after getting airdropped and figuring out how to do it.. but at the same time, there were a lot of smart people who hedged their uncertainties about bitcoin by keeping their Bcash.. just in case.. and I am not even sure if that ended up being a bad decision, even though monetarily it did not work out and it was not the one that I choose to make... because I thought bcash was a bunch of bullshit from the start... mostly based on their seemingly wanting to be able to change bitcoin so easily.. so I had already identified the difficulties to change bitcoin as a feature rather than a bug, and so the bcash era was a time in which our resolve was tested in terms of if we were able to identify the difference between the two. and surely I was not really looking at bitcoin versus bcash from a technical position but in stead from a kind of maintaining the status quo position for something that was not broken (namely bitcoin) so the various dramatic proposals regarding how to fix bitcoin seemed to me to be quite misplace during that era.
This reminds me of
Bitconnect (some old lulz
here), where all the people in the video were effectively disciples of a religion/cult, driven by greed. And we all know what happened.
I am not sure if bitconnect or even one coin and some of those others were very good examples of a way to deviate from bitcoin, but yeah, I get your religious angle on bitconnect.
Not with Bitcoin. This is science, not metaphysics, and those who see it that way are missing the point.
But I do see the logic behind the points you're making. Humans have a tendency to want to "belong" to some superior group, call it a society, cult, religion, whatever. So people may see Bitcoin as a kind of special club they want to belong to, even though they don't understand it. Come to think of it, still good for them if they become coiners, as long as they stick to BTC, rather than BSV, BCH, or other "crypto" varieties. That's why understanding is so important.
Yeah... I am not sure why it seems to take a while for people to come over to bitcoin.. and maybe if either you or I might have come to bitcoin in a different way, then maybe we would have had been more vulnerable to get distracted by some of the dumb anti-bitcoin talking points.. and maybe I am being too cruel to suggest that all the talking points are dumb because some of the other talking points seem to be quite convincing... especially if you haven't studied bitcoin first, then you end up getting lured into such shitcoin and then when you invest into it, then you might end up being biased by your investment (the weight of your shitcoin bags).
You and I probably are not even thinking about these matters very differently, and it is good to hear different ways of expressing matters, but both of us still come back to a lot of similar ideas, even if we might phrase some of our observations differently.