Bitcoin Ship Captains.

I was reunited with some great friends in the Bitcoin industry yesterday at an AI/Crypto event. There were a few friends I hadn’t seen for years, so a part of this event was a reunion for us.

There was a moment when the group of us huddled together and were telling stories about the last decade of crypto and I realized that this was the group that survived everything. These were the ship captains who had navigated the hurricane that is crypto and survived! They survived every up and down over the last 10 years and they were still in the space, still building great things.

These were the cockroaches of crypto. Most of them had grown beards, I guess after a decade in crypto, you have earned the beard, it actually makes everyone look more like a ship captain.

Life had happened to each one of them. They all had tales of triumph and defeat. They all had grown families and relationships. They had all experienced tragedy and luck.

These were the people that Teddy Roosevelt talks about in his famous quote “it is not the critic who counts.”

Someone on stage at the event posed that the best thing you could have done in Bitcoin, the best investment, was to buy Bitcoin and not do anything. Not build anything, just sit on your hands, so why would you work? Because just buying Bitcoin outperformed every asset class, every company in the asset class and beyond. So why work?

And looking at my friends, the ship captains, I couldn’t help but laugh at the concept - without these founders working on Bitcoin, Bitcoin wouldn’t have been nearly as valuable. Without their energy and enthusiasm, nothing would have happened.

But most importantly…

Without working in the industry, you would have never held your Bitcoin for a decade, because you would never have learned how valuable the people in the industry are.