Luke Scott tapped the pier rail with his beer bottle, watching the harbor lights flicker like distant stars. “Remember when we used to come here with our bikes?”
Marco Ruiz grinned, settling beside his oldest friend. “And you’d time how long it took the tide to cover that rock. Even then you were obsessed with cycles.”
“Someone had to keep track. You were too busy trying to impress Sarah Martinez.”
“Hey, it worked eventually.” Marco’s laugh carried across the water. “Different approaches, man. You built spreadsheets for your crushes. I just showed up.”
Luke smiled despite himself. Twenty years of friendship, and Marco still approached everything like an adventure while Luke mapped the terrain first. “Speaking of different approaches…” He pulled out his phone, showed Marco his Bitcoin wallet.
“Finally convinced you to look at this seriously?”
Marco’s expression shifted, playful to guarded. “I looked. But Ethereum’s got actual utility. Smart contracts, DeFi—it’s not just digital gold sitting in a vault.”
“Twenty-one million coins, forever,” Luke said quietly. “That’s not a bug, it’s the feature. Ethereum’s got an infinite supply and a teenager running it.”
“Vitalik’s a genius.”
“Satoshi’s a ghost. Can’t be corrupted, can’t be coerced.” Luke’s voice carried the conviction of someone who’d spent years diving deep. “Marco, this isn’t some tech play. It’s sound money. It’s fixing the root problem. As Michael Saylor says ‘There is no second best.’
Marco raised his bottle. “Then I’m building the future and you’re hoarding gold. To different moons.”
Their bottles clinked, but Luke noticed Marco’s smile didn’t reach his eyes anymore.
Their friendship had started in third grade when Luke helped Marco with long division and Marco taught Luke how to talk to the cool kids. Through middle school science fairs where Luke built precise models and Marco created wild experiments that somehow worked. High school dates where Luke researched conversation topics and Marco just made people laugh.
“You overthink everything,” Marco had said junior year, watching Luke stress about asking Jennifer to prom.
“You underthink everything,” Luke shot back, but he was smiling. “That’s why we work.”
College separated them—Luke to MIT for computer science, Marco to Berkeley for business. But summers brought them back to the pier, sharing stories about girls who broke their hearts and dreams that kept changing shape. Luke talked about elegant code; Marco talked about changing the world.
After graduation, they’d moved to the same city within months of each other. Luke landed at a fintech startup; Marco started a marketing consultancy. Different worlds, same friendship. Every Friday night, they’d end up somewhere, arguing about everything and agreeing about what mattered.
Then Luke discovered Bitcoin.
2017 had been the year Luke fell down the rabbit hole. Not just buying Bitcoin—studying it. Austrian economics, monetary history, cryptography. He consumed every Satoshi email, every Andreas Antonopoulos talk, every Saifedean Ammous thread. The deeper he went, the more urgent it felt.
Marco watched his friend’s transformation with growing unease. “You sound like you joined a cult.”
“I sound like someone who figured out the game is rigged,” Luke replied, not looking up from The Bitcoin Standard.
They were at their usual bar, but Luke had his kindle out instead of paying attention to the game on TV. “Fiat money is theft, man. Central banks stealing purchasing power through inflation—”
“Okay, but Ethereum’s doing something about it. DeFi is rebuilding the entire financial system. Bitcoin’s just sitting there.”
Luke finally looked up. “Bitcoin doesn’t need to do anything else. It’s perfect money. Store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account. Everything else is noise.”
Marco ordered another beer. His best friend was disappearing into orange-pilled orthodoxy, and he didn’t know how to get him back.
By 2020, Luke had started the podcast. “Stacking Sats with Luke Scott” began as weekend hobby but grew into something bigger. His calm, methodical explanations attracted listeners who wanted Bitcoin education without the Twitter toxicity. Sponsors came calling. Speaking engagements followed.
Marco, meanwhile, had discovered Ethereum at $300. Not just the price action—the ecosystem. He started a newsletter called “Building Tomorrow,” tracking DeFi protocols, NFT projects, Layer 2 solutions. His subscriber count grew alongside his ETH stack.
They still texted, but conversations felt strained. Luke would send Marco clips from Bitcoin maximalists. Marco would counter with threads about Ethereum’s roadmap. Their group chats with college friends became uncomfortable as others picked sides or asked them to stop arguing.
“We’re like those couples who can’t talk about politics anymore,” Marco joked, but neither of them laughed.
Sophie entered Luke’s life through the podcast. She managed communications for a Bitcoin venture fund and appreciated Luke’s thoughtful approach. She also noticed how his friendships had narrowed to people who spoke his new language.
“You miss Marco,” she observed after Luke mentioned him for the third time that week.
“He’s free to join us anytime. Just has to admit he’s been gambling instead of investing.”
Sophie said nothing, but her silence spoke volumes.
The crash came in May 2028. An exploit of the Ethereum had it come crashing down 95% from its highs, and the protocols Marco championed bled users like punctured balloons. Bugs became rampant and drained billions. Fees hit absurdity. News tickers ran red.
Luke called him that first night, genuinely worried. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” Marco’s voice sounded hollow.
“Down a lot, but I’m fine.”
“Listen man, sell what you can, buy Bitcoin. It’s not about the price—it’s about the philosophy. This is what Austrian economics predicted. Malinvestment, boom-bust cycles—”
“Don’t start this now.”
“Marco, I’m trying to help. This is your chance to learn from—”
The line went dead.
Luke stared at his phone, torn between vindication and grief. He’d been right about everything, but being right felt lonelier than he’d expected.
About a year later, Marco began his quiet journey back to humility. The crash had shattered more than his portfolio—it had broken his confidence in his own judgment. He sold his remaining altcoins at brutal losses and started dollar-cost averaging into Bitcoin, buying $200 worth every week regardless of price.
He couldn’t bring himself to call Luke. His friend had become @StackingSatsLuke, with 150k followers and a premium course on Austrian economics. Marco was just another casualty of the altcoin graveyard, too proud to admit defeat and too broke to matter.
Instead, he studied alone. He read The Bitcoin Standard cover to cover, then Layered Money and The Fiat Standard. He joined local meetups where nobody knew him, listened to other people tell their stories of discovery and loss. Slowly, he began to understand what Luke had been trying to tell him.
Bitcoin wasn’t just superior technology. It was a return to sound money principles, a check on government overreach, a tool for human flourishing. The network’s simplicity wasn’t a bug—it was the feature that made everything else possible.
By 2032, Marco had accumulated 1.8 Bitcoin through disciplined DCA and freelance work. It had taken him three years to understand what Luke had grasped immediately: Bitcoin was patience made manifest, delayed gratification encoded in mathematics.
He wrote texts over the years to Luke that he never sent, apologies that felt too small and too late. His old friend had become a celebrity in their small world, hosting conferences and advising institutions. What could Marco offer except admission of failure?
The accident happened on a Tuesday morning. Marco was cycling to his new job at a credit union—when a robotic delivery truck glitched and ran a red light-an obscenely rare occurrence. Marco had been cycling for years with self-driving vehicles and never saw it coming.
Luke learned about it from Maria, Marco’s sister, who’d found his contact information in a folder labeled “Important People.”
“He talked about you all the time,” she said at the funeral. “Said you were the smartest person he knew, even when you two weren’t speaking.”
Luke wanted to explain their fight, the years of stubborn silence, the opportunities they’d both let slip away. Instead, he listened as Maria shared stories he’d never heard: Marco volunteering at the community center, teaching kids about money and patience. Marco keeping a photo of them from college on his desk she gave to him. Luke’s chest collapsed. He pressed the photo to his face, choking out a sound of true pain he hadn’t made since childhood. Years of pride, silence, wasted seconds—gone. Maria held his hand and let him weep. Marco said he hoped to reconnect when his pride stopped hurting so much.
“There’s something else,” Maria said, handing Luke a folder. “His will mentions you specifically.”
Inside was a hardware wallet—a BitBox02—and a letter in Marco’s careful handwriting:
*Luke—
If you’re reading this, I’m probably dead, which means I never got the chance to call you like I should have. Coward’s way out, I guess.
You were right about everything. Took me years and most of my net worth to figure that out, but here we are. I’ve got 1.8 Bitcoin on this wallet, earned the hard way through DCA and discipline. I kept learning from you too just from afar this time. The seed phrase is in my safety deposit box at First National, split between two bank envelopes labeled “For Luke” and “From Marco.”
I know you don’t need the money, but I hope you’ll accept it anyway. Not as an investment—as an apology. You tried to save me from myself, and I was too proud to listen. By the time I understood, you’d become famous and I was embarrassed. How do you apologize to someone who became a legend by being right about everything you got wrong?
I learned something these past few years: Bitcoin isn’t just about the technology or the economics. It’s about community. About teaching people patience and delayed gratification. About showing them there’s a better way.
You built that community first. I hope you’ll remember that friendship matters more than being right.
Thanks for trying to save me. I wish I’d listened sooner.
Your friend always,
Marco
P.S. - Check the wallet label. I couldn’t resist one last joke.*
Inside the wallet: a hardware device. Its label made him laugh through tears: Seed Phrase Karaoke. He plugged it in. 1.8 Bitcoin sat there, each purchase annotated in Marco’s clumsy notes: “Payday DCA,” “Sold the condo furniture,” “Kids’ coding bootcamp donation.”
The final note: Different Roads, Same Moon.
Luke closed his laptop and walked to the pier where their friendship had started and ended so many times. The harbor lights reflected off the water like scattered satoshis, each one precious and irreplaceable.
He pulled out his phone and recorded a voice memo, something personal he’d never shared publicly:
“This is Luke, and I want to talk about something more important than Bitcoin. I want to talk about friendship, and patience, and the difference between being right and being kind…”
He posted it that night with a simple caption: “In memory of Marco Ruiz, who taught me that the best HODLers are the ones who hold onto people, not just coins.”
The response overwhelmed him. Hundreds of stories about lost friendships, about pride and reconciliation, about the human cost of being right. Marco would have loved the conversation it started.
Luke kept the BitBox02 on his desk next to their old photo from the pier. 1.8 Bitcoin that represented more than money—it was proof that people could change, learn, grow back toward each other even when pride built walls between them.
Sometimes the best inheritance isn’t what someone leaves you, but what they teach you about what matters most. Marco’s final gift wasn’t the Bitcoin—it was the reminder that no amount of perfect money could buy back the time they’d lost to stubborn silence.
The pier still creaked in the evening tide. But now Luke heard it differently—not as a countdown to some distant moon, but as a rhythm that connected all the moments when friendship mattered more than being right.