I have done a few posts describing conversations I have had with my retired or soon to be retired friends about bitcoin. I can’t find those posts right now. This one is about another friend with whom I am at a loss to present arguments. Here’s the story:
Another Retired Guy
Mr. X was a very successful retail business owner. He accumulated a good deal of wealth and discovered the stock market at a young age. He had little formal education, but he is very intelligent, well read, and with a natural aptitude for numbers. He did well in stocks, bonds and real estate, and began managing his wife’s 401k years ago. He is disciplined. He would always set aside a portion of his brokerage assets for trading options, derivatives and stuff like that which I never really understood.
Down The Rabbit Hole
We became interested in bitcoin at around the same time, and we had endless conversations about it in 2017. We learned together. He became a typical hodler like me. He read the Bitcoin Standard, became obsessed, and has been steadily buying and holding bitcoin in cold wallets since. I assume he has a substantial stack now, although of course we don’t talk about it. We also don’t talk as much as we did, since we no longer live near each other.
Our Paths Diverge
We caught up with each other on the phone the other night. When the conversation naturally turned to bitcoin, he said that he was having fun with “bitcoin shitcoins.” I didn’t know where this was going. He told me that he was using his brokerage accounts to trade shitcoins like microstrategy, all the ETFs, and even stocks like Semler Scientific. He said he didn’t feel bad about selling them since they weren’t real bitcoin anyway. He loved Saylor’s strategy of leveraging bitcoin with fiat. He was very excited talking about the availability of etf options.
I asked him what his end strategy was. He said he was trying to accumulate as much fiat as he could in the next year or so, then sink it into real bitcoin when the next bear market came around. He would also use some of his fiat to spend on his grand kids if they needed something.
I had trouble formulating arguments against him. I tried, but he would accuse me of acting like what he was doing was a sin. He wondered if I hadn’t embraced bitcoin as a religion.
I’m curious to know how other stackers would handle this? Is he right?
