Your rent went up again in January. Groceries went up twice. The raise you got in April got eaten before Memorial Day. Your savings balance is the same number it was two years ago and somehow buys less.
Your friend Kyle won't shut up about bitcoin. He's a normal person. He has a job, a dog, a Honda. Tonight he's at a meetup downtown and he just texted you the address.
Your rent went up again in January. Groceries went up twice. The raise you got in April got eaten before Memorial Day. Your savings balance is the same number it was two years ago and somehow buys less.
Your friend Kyle won't shut up about bitcoin. He's a normal person. He has a job, a dog, a Honda. Tonight he's at a meetup downtown and he just texted you the address.
It is a basement with twenty-ish people in it. An attorney, a barber, a few developers, a woman with a sleeping baby. Kyle is arguing with somebody about a hardware wallet you've never heard of.
Nobody is selling you anything. Nobody is trying to sound smart. Somebody explains, with no condescension, what self-custody is. You wrote the word down on your phone so you could look it up later.
The app is slick. Onboarding takes eight minutes. You buy five hundred dollars of bitcoin with a debit card. The app celebrates you with confetti.
You scroll past forty pages of terms of service. There is a section called "custodianship" you did not read. The coins sit inside the exchange, next to everyone else's. Your friend at the meetup said something about this and you don't quite remember what.
You spend a weekend reading. Keys, seed phrases, hardware wallets, why on-chain is different from a database. You buy a cheap hardware wallet and set it up while eating cereal on Sunday.
By Monday the five hundred has moved off the exchange and onto a device you control. You write twelve words on a piece of paper and then on a steel plate. You also start a recurring purchase, a small one, every Friday.
You are still at the same firm. You got promoted twice. Your salary number is higher and your savings balance is higher and the things the numbers buy are smaller. The raise kept pace with the job; the job never quite kept pace with the grocery store.
Kyle is still your friend. He bought a house in 2027. He never mentioned bitcoin to you again, because you had already told him what you thought about it, and he is a polite person.
You were at dinner when the first headlines hit. You opened the app. The banner on top said "temporary pause on withdrawals while we stabilize operations." By Tuesday the CEO was giving an apology tour on cable news. By Friday the Chapter 11 filing had your account on a spreadsheet attached to it.
You will get some fraction of your money back, eventually, after a bankruptcy process that takes years. The bitcoin you bought is somewhere on the chain, unspent. Just not by you.
A small automatic purchase every Friday. You didn't time the top, didn't buy the bottom, didn't stress either direction. The hardware wallet lives in a drawer. The steel plate lives somewhere else.
The thing that changed wasn't the balance. It was that you stopped flinching every time rent went up. You were holding the thing rent was going up in.
You moved for a job. There was no meetup in your new town. You posted on Meetup.com, booked a room above a coffee shop, and told three people. The first meeting had four attendees counting you. The second had nine.
It has been eighteen months. The room is full most nights. Somebody brought their skeptical friend last week. You remembered what that was like.