Powers

Nobody warns you. That's the sick part. Nobody sits you down and says, hey, if you spend one weekend actually reading about money, you will lose the ability to enjoy anything for the rest of your life. Your brother-in-law just mentions it at a barbecue. That's how it starts. Some guy holding a hot dog says "you should look into Bitcoin" and you laugh at him. You laugh AT him. You make the tulip joke. You feel superior for eleven more days. Then it's 2:47 in the morning and you're on your fourth Saylor podcast and your wife thinks you're having an affair. And in a way, you are. You're cheating on your entire worldview. ou came in to debunk it. That's the trap. Everyone comes in to debunk it. You wanted to find the flaw, dunk on your brother-in-law, and go back to your Vanguard target date fund like a respectable adult. Instead you found out what happened in 1971 and now you can't make eye contact with your 401k. Because here's what actually happens. Bitcoin is cool and all, but you REALLY learn about the dollar. Bitcoin is fine, Bitcoin is twenty-one million and a schedule, you understand it in an afternoon. The dollar takes months, because every time you think you've hit the bottom of that thing there's a trapdoor. The Fed just... prints it? And they gave how much to the banks in 2008? And the banks did WHAT with it? And the guy who ran that got a MEDAL? You're up at 4am reading about the Cantillon effect like it's your kid's toxicology report. Then comes the phase where you're insufferable. Everyone goes through it, nobody admits it. You ruin Thanksgiving. You genuinely ruin it. Your aunt says turkey prices are crazy this year and you see your opening like a lion seeing a wounded gazelle. Forty-five minutes later you're drawing the M2 money supply on a napkin and your mother is crying and your uncle is saying "it's not backed by anything" for the ninth time while his pension is backed by the promises of a government that's thirty-seven trillion in debt. He's worried about YOUR risk profile. He has unit bias so bad he'd rather own a whole Shiba Inu coin than a fraction of the hardest asset ever created, because his brain, poisoned by seventy years of fiat, thinks "whole thing cheap" beats "piece of thing good." And the prices. God, the prices. You can't turn it off. You're in the grocery store repricing eggs in sats. The eggs are getting cheaper in sats. Everything is getting cheaper in sats except your will to explain that to anyone. You look at a house and you don't see a house, you see the number of Bitcoin it costs, and that number falling forever, and you realize the housing crisis is a measuring stick crisis, and you say this out loud at a dinner party, once, and now you're not invited to dinner parties. Then the anger burns off and something worse arrives. Clarity. You realize nobody is coming to fix this. The people in charge KNOW. That's the part that breaks you. They're not stupid, they're incentivized. The debt can't be paid, only inflated, and every serious person in a suit on television knows it, and their plan is to be dead before the invoice arrives. So you buy. Coinbase, first time, hands shaking like you're doing something illegal, and the fee annoys you, and that annoyance is the last normal financial emotion you will ever feel. You set up the DCA. You learn what a hardware wallet is. You write twelve words on steel like a doomsday prepper, because that's what you are now, except your bunker is math. And then the loneliness. Nobody tells you about the loneliness. You've seen it. You can't unsee it. And you're surrounded by people you love who are working forty years to fill a bathtub with the drain open, and when you point at the drain they get mad at YOU. So you stop pointing. You just stack quietly, in the dark, waiting for the day one of them comes to you, at a barbecue, holding a hot dog, and says the words. "Hey... you were into Bitcoin, right?" And you smile. Because it's their turn in the barrel. Welcome. Nobody warned me either.