Bitcoin Holders Don't Want the Price to Rise

Lex Fridman opens with the biography that still sits under everything else: Anthony Pompliano served six years in the U.S. Army and spent thirteen months in Iraq in 2008 and 2009. Pompliano joined at seventeen, which meant his parents had to sign. He had graduated a semester early from high school, planned to play college football, and instead found himself working at Chick-fil-A and Quiznos. That, he says, was not the path he wanted, so he walked into a recruiting office and took the pitch: a signing bonus, jumping out of planes, the usual.

He signed up for the Reserves. The plan was basic training, qualifications, college, and maybe a deployment after graduation. Instead he was pulled out of school as a junior and sent at twenty. Football, he thinks, was an accidental gift on both ends of combat: a male, testosterone-heavy, us-versus-them sport that already felt like a uniformed fight, then a de-escalation on the way home when most of the men he served with went back to being prison guards, police officers, or lumber-yard workers. He went back to the combative environment of football first, then to ordinary civilian life.

Veterans will tell you the two most dangerous stretches of a war are the first two or three weeks and the last two or three. At the start you do not know the people, the terrain, or the local signs worth watching. At the end you think you have survived and you get complacent. Pompliano's unit made it through the handoff with the outgoing team. Then came the first mission as a unit at 100 percent. That night he was standing up out of a truck when a round he believes was a sniper's shot hissed past. The soldier next to him, from rural Pennsylvania, said he had never been shot at either, but he had hunted his whole life: get the fuck down.

Later that same night a vehicle at the front of the convoy ran over an IED. Pompliano had never been in a convoy that had been blown up, but training took over. Everyone started screaming "IED" at once and looking for people, positions, and the next move. In that moment, he says, nobody was thinking; they were running a program that had been drilled into muscle. A U.S. soldier died, shot in the head. Pompliano did not know him. The man had shown up as secondary support. Only afterward did he learn the name, and that there was a family and young children. At twenty, holding a rifle, he understood it was real for a reason.

The memory that stayed with him was not only the explosion. It was the children on the roadside: a ten-, twelve-, or fourteen-year-old with hate in the eyes, aimed not at Pompliano the person but at the uniform and what it stood for. Once you have seen that look, he says, you never mistake it. Talking it through later, the unit would say the quiet part out loud: if they were that kid, they would want to kill that person too. Imagine tanks from another country rolling down an American street tomorrow, imposing rules they believed were right. At minimum you would not feel great. At maximum you would fight back.

The crueler possibility is local and specific. Maybe a year earlier another American unit came through, took fire, returned it, and killed that child's uncle. From a distance, he says, Americans look at war as black and white and clinical: go, invade, crush, because this is the most dominant military in the world. On the ground you see the humanity of it. That is why almost every veteran he knows comes home as one of the largest pacifists in the world.

He cites a speech by Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell. If you are a politician, Luttrell said, your job is to be the diplomat. Do everything you can not to send me and my friends anywhere, because when you send us we will bring hell with us. That is the business. Everyone up the chain until that moment has a job to prevent it. Pompliano's generation of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, he thinks, came back arguing that the United States should not run around the world as police, and that if soldiers do have to go, the country should understand what that actually means.

Fridman asks whether there will always be war. Pompliano splits the words. "War" carries bullets, bombs, death, a morbid register. Conflict is different: billions of people on one planet will always disagree, over ideas or geography or something else. Conflict stays. The question is what form war takes. He sees it becoming more clinical: more drones, fewer soldiers on the ground, more special forces and small specialized teams instead of big mechanical armies, then information war and cyber war. A war with no death sounds far less frightening than sending ten thousand soldiers and piping back the videos of the ones who do not come home.

Fridman asks whether Pompliano considers himself a Bitcoin maximalist. Pompliano works backward from the world he wants: an automated one running on open, decentralized protocols, returning sovereignty, individualism, personal responsibility, and liberty to people over institutions, and moving a historically analog economy into a digital one. Obsession with an inanimate object, he says, is pretty stupid. What matters are the ideals and the most rational path to that end. Maximalism, as he defines it, is not only "this is best." It is also anti-everything else, the way a keto maximalist says every other diet is bad.

Most people labeled Bitcoin maximalists, he thinks, would be open-minded if a superior technology arrived. The clash is that the Bitcoin community believes Bitcoin is the best path and has specific arguments for why the others are not. That posture looks strange in ordinary investing, where nobody says Apple is the only stock worth owning. In crypto he sees two camps building two different things that unpack into the same ambition. Bitcoin is treated as programmatic, transparent money aiming to become a global reserve currency, the opposite of inflationary, opaque fiat. Everything else, led by Ethereum's "world computer," is chasing smart contracts and other uses.

The real split, he says, is innovation versus security. Bitcoin's community decided security is the number-one optimization: decentralization over transaction speed, cost, or anything else a currency might want. Facebook's Libra, later Diem, is his cautionary tale: without decentralization it is easy for a nation-state to interfere. Other chains say security matters but is not first; they will trade a little of it for speed or composability. Ethereum exists because a group wanted to do something on Bitcoin, felt they could not, and built smart contracts instead.

Calling one camp right and the other wrong strikes him as childish. The market will decide. Tribalism, he thinks, comes from the ticker price. Venture capitalists did not scream at each other like religious zealots over which cloud platform to back. Crypto is different because retail investors sit beside professionals, through ICOs and other raises that either give the little guy access or make scams easier, depending on whom you ask. Ten years from now, he tells Fridman, they will look back and say the market judged X valuable and Y not. The shouting in between is fun. It does not really matter.

What is money? Pompliano's answer is blunt: today it is a belief system. You may believe one currency is worth more than another because a military stands behind it, or because you like or dislike a government's monetary policy. Underneath that, nothing backs it except a state that demands taxes in that unit and can jail you if you refuse. For five thousand years the layer-one technology was gold. It was scarce, outside the system, and nobody could create more of it. That store-of-value optimization was the bedrock of the whole monetary stack.

Gold's problem was transacting. If Fridman wanted a couple of ounces and Pompliano had a bar, he would have to shave it. It is heavy. Mailing it is expensive. So people built a second layer: paper claims. Put the gold in a vault, issue receipts, trade the receipts, redeem them when you want the metal. Then came electronic money, credit, and more layers on top. In 1971 the United States left gold. It was sold as temporary. The country never went back. Sound money, outside the system, became government-controlled money that could be created at will. Some countries have been disciplined. Some have been terrible at it.

Bitcoin, in this telling, is gold's security optimization in digital form, with purchasing power compounding on the order of 200 percent a year for more than a decade when measured in dollars. Critics still yell that it is slow and costly. One school says the technology is antiquated and they will build something new. The Bitcoin community says do what gold did: keep the secure base and build layers two, three, four, and five on top, already cheaper and faster. Pompliano thinks both worlds will coexist. The question is which one matters more. You can improve the other features later. You cannot go back and fix the core.

Every currency and financial service in the world, Pompliano argues, is highly susceptible to censorship. The United States, in his view, is in that business: how many countries does it sanction and cut off, in small or material ways, from the global financial system? American superiority, he says, comes from bombs, bullets, soldiers, and the ability to impose will. There is a strong argument that the people of sanctioned countries did nothing wrong. Governments may be bad by democratic lights. The people get hurt anyway.

Zoom out of the Western worldview, treat everyone as part of the human race, and it is censorship. There may be an argument for it. There may be an argument against it. What Bitcoin does as a payment network is simpler: anyone with an internet connection, regardless of birthplace, language, religion, wealth, or education, can plug into the monetary system and move value without asking permission. In the United States, dollar banking already offers something close to that, unless the recipient is on a list. Most of the world does not have it.

When a national currency starts to fail, the first move of people in power is often capital controls, locking citizens inside the collapsing unit because letting them out makes the problem worse. Bitcoin, he says, hands billions of people a tool of peaceful protest. Over the prior twelve months the Federal Reserve, elected officials, and central banks around the world created trillions of dollars and injected them into the system. Pompliano and Fridman had no say. Some of the arguments for that response, he grants, are good: mitigate short-term pain, figure out the long term later. The people making those far-reaching decisions are few, and in many cases appointed rather than elected.

Fridman asks what trajectory would let Bitcoin become the world's main currency, or at least overtake the dollar as a store of value. Pompliano refuses the frame of direct competition. The valuable technologies, he says, expand markets rather than steal share. Uber did not simply kill taxis; it made car access possible for millions of Americans who no longer keep a car. Bitcoin has a medium-of-exchange overlap with the dollar, but the larger market is store-of-value assets. Young people grew up with a phone in their hand. Going to a bank, sending a wire, or pulling cash from an ATM already feels antique. He asked his twenty-four-year-old brother how he sends money to friends. Venmo, as expected. The second answer was Uber: get in a car together and split the ride.

Look at financial assets the way a young person does, Pompliano says, and the traditional 60/40 portfolio is already broken. Bonds offer flat-to-negative real returns if you believe the dollar is being devalued. The stock market from 1971 to today, in dollar terms, is a forty-five-degree line up and to the right, seven or eight or ten percent a year. Denominate the same market in gold and it is down since 1971. So is the stock market accruing true value, or is the unit it is priced in quietly shrinking, not in a 50 percent crash but in a disciplined grind?

People come to Bitcoin two ways. The first is as savings technology. In the traditional world we tell a teacher, a firefighter, an accountant, a mid-level manager: be best in class at your job, and also be a professional investor, because dollars in a bank account are devalued away. That is a really tall task. They have a hard enough time doing the job and taking care of a family. Bitcoin's pitch as savings is simpler: buy some, and over time purchasing power rises because supply is fixed and demand keeps growing.

The second path is the alternative sleeve of a portfolio: art, real estate, precious metals, assets people hold more as stores of value than as expected compounders. Gold, he says, is a narrative-driven asset. We tell people it is scarce. We have a good estimate of how much exists and how much comes out of the ground each day. We cannot prove either number. The internet changed the appetite: if you say something is scarce, prove it. His brother's generation Googles the story and comes back to tell their parents they got it wrong. Provability is becoming the point.

He thinks the gold-to-Bitcoin shift is underestimated. Gold had been down since August 2020, in a window when the United States printed on the order of six trillion dollars, the very setting in which gold hit an all-time high after 2008. Central banks, long net buyers, had been net sellers in several of the prior six months. Jewelry demand, gold's non-monetary use, peaked in 2013 and kept falling. Those three channels are about 93 percent of gold's use; only 7 percent is industrial. A $10 trillion asset, on that picture, looks like it is contracting. If the value leaves, he asks, where does it go, while retail, the wealthy, institutions, corporations, and pension funds pour into digital sound money? Lined up side by side, the gold and Bitcoin communities agree on the world's problems and on sound money as the answer. They disagree only on analog versus digital.

Why does scarcity make things valuable? Pompliano says the correlation runs across assets, not just money: sneakers, art, whatever. Scarcity is how humans have derived value for thousands of years. Fridman takes it further. Immortality, he worries, would dissipate meaning. Love, too, is intensified by scarcity; dating culture that treats people as abundant looks, to him, like it cheapens the moments when connection actually happens. Money may just be another story we tell ourselves along the same line.

Pompliano thinks they are more connected than that. Money is time. You pursue it because it should buy you more hours. One of his favorite movies is *In Time*, with Justin Timberlake, a film he loses people with as soon as he names the star. Everyone has a clock in their arm. Work deposits time. Hit all zeros and you die on the spot. Society is zoned by remaining hours: a few days and you live in the poor sector; years and years and you live in the rich one. Aging freezes at twenty-five, so someone may have lived a thousand years and still look young.

The detail he cannot shake: at the bottom, everyone runs, because walking would waste scarce time. At the top, nobody runs, and running marks you as lower class. A million seconds is about eleven days. A billion seconds is thirty-one years. Switch lives with Warren Buffett and a lot of people say yes, until you add that they have to be ninety-two. Most then say no. A person in their twenties has about two billion seconds left. If they keep measuring wealth in a devaluing dollar, a million dollars never buys what it used to, and the finish line keeps moving: a hundred thousand, then five hundred, then a million. Sound money is an asset that holds value and appreciates, so you can stop running.

He puts a sharp class line on it. The top 55 percent of Americans, he says, understand something the bottom 45 percent do not: they invest. The bottom 45 percent consume. That is why the wealth gap keeps widening. People holding devaluing cash watch it melt. People holding scarce things, even if not strictly finite, real estate, art, gold, watch those assets rise against the currency. Give them a fully finite, provable supply they can transact, and it becomes a representation of time: acquire more of it, apply leverage through machines or other people, and free your hours.

Fridman brings up Eric Weinstein, who had stepped into the Bitcoin community's social dynamics and hit a nerve. Pompliano puts Weinstein with other independent thinkers willing to speak, revise, and change their minds, a scarce type he associates with the so-called intellectual dark web. What he has watched, from hedge-fund managers to public intellectuals, is people playing with the ideas for months or years and arriving at the same Bitcoin thesis. Building a global reserve currency of the internet, he says, needs shepherds. The community is rabid, powerful, and more practiced at attacking the arguments than almost anyone else, which is why critic Marty Bent's line sticks: a lot of Bitcoin critics have not done their homework.

Fridman grants the immune-system picture and then names the toxicity. A newcomer in the Dunning-Kruger phase makes declarative statements, gets piled on, and leaves. From outside, exploring an idea is a learning process. From inside, a trillion dollars of value is at stake and must be protected with their lives. The truth, Pompliano says, is in the gray where most people actually live. The community also understands internet culture better than almost anyone, which is why memes, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and podcasts can destroy a narrative. If you are an upstart challenging the most respected institutions and you walk in wearing a suit to debate, you get your clock cleaned by lawyers, regulators, and lobbyists. Meme them to death and the asymmetry flattens. "It's the ultimate insurgency," he says. You have to lean into the advantage you have.

JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, or the Fed tweeting memes would validate the medium and pull the establishment down to the challenger's level. Meanwhile he gets messages every day: banker by trade, Bitcoiner at heart. Infiltrate with ideas, not headcount. Banker in the streets, Bitcoiner in the sheets. Laser-eye profile pictures look ridiculous until members of Congress do them, speaking inward to the community rather than converting colleagues. Anonymous accounts telling Mark Cuban or Kevin O'Leary "have fun staying poor" are, in his view, a feature more than a bug, an immune system that does crappy things and is still a net positive.

Ray Dalio is the Wall Street version of the same journey. Bitcoiners had long said Dalio understood the argument and was missing only the last piece: Bitcoin is the solution. Pompliano gives him credit for staying open. Live long enough and the innovator becomes the establishment; Gates, Buffett, and Dalio all fit. When Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller, Dalio, and even Howard Marks write about it, the main effect is not converting the public. It is reducing career risk. If it is good enough for those names, an investment committee can hear the same pitch. The adoption path keeps repeating: infrastructure, then tech billionaires, then Wall Street legends, then institutions, then corporations, and eventually, he thinks, a central bank. Short-circuit the journey and people do not appreciate it, the way a kid given money never earned does not. Dalio wrote *Principles* around the hero's journey. In a sense he is living one.

Fridman drags the conversation down to the practical question: how does a person actually buy and store Bitcoin? You can mine it, renting energy and computation to the network under proof of work. Or you can use an exchange. Pompliano is biased: he invested in BlockFi, which lets people convert dollars, earn interest above traditional accounts, or withdraw to a hardware device. Storage maps onto three layers of the old banking world. Leave it at the bank, easy to send, with counterparty risk partly backstopped by FDIC insurance. Pull cash and put it under the mattress. Or lock it in a vault behind ten passwords and biometrics. In Bitcoin those layers are the exchange, a hardware or software wallet, and deep cold storage. A company called Xapo, he notes, buried coins in a mountain with armed guards.

The community phrase is not your keys, not your coins. His friend Isaiah Jackson's version is "not your keys, not your cheese." Pompliano is not dogmatic. Speculators cannot put coins in deep cold storage because they need to trade; they live in a high-risk, high-reward quadrant. The person who bought one Bitcoin to give a child on an eighteenth birthday is a different species. Even a five-dollar purchase, he says, is worth running all the way from exchange to hardware wallet and back, just so you have actually experienced the thing. On-chain, 60 percent of Bitcoin has not moved in twelve months. Those are the diamond hands. They are also the people least likely to leave coins on an exchange.

He did not buy a little in 2011 and watch it grow into the position. In December 2018, with the dollar price falling, he converted about 50 percent of his net worth from dollar assets into Bitcoin, an intentional bet on a late-cycle world of inverted yield curves, repo-market stress, and CEOs leaving jobs. He expected that when markets turned, government would cut rates and print. He did not foresee a pandemic, zero rates, or trillions instead of hundreds of billions. In spring 2020, watching aggressive rate policy and quantitative easing, he converted the rest. More than 95 percent of his net worth is now in Bitcoin. He treats it as savings. A dollar is worth a dollar. One Bitcoin is worth one Bitcoin, not sixty thousand or seventy. "When I make a purchase," he says, "in my head I'm calculating how much bitcoin I'm spending."

A devaluing unit of account incentivizes spending and investing. An appreciating one makes you anti-consumptive, because every unit spent is future purchasing power given away. The last fifty years, he argues, are the historical outlier. Fiat created a financial incentive to consume, and nobody does that better than the United States, visible in the size of a McDonald's Coke. The dark version of the same story is that if you do not consume and invest, you join the bottom 45 percent holding no investable assets while the currency melts. Why spend one Bitcoin for $10,000, as you could in October of the prior year, if later it trades for much more?

His advice for ordinary buyers is almost insultingly simple: dollar-cost averaging. Most people are not sitting on a pile of cash. They trade hours for a paycheck every two weeks. Take the percentage you have decided to allocate and buy on payday, ignoring the price. If you had dumped everything into Bitcoin at $20,000 in December 2017, you would have waited almost three years just to break even in dollars. If you had bought then and every two weeks for three years, you would have been up hundreds of percent, because you also bought at 15, 12, 10, 9, 8, 3, 4, and 5. Set an allocation, treat it like a savings account, and do not look. Almost any American who does this for a lifetime, he claims, can become a millionaire. The same rule applies to the S&P 500. Time in the market and compounding beat being 2 percent cheap or 2 percent dear.

Volatility, he says, has no moral content. Amazon has had a double-digit drawdown every year since going public, averaging over 30 percent, once more than 95 percent. It still became one of the best-performing stocks of the past twenty years. If you are long and volatility is up, it is good. If you are long and it is down, it is bad. Price everything in Bitcoin and the picture inverts: over one, three, and five years the dollar is down about 99 percent, stocks 80 to 85, gold, bonds, and real estate all smashed. You can call that Bitcoin rising in dollars, or you can call it the world doing price discovery and moving Bitcoin up the ranking. Some of that is Lindy: the longer it survives, the more likely it is to keep surviving. Some is fundamentals: hash rate, usage, volume. Some is fixed supply meeting rising demand. The 60 percent that does not move is not watching the daily print.

Fridman notes that Pompliano has tweeted about a million-dollar Bitcoin. The arithmetic starts with gold at $10 trillion. On portability, divisibility, verifiability, and scarcity, Pompliano says Bitcoin is superior in every way, a 10x or 100x technology. Bitcoin's market cap at the time was just over $1 trillion. Capture gold's $10 trillion and a coin is about $500,000. Capture twice that, $20 trillion, and it is about $1 million. He is not claiming it must. He is saying a 10x better asset only has to capture some of the value in that direction for the order of magnitude to stop looking insane.

Supply is the part of the equation you can hold constant. There will only ever be 21 million coins, about 18.6 million already circulating, every transaction since January 2009 visible, about 900 new coins a day. Demand is the half you still have to forecast. Every four years the protocol halves issuance: 50 coins per ten minutes, then 25, then 12.5, then 6.25 in May 2020. In 2019 he started arguing that 2020 would bring a supply shock and a demand shock together, "rocket fuel." He did not know a pandemic was coming, but the framework held. He has called for $100,000 Bitcoin in 2021 since 2019. Now he is the conservative in the room. The next supply shock is 2024. If history rhymes, a million-dollar Bitcoin arrives within eighteen to twenty-four months after that, by the end of 2026, preferably without another public-health crisis.

What is a shitcoin? It depends whom you ask. To the most enthusiastic Bitcoiners, everything else is a shitcoin. To Bitcoin proponents who still see value in other projects, it is the bottom half of the rest. It is a meme for "this bucket has no value." Ohio congressman Warren Davidson once got the word read into the congressional record, which made him beloved in the community. Pompliano treats that as a signal of narrative power. Decentralized products have no CEO. The teams that win are the ones that can raise attention, recruit, and tell a story. Shitcoin is both an attack on outsiders and a rallying cry inside. Other communities now use it too: we are not the shitcoin, the next guy is.

Bitcoin, he says, is about truth, not narrative or feelings. It is math. You can prove a claim on a chain or you cannot, so the people it attracts show up to financial media with data points A, B, and C and examples one, two, and three. The media, used to soft opinion pieces, just yells that you cannot say they are wrong. Fridman adds the limit he cares about: tearing down bad ideas can be done with grace, and grace takes skill. Christopher Hitchens is his example of a verbal pitcher who could dismantle an argument and still move toward truth. Most internet teardown, he says, does not put in the work. If you want to be in the culture, treat shitposting as a 10,000-hour craft. Pompliano agrees and returns to intention versus action. Telling someone they are wrong so they can see the truth is one thing. Telling them so they hurt is another. A good meme, including the elaborate edited videos, is the most precise way to deliver a blunt message. Emojis, GIFs, and memes are hieroglyphics that now go to millions with one button.

Fridman asks what Elon Musk is doing with Dogecoin, a coin almost no technologist sees as revolutionary, with known security issues. Pompliano starts with the latest SEC filing: Musk's title is Techno King of Tesla, the CFO's is Master of Coin. Once you will put those words on a form, Dogecoin is among the least crazy things you could talk about. Musk, he thinks, is underestimated as a reader of internet culture, memes, psychology, and marketing. Every Dogecoin mention is a rallying cry for a generation of kids and for crypto as an industry, a flag he can yell about without the punishment that would follow talking his book in securities. It is a Venn diagram of what people find funny and what he can say. It is also a middle finger to the SEC. Pompliano does not think Musk bought a pile, pumped it, and plans to cash out. There is a meta-message in it, closer to first-principles communication than to an economic trade. The long-term move, the one he also ascribes to Bezos and Jack Dorsey, is to pick a future world and build toward it, using Bezos's regret-minimization: fast-forward to eighty or ninety, look back, and choose the option you will regret less.

NFTs, he says, are probably both a fad and a lesson. Fungible means you can mix hundred-dollar bills and grab any one. Non-fungible is a Picasso next to unknown paintings: grab the wrong canvas and you lose. The technology, on whatever chain, brings true digital scarcity to the internet. People then look at the analog world, see what is scarce and valuable, and try to move it over. Art is the cleanest example. He concluded that just as Bitcoin will be bigger than gold, the digital art world will be bigger than the traditional one: more portable, divisible, a demand market the size of the internet rather than an auction house, display with motion and music. What traditional art still has is narrative, and that narrative is being built. Serial numbers are the metaphor: only Eiffel Tower 001 matters. What we are looking at is maybe 1 percent of what it grows into. Ten years out he sketches a virtual museum of digital sculpture, game skins, and goods, with tickets and consignment, the analog playbook copied into a much larger addressable market. Fast-forward far enough and conflict in that world is less about killing bodies than about attacking virtual property and virtual sovereignty. One of the most violent things a country may do to another is simply take down the internet and put people in isolation.

Fridman turns to AI. In a digital world, he says, software systems can scale with far less friction than robots in physical space. Pompliano starts with a definition: a lot of what is called artificial intelligence is human intelligence copied at scale, automated and programmatic. In the analog world that means hiring thousands, or Amazon's millions, with recruiting, training, and retention. In the digital economy you program the resources, get the leverage, and let them decide without having pre-written every edge case. Technology always gets used for good and bad, phones, pagers, the internet, guns. Malicious people, he thinks, will be handled the old way: understand, identify, control, reverse or prevent. The real danger is inadvertent consequences. When something can think for itself and you cannot use a monopoly on violence to control it, that is scary.

Fridman's sharper fear is not superintelligence. It is super-dumb systems at scale. Imagine chimps that can multiply overnight from a million to a trillion. Where did they come from? Maybe they stay peaceful when resources are unconstrained. We do not know. It all starts with the first chimp-multiplier, sold on housework. Once a million or a billion dumb agents can roam the digital space we are moving our lives into, the risk is concentrated there. Pompliano adds irreversibility. Inadvertent harm is tolerable if the system can be rolled back. Overlay a mistake you cannot reverse, and humans lose control. If you have a trillion chimps, they will not like it when you try to start killing them off.

Asked for resources, he names his own first, with a warning that they are selfish: the Pomp Podcast, which he uses to learn, and the Pomp Letter, which forces him to collect thoughts every morning. For Bitcoin he starts with *The Bitcoin Standard*, then Jason Williams's *Bitcoin: Money You Can't Fuck With*, Nick Carter's *Layered Money*, Isaiah Jackson's *Bitcoin in Black America*, and Jeff Booth's *The Price of Tomorrow*. The book that best matches Bitcoin's ethos without mentioning Bitcoin is Mark Spitznagel's *The Dao of Capital*, a hymn to long-term thinking from a tail-risk hedger whose fund was up about 4,000 percent in February and March 2020 after eight or nine losing years and still ranks among the best over a long enough window. At twenty, sitting in the Iraqi desert, he read *Rich Dad Poor Dad*, *Think and Grow Rich*, and *The Richest Man in Babylon*. He implemented almost none of the tactics. They changed his relationship with money. *When Breath Becomes Air* is, for him, one of the best books ever written, because it says what Iraq also said: you are going to die, so spend the scarce asset, time, on enjoyment.

He does not meditate on death so much as refuse to fixate on it. After war, college anxieties looked unserious. People who know him say he rarely gets worked up, good or bad. If that is the final result, enjoy it. Does money buy happiness? People hear the question and picture houses, boats, cars. Reframe it: what if money let you spend more time with your family? For him, leveraging financial resources to buy hours for the things he likes is happiness. It may not work for everyone. He does not care, because those people are not him. The meaning of life, answered as the right answer for him rather than the accurate one, is to be happy. His friend Jonathan Geller talks about enough being enough. Bitcoiners, Geller notes, believe two contradictory things: they do not want the dollar price to rise, because they want to buy more, and no matter how much they hold, it is not enough. At some point you have to name the number. People who get clear on their threshold, money or time or impact, hit it on a much shorter timeline. Start at sixty and you will not hit it before sixty. Fridman describes oscillating: most of the time in gratitude, a fraction of the time in Marvin Minsky's mode of hating everything you have ever done. Pompliano adds purpose. Elon does not need to colonize Mars for the money. Once you have enough, you can be selfish about a non-economic pursuit. Fridman closes with Gandhi: freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.