Intro to Financial Fitness

Building your best self is about more than just physical fitness. It must take into consideration all aspects of your life. We believe that that physical fitness is just the beginning - the building block that everything else can be stacked on. When you start down the path of building your fitness, it allows you to gain the motivation and confidence to build other aspects of your life. You can start to see the limitless potential all around you. The next step, in our opinion, is to build yourself mentally and financially.

The Financial Fitness section of the blog is designed to help you on the financial side of the path. To be clear, many of the authors will not be financial advisors (although some of them will be). However, all of the articles and resources shared will be backed by evidence, both from researchable sources and personal experience. The topics will range broadly from retirement planning to real estate investing, and even to Bitcoin and digital currency. Our goal is not to tell you how to spend your money, handle your investments or how to become rich. Our goal is to get you to think about your finances and the world around you in a different, more thorough way that allows you to have the potential to gain an advantage in the financial realm. We want you to be financially secure, stress less about money, and live your life on your terms.

The financial world is a complex subject and only gets more convoluted as time goes on. We hope to break it down into digestible pieces and leave you wanting to do your own research into different topics so that you can master as much of the information as possible. This is a long process that no one could hope to master quickly. As with physical fitness, think of it as a marathon- not a sprint. True knowledge and mastery takes time. We urge you to start the process as early as possible and take it just as seriously as you would your health.

As noted, the subjects discussed will sometimes delve into some very complex topics. If you have any questions about any of the content or would like references to other material that we recommend, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We do not charge for these discussions and welcome them at all times. We are happy to schedule a call or meeting to discuss any and all questions you may have. While many of the authors are not financial advisors, open discussion with like-minded individuals with a deep interest in the topics is one of the best ways to learn about and understand different concepts. We look forward to going down the financial fitness path with you!

The Basics, containing chaos, and personal responsibility

 Some thoughts to consider this week:

Start with the Basics

“Sometimes the best way forward is the most basic path.”

People who find an interest in fitness will almost always be inundated with new ideas and routines that seem to get more complex as time goes on. This can be confusing and overwhelming. If you ever find yourself overwhelmed, get back to the basics. It doesn’t have to be complicated - it just has to work. Some of the most fit people on the planet have the most basic exercise routines.

Containing Chaos

“Before you start blaming your problems on the world around you, make sure your own house is in order.”

Everyone has their own share of problems that could easily be attributed to something outside themselves. Those who find their way past obstacles faced have a lot in common with how they did it. One of those things is that they always make sure their own house is in order first. Eat right, exercise regularly, learn daily, keep your house and workspace clean, etc. By getting your own house in order, the chaos that surrounds you will begin to calm down and allow you to look for opportunities. This is a hard but worthwhile process.

Personal Responsibility

An ancient Greek saying that captures the power of personal responsibility:

"If your doorstep is clean, then your city will be clean.”
Source: unknown

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

If you like the ideas here, consider joining our newsletter where we regularly send out tips for in the gym and in life. Our goal is to help people live better lives and we hope you gain value from the blog and our newsletter.

Intro to Bitcoin (Part 1)

*I am not a financial advisor. These articles are meant as educational material only and reflect my own personal views.

Anyone who has shown even a fleeting interest in Bitcoin, and even for those who have completely written it off as a scam or something not worth paying attention to, I invite you to join me on this series of short articles delving into this asset, its potential, how it could reshape the world, and why everyone should, at the very least, conduct some research to understand the financial environment we are currently in.

I want to be upfront with you right away; I am biased toward Bitcoin because I have been reading and listening to any information I can get my hands on for the past five years. Some of my convictions about it differ from others due to the time I have spent studying how it works and how it can largely affect the economy. Bitcoin can be somewhat daunting to understand as it has many facets, and frankly, the world has never seen an asset like it in human history. I am not trying to convince you to buy Bitcoin. My goal is to pique your interest enough to explore it. If you were to simply buy it with no knowledge or interest in it, the chances of you holding onto it long enough to be effective for you and your portfolio are slim because of the volatility. But once you have studied it, experimented with it, and know that if you buy, you are buying for the long term, I believe you will be more at peace with your investment and see its true world-changing potential. Even if you decide it isn’t the right investment for you, the knowledge you will gain during the research will be invaluable to understanding money and how the economy works.

A man named Jason Maier recently released a new book called “The Progressive Case for Bitcoin”. At the very end of the book, he stated that he believes no one who has ever studied Bitcoin for 100 hours has ever walked away thinking it was a bad investment. I tend to believe this statement and want to attempt to prove it to you in these articles. In order to provide a basic understanding of Bitcoin, I will be covering multiple topics including, but not limited to, the gold standard, inflation, time preference and Bitcoin itself.

Common Questions

Throughout this series of articles, we will be answering common questions about Bitcoin. You will find some of these common questions below with direct links to the articles that answer them.

What was the Gold Standard? - Article 2

What is the National Debt? - Article 2

What is inflation and what issues does it cause? - Article 3

What is the Cantillon Effect? - Article 3

What is proof-of-work? - Article 4

What is the difficulty adjustment? - Article 4

How many Bitcoin are there? - Article 4

What is the halving? - Article 4

What is the Stock-to-Flow ratio? - Article 4

Explanation of time preference - Article 5

What keeps bitcoin safe from government control? - Article 6

What impact does Bitcoin have on the environment? - Article 6

How do I buy Bitcoin? - Article 7

What do I do once I buy Bitcoin? - Article 7

How can I learn more? - Article 8

Glossary

Below are the definitions of some terms that will come up in the articles that may be new to many readers. It will help to understand these terms as you make your way through the articles.

Fiat Currency - All currencies issued by government (Dollar, Yen, Ruble, etc.) The definition of fiat is “a decree.” In the case of currencies, this means a fiat currency has value because an authority, such as a government, declares it has value.

Bitcoin Protocol - The internet is a protocol that everyone uses and continues to be built on top of. Email is also a good example of a protocol. There are few people that understand the underlying protocol of these technologies, yet we all use these same protocols to build websites, companies, applications, and even send messages. The protocols underpin everything built on top of it and rarely changes. The Bitcoin protocol is similar. It is a set of codes that Bitcoin runs on. Many services, applications and new technologies are built on top of this protocol, but the underlying protocol doesn’t change and acts as the foundation of the network.

Lighting Network - If the Bitcoin protocol is layer one of the network, the lighting network is layer two. Lighting has been built on top of the Bitcoin protocol in order to solve the issue of faster and cheaper payments. While layer one only handles so many transactions at a time to focus on security, this makes payments for coffee and other small transactions tedious. The lighting network makes these small transactions instant and cheap. Think of layer one as the place to make large secure payments while layer two is for small day-to-day transactions.

Digital Bearer Asset - A bearer asset is an asset that does not require the redeemer to register ownership, meaning the person who holds the asset is the owner. This can include a bond, checks, and cash. Bitcoin is the first digital bearer asset ever created. Meaning if you hold your own private keys no one can claim your Bitcoin unless you spend the Bitcoin or give up your keys.

Hardware Wallet - a device that holds the private keys to your Bitcoin. While the device does not actually hold Bitcoin, it allows you to access your address on the blockchain that proves you own your Bitcoin (Bitcoin never actually leave the blockchain). This device is not connected to the internet unless making a transaction (some are never connected to the internet at all). The device will also create addresses that allow you to receive Bitcoin.

Private Keys - Think of this as the password to your bank vault of Bitcoin. These “keys” are encrypted into a 12-24 word seed phrase that allows you to access your Bitcoin. Keeping your keys safe and protected gives you ownership and allows you to be your own bank of Bitcoin. Private keys prove you are the owner of this digital bearer asset. “Not your Keys, Not your Coins!”

Public Keys - A public key is created from a private key. Public keys can be shared with the public to receive Bitcoin from others. While a private key gives access to a public key, encryption makes it impossible for a public key to give access to a private key. Therefore it is safe to give out your public key, but you should never give out your private key.

Block - A block in Bitcoin is mined every 10 minutes on average. Miners all around the world compete in a sort of lottery competition to mine blocks. Included in the block is the Block Subsidy or reward for mining the new block, which at the time of writing is currently 6.25 Bitcoins. This is how new Bitcoin is introduced to the world. The block also contains transactions from the Bitcoin protocol and all the fees included with those transactions.

Blockchain - You can think of the blockchain as the entire ledger of Bitcoin’s history. Every transaction inside of every block is available to see in the blockchain and anyone can view it. This includes every block since the genesis block (the first block ever mined), back in 2009. These blocks are “chained”’ together as each proceeding block references the block before it in order to keep a legitimate ledger of truth of every transaction over time.

Node - A node is a computer that runs the bitcoin software and validates new blocks. Anyone can run a node. These nodes are what keep the protocol functioning and working honestly. Nodes also keep the network decentralized and secure. Bitcoin cannot be shut off because nodes are scattered throughout the world and as long as one person is still operating a node, the Bitcoin network will keep plugging along. Nodes interact with each other by validating transactions on the network. Any transaction that does not align with the protocol immediately gets discarded by nodes in the network which keep the system secure.

Miner - Miners are specialized computers that “mine” Bitcoin. These computers function by trying to win the lottery of finding new Bitcoin. This is done by making trillions of mathematical guesses if you will. The miner who guesses the correct number first “mines” the next block and is rewarded with newly minted Bitcoin. With this they get to place the new block into the blockchain and also receive all the fees from the transactions in that new block.

Proof of Work - this the name for the mining process of Bitcoin. It is called Proof of Work, because in order to mine the Bitcoin, real world energy (electricity) has to be used in order to mine Bitcoin. This energy takes capital, from buying the miner, paying the electricity cost to run the miner and in larger mining operations, building the infrastructure to house support and cool the miners. This can even include infrastructure to transport energy from hydroelectric, solar, wind, and other energy sources in order to run the mining rigs. This global competition keeps Bitcoin decentralized and acts more as a free market where everyone is competing and no one has control over the network

Proof of Stake - This is the mining process for most other cryptocurrencies and could even be compared to how fiat currencies work. Miners do not use real world energy to mine in this circumstance. Mining is produced by a computer algorithm and is distributed to the highest stakers in the network. In order to receive proof of stake coins, outside of buying, you must stake your coins in the network. The more coins you stake, the more coins you receive. While most claim it is better for the environment, the drawbacks are that the rich tend to get richer, which creates a centralizing problem in the network. The more coins you have the more you get, and the more power and control the top few have in the system. Since no real work or energy is being put in to protect the network, the top holders could in fact change the rules if they so choose.

Part 2 of the series can be found here.

The Dollar and The Gold Standard (Part 2)

Let’s start with a few surprising facts about currencies that you may not be aware of.

• The Dollar is not backed by anything. The US officially came off the Gold Standard (where the dollar was backed by gold) in 1971, although temporary breaks between the dollar and gold happened several times in previous decades. When the dollar permanently broke away from gold is when the dollar officially became a fiat currency. A fiat currency is a currency issued by the government and backed by the trust that it is worth what the government says it is. The definition of fiat is “by decree.”

• The dollar has been losing purchasing power consistently since its inception.

• Fiat Currencies have an average lifespan of 27 years.

• World reserve currencies have an average lifespan of 80-110 years, and the dollar has been the world’s reserve currency for about 103 years depending on which resource you use.

As you can see from these few examples, currencies that are issued by governments do not have the best track record. Fiat currencies all end up collapsing at some point in time because of centralized authority over the money supply. This has been happening for hundreds of years, dating back to when cultures used seashells for exchange. For example, wampum shells used to be used as currency in parts of the Americas, Africa, and Asia in the 1600s. These shells were fairly rare to these cultures and were difficult to come by, so they worked well for retaining value. This type of currency works in small societies, but eventually the New England colonists arrived with greater technology that allowed them to drill for more shells at a much faster pace than the more primitive societies they encountered. They used these mass-produced shells to purchase furs and items from these indigenous populations until the market was flooded with new shells. The mass production and centralized authority that New England brought to this economy devalued the shell currency and the colonists were able to buy most of the goods the indigenous population had worked to create. This more primitive form of hyperinflation lead to the collapse of the shell currency and had to reset to a more sound or “hard” money that newer technology couldn’t mass produce. This refers to money like gold, which is hard to create and extremely difficult to replicate. Gold makes for much better or sounder money than seashells, salt, or cattle, which were all used as currency at some point in history.

During the Gold Standard era, the dollar was backed by gold, meaning you could take your cash into a bank and redeem it for its value in gold. With the dollar pegged to the value of gold, governments were held to a certain level of spending as they could not print more money than they had gold in reserves. In today’s economy, the dollar, along with every other global currency, is fiat money, as it is no longer backed by gold or any other real commodity. This allows governments to print money on a whim, which dilutes the purchasing power of everyone’s money. The dollar began to come off the gold standard in part to finance both world wars (and all the wars since) along with new technology such as the telegraph which made moving money much simpler and faster than sending and verifying gold for each transaction. So, the US, and eventually the world, broke away from a dollar pegged to gold system and we now have 160+ fiat currencies around the world. This allowed transactions to happen much more seamlessly, but it also changed the way countries worked around budgets. The world started to operate on credit and easy money instead of money limited by a commodity. This drastically changed the way governments financed everything including wars, company bailouts and financial crisis. We used to vote on wars and buy war bonds or raise taxes to support a war, but now we endlessly finance them because the money is created with no taxes being taken. Instead, money is printed without the knowledge of the public. It is much easier to get the public on board with these expensive endeavors when we don’t directly get taxed for them. What we fail to understand is that there is a tax being taken, and that is the tax of inflation.

With no asset to peg our money to, the government of any country prints money whenever they are in a pinch, or even when politicians need to win an election. For instance, when faced with a possible recession, it is a much easier decision to print money to “save” the economy in the short term in order to get reelected, while leaving the mess to fall on another leader in the future. It is very difficult to win an election by cutting spending and letting the economy correct itself. For hundreds of years, history has repeated this mistake, until the game eventually ends, and a new money is introduced.

I believe we may be nearing the end of the dollar as a world reserve currency. However, to estimate the time frame for the collapse of the dollar is impossible. It could be 5, 10, or 50 years away, but every time we print more money, we bring that timeline closer. We printed over 700 billion dollars in 2008 during the Great Financial Crash and over 6 trillion dollars in the Covid-19 response. If we have another shock to the system, how much money will need to be printed to avoid disaster, and how much more fragile will that ultimately make the system and economy? There is a point in time when the national debt created by this money printing becomes impossible to pay back because just the interest rates alone on the debt are too high to pay back. According to https://www.usdebtclock.org/, we are currently at $34 trillion dollars in debt. This is not something that can go on forever.

Why should you care about the debt of the US and how does money printing affect you? To be brief, it steals your time and money by way of inflation. In the next article, we will dive into inflation, which is what money printing creates. I promise that this is not to be doom and gloom, as I know it sounds that way. This is meant to be more of a realistic look at what is happening in the world and how this new asset, Bitcoin, may be stepping in to help solve some of these large global issues. We need to know the problems we face in order to start looking for a solution. Although there is a lot of bad, there is also a lot of hope in the near future too. It comes from people seeing potential future problems and building new ways to mitigate or solve them.

You can find Part 3 of the series about Inflation here.

Inflation and The Cantillon Effect (Part 3)

A Corrosive and Divided World

Have you looked at the world lately and felt that things are different? Perhaps more divided, chaotic, filled with anger, or even hopeless? Maybe you haven’t had the time to look at the world because you’re too busy trying to keep up with everything in your own life. It can feel like you’re on a hamster wheel. For me, this moment came when I started calculating my future retirement funds. The realization that I either had to find a way to make a lot more money or I might never retire set in, and things began to feel a little hopeless. The dollar doesn’t buy as much as it used to, but I believe that is pretty common knowledge. The big question is why is this happening?

Much of this frustration and disconnect comes from our global monetary system breaking down. This may sound like a stretch, but when you consider what money touches in our lives, you begin to realize that if money is broken or corrupted, it cascades through all of society and begins to break down everything else. The reason this is true is that money is essentially a language of value upon which society is built. Without some form of money, we wouldn’t have the societal structures we have today. However, when money becomes corrupted, such as the ability to print money at will, society itself begins to corrupt.

Inflation

As an example, let’s consider the scenario of inflation and how it corrupts business decisions, using the production of wine as an illustration. When inflation sets in, the supplies, production, and shipping of wine become more expensive. So, what does the producer do? Well, they have three options, each with different consequences.

1.) Option one is to keep the price the same to remain consistent for their customers, but this poses the risk of reduced margins or operating at a loss. This could lead to job cuts, resulting in a weaker product, lower production, or potentially delayed deliveries.

2.) Option two is to raise prices. Doing so risks losing business at those higher prices, as people often become upset or perceive it as price gouging.

3.) Option three is to dilute the wine, perhaps with water, to reduce costs while sacrificing product quality.

Most producers tend to choose option two or three. If option three is chosen, they risk bad publicity if someone finds out, potentially leading to lost business. The worst scenario occurs when other wine producers follow suit, resulting in an inferior product across the entire economy. Now, imagine this scenario applied to the global marketplace, affecting all the products and services you enjoy or need. It has a cascading effect, and everyone suffers. Most of the time, consumers are frustrated with higher prices or lower quality products, attacking businesses without fully understanding the reasons behind these changes, often blaming the businesses instead of recognizing the role inflation plays.

From an individual perspective, inflation is even more insidious. Most people work 40 hours a week to cover the essentials of daily life, but when inflation sets in, they are forced to work longer hours- say 42, 45, or even 50+ hours, just to maintain the same standard of living. Inflation effectively steals your time, time that could be spent with family, pursuing hobbies, or creating something new. You might even need to pay for more childcare due to increased work hours, potentially falling further behind. Can you see how insidious this is?

This is the root of societal frustration. Money is breaking down right before our eyes, but it’s difficult to grasp the full picture. That is why people are upset and looking for someone to blame yet don’t fully understand the reason. Many people have to live with roommates or their parents because they can’t afford their own place. Fast food becomes the best meal option for some because it is cheaper, leading to health issues and increased medical costs. Education costs continue to rise, forcing people to either accumulate more debt or abandon their education thus limiting their access to higher-paying jobs and exacerbating their struggles. Even politics is stuck in a loop, with politicians unable to cut spending and welfare programs without losing their chance of being reelected. Instead, promising to give money to everyone and blaming the other side for societal problems has become the winning strategy. In reality, they are more concerned with their ability to be elected than actually helping the people they serve. This is where the division comes from. This is the vicious cycle of inflation.

None of this helps people build a better version of themselves or their communities because we are all pushed into survival mode. I can’t fully grasp what will happen as more and more money is printed to sustain this, but let’s be clear; they cannot stop printing money, or the system will completely collapse, a scenario for which virtually no one is prepared.

Cantillon Effect

Inflation in the money supply also creates a scenario called the Cantillon effect. The Cantillon effect refers to the idea that changes in the money supply in an economy cause the redistribution of purchasing power among people, disturb the relative prices of goods and services, and lead to the misallocation of scarce resources, as first described by the 18th-century economist Richard Cantillon.

For example, let's outline a situation in which a company, supported by government subsidies paid for with printed money, impacts the housing market to demonstrate the Cantillon effect. When the government prints money to subsidize a company, there are a lot of unseen effects that take place. The free market is disrupted and prices are dislodged from reality. When a company is subsidized, the company now makes money no matter how well it performs. The incentive to provide high quality goods or services declines compared to a company who has to survive on its own in a free market. The subsidized company may even lack the incentive to perform ethically as they know they will be funded no matter what. This company can now beat out competition without having to provide better goods and services than its competitors. If this happens in areas all across the economy, then there becomes several companies that hold all the wealth and they become “too big to fail.” The government will bail them out and provide them with more money in order to keep them afloat. This makes beating out competition rather easy. With no competition left, these companies become incredibly wealthy and are able to influence policy. These wealthy and well-connected companies, and individuals who run them, become first in line to the newly printed money. This gives them the ability to buy assets before the inflation sets in. This new demand begins to push up asset prices before the newly printed money gets to the hands of the middle and lower class. Those who have hard and scarce assets such as houses have an advantage when the money supply is increased. As we discussed with inflation, the more money they print, the higher prices become including asset prices. So, wealthy individuals and companies who already have assets see the value of their assets increase because of the increase in the money supply, which starts to price out the middle and lower class from being able to purchase and own assets for themselves. When the value of the dollar is decreasing and asset prices continue to climb, the incentive align to own more assets such as a second or third home to continue to save or even increase wealth. This increases the wealth gap without anyone actually adding any true value to the economy.

The Cantillon Effect and inflation become a hidden tax that hits the middle and lower class much harder than higher earners. Since the middle and lower class don’t have as many hard assets, the 2% inflation (or more as we have seen since 2020) consistently steals wealth from these people. The higher income earners who have assets see their value increase well over the 2% inflation mark, so they are actually increasing their net wealth without providing any extra value, while everyone else is having their wealth stolen from them. This is where the wealth gap gets even larger and where civil unrest begins to set in due to a bigger divide in society. This unrest leads to populist leaders who pit one side against the other and it is happening all over the world.

So, why are we told that a 2% inflation target is necessary for an economy to function? Or, even better, why is stealing 2% of everyone’s wealth considered good for society? I have not found a good answer to this question. We are led to believe that this is what needs to happen in a functioning economy, but I would argue that the problems we are seeing in society are because we have inflation.

This is not a call to hate the wealthy, as most of us would like to be wealthy, and if we were, we would do the same thing to preserve our wealth. This is to bring awareness to a deeper problem that money printing creates. This problem cannot be fixed from the system; the system is the problem. We need a new set of rules to play by. A fair set of rules where everyone knows the rules and a small group of government officials can’t change them on a whim. Thankfully, for the first time in human history, there is another system to opt into. One with fair rules that levels the playing field. A set of rules that does not favor any one person over another no matter how much money they have. This system is Bitcoin.

In the next article, we will discuss Bitcoin, what it is, and how it differs from any other money that the world has ever seen before. If this has piqued your interest so far or even if you’re still skeptical, I highly recommend two resources. The first is a one-hour podcast that provides a different perspective on inflation and its societal effects. The second is a website featuring charts focused on the year 1971, when we officially abandoned the gold standard, marking the beginning of accelerated money printing. These resources offer eye-opening insights, and once you start exploring this topic, it is challenging to look away.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5nHUtzovz1jjJn7uK31K76?si=72c88928ccb54bf4

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Part 4 of the series can be found here.

What is Bitcoin? (Part 4)

Definition from Oxford Dictionary: Bitcoin is a type of digital currency in which a record of transactions is maintained, and new units of currency are generated by the computational solution of mathematical problems. It operates independently of a central bank.

Definition from Google: Bitcoin is a digital currency that operates free of any central control or oversight from banks or governments. Instead, it relies on peer-to-peer software and cryptography. A public ledger records all bitcoin transactions, and copies are held on servers around the world.

Definition from CoinDesk: Bitcoin is the world’s first successful decentralized cryptocurrency and payment system, launched in 2009 by a mysterious creator known only as Satoshi Nakamoto. The word “cryptocurrency” refers to a group of digital assets where transactions are secured and verified using cryptography—a scientific practice of encoding and decoding data. Those transactions are often stored on computers distributed all over the world via a distributed ledger technology called blockchain.

I have included three separate definitions of Bitcoin because it can be a bit difficult to define since it means something different to different people. For some, it is a speculative investment; for others, it is freedom technology and represents hope for a better future. Some already use it as a currency, while some use it purely as a savings technology for the time being, and still, others are focused on building businesses and new technology on the network of Bitcoin, from banking services to social media protocols and applications. What is clear in these definitions is that it is a peer-to-peer, censorship-resistant network of transacting value without a third party. Bitcoin is a digital bearer asset backed by real world energy and cryptography. This real-world energy includes electricity and capital to buy the asset as well as the miners and even the infrastructure to support the mining equipment which can include conversion of hydroelectric, solar, wind and other types of energy production. Bitcoin cannot just simply be created out of thin air like fiat currency or a digital picture. It is the first time in history that true digital scarcity has been achieved.

What does this mean?

Bitcoin solved a major issue in the digital realm that people have been trying to solve for decades. Everything digital can be infinitely copied at no cost whatsoever. Think of all the cat pictures and videos online that make their rounds. This is a huge problem when addressing digital currency. Bitcoin was not the first try at creating scarce digital money. Bitcoin was just the first one that worked. There have been attempts at creating decentralized money online since the 1980s, and Bitcoin used several of the inventions of other attempts and bootstrapped them together to harness real-world energy to create digital scarcity. This means that although Bitcoin is digital, it cannot be replicated or spent in two places at the same time. Bitcoin is truly the first digital bearer asset.

There are five aspects of Bitcoin that we are going to cover to get a better idea of what this thing is and how it is different than the fiat currencies that dominate the world.

• 21 million Hard Cap

• Proof-of-Work

• Difficulty Adjustment

• The Halving

• Stock-to-Flow

21 Million Hard Cap

The most important part of Bitcoin is that there will only ever be 21 million coins available (each Bitcoin can be divided into 100 million units known as Satoshis). The halving cycles and difficulty adjustment work in tandem to give us a good sense of when the last Bitcoin will be mined, which will occur in the year 2140. There is no other asset that has this precise of a supply issuance. That is a big deal because Bitcoin is solving one of the most important problems in the world today.

That problem is that there can be an infinite amount of fiat currency printed. There is no cap to fiat currencies and the people making the decisions to make more are easily influenced to do so. As we discussed in earlier articles, this devalues everyone's money and sets up extremely poor incentives in business, politics, trade, and personal life. Money touches almost everything in our lives and Bitcoin is the first money we have ever had that has a fixed supply cap. This will level the playing field for everyone on the planet and the system is completely voluntary. You can choose to use it or not unlike most all fiat currencies that you are forced to use depending on which country you are born in. With Bitcoin, everyone knows how much wealth they have relative to the entire system. In fiat, the equation when thinking about your wealth equals your dollars divided by potentially infinite dollars, but in Bitcoin your wealth equals your amount of Bitcoin divided by 21 million. By holding Bitcoin, you cannot have your wealth devalued. It is the ultimate savings technology over the long run.

Proof-of-Work

It does help to think of Bitcoin as digital gold. The analogy works well because, like gold, Bitcoin uses a Proof-of-Work mechanism to "mine" new coins. Much like gold miners use physical labor (energy) and capital to extract the metal from the earth, Bitcoin miners use real-world energy and capital to mine bitcoin. Although it is mined in the digital realm, it still takes real-world resources to mine the asset. This is much different than fiat currencies and other cryptocurrencies that are digitally printed with no work or value added. This Proof-of-Work mining process links bitcoin to the real world because there is no free Bitcoin, and no one can simply create more on their own at no cost.

Difficulty Adjustment

Keeping the gold comparison in mind, bitcoin has a key feature built into the protocol that separates the two assets. This feature is called the difficulty adjustment. To understand this feature, we need to discuss the mining process. Miners in bitcoin network are simply computers making guesses to solve a mathematical puzzle or lottery (this is a very simplified explanation, but it will help us understand the process). When a miner solves the puzzle by guessing correctly, a new "block" is mined and put into the blockchain. In this block is the reward subsidy which, at the time of writing, is 6.25 bitcoin along with a batch of transactions waiting to be broadcast to the network and all the fees included with these transactions. Bitcoin blocks are mined roughly every ten minutes. This gives the protocol enough time to verify the blocks without getting bogged down.

Knowing this information, we can again compare Bitcoin miners to gold miners. As the price of either asset goes up, it incentivizes more miners to come into the space. In gold, more miners mean more gold being extracted from the earth. This rush will last until the supply catches up to the price where it then falls back into a stable range and the frenzy dies down. In Bitcoin, more miners come in and can actually find blocks at a faster pace. Just as in gold, this will increase the supply, but unlike gold, Bitcoin's protocol readjusts its difficulty to mine blocks every 2016 blocks or about every two weeks (2016 x 10 minutes = roughly 2 weeks). This mechanism is known as the difficulty adjustment and what it helps foster is a predictable supply of Bitcoin. This means no matter how many miners there are, whether it is 10 or 10 million, the protocol will always readjust the difficulty to mine blocks roughly every ten minutes. This allows us to know within a very accurate window how much supply of Bitcoin will be available. Unlike gold and other commodities, there is always a steady flow of Bitcoin being mined, and no amount of miners can change this supply in the long run. This ensures that no miners can cheat the system or unfairly distribute coins, and it gives the users of the system near-perfect predictability of the supply no matter the demand, which is unlike any other asset we have ever known.

The Halving

Another protocol feature in Bitcoin that no other asset on the planet has is called the Halving. This occurs every 210,000 blocks or roughly every 4 years. When Bitcoin first began producing blocks in 2009, the miner who mined the block was rewarded with 50 Bitcoin. So, every 10 minutes, a new 50 Bitcoins entered the market. Every four years, this 10-minute reward gets cut in half. We have been through 3 having cycles, and the Bitcoin block reward is currently 6.25 Bitcoin. The next halving is in April of 2024, where the reward will be cut to 3.125 Bitcoin. This feature of the protocol creates a huge supply shock every four years, which is about when the price begins to accelerate before cooling back off in later months. This not only creates a ton of price action and hype, but it also brings in a new wave of people that become interested in the asset, and with more interest comes more people who buy and hold for the long term. This creates even more of a supply reduction over time. Every halving cycle creates a higher stock-to-flow ratio for Bitcoin, and the asset becomes more and more scarce.

Stock-to-Flow

The difficulty adjustment and the halving play a large role in the Stock-to-Flow of Bitcoin. The Stock-to-Flow ratio is a way to analyze commodities by assuming scarcity drives value.

• Stock: Refers to the existing quantity or supply of the commodity.

• Flow: Refers to the annual production or newly mined quantity of the commodity.

The formula for the stock-to-flow ratio is: Stock divided by flow.

A higher stock-to-flow ratio indicates a lower annual production relative to the existing supply, suggesting a higher level of scarcity.

Gold’s stock-to-flow ratio is about 59, which is very high compared to most other commodities. Stock-to-flow of gold = 190,000 tons of stock divided by about 3,200 tons per year = 59. Meanwhile, silver's ratio is about 22, which is one of the main reasons gold has beaten silver out for its monetary use as it holds value better. This ratio works well for commodities but is not useful for fiat currencies that can be printed out of thin air at different amounts. Bitcoin's current Stock to flow ratio is 58.3, which about matches gold; however, Bitcoin’s Halving feature will eventually make Bitcoin's stock to flow infinite because there will be a time when there will no longer be any new Bitcoin to mine.

In Conclusion

For the first time in history, we have a global, digital bearer asset that people can voluntarily opt into. The rules cannot be changed, and the issuance is predictable. If gold was the best money humans have ever had, Bitcoin is the next step up from that. Like gold, it is scarce, and connected to real-world energy and resources, but Bitcoin outperforms gold in divisibility as it is hard to divide gold for small payments, verifiability, and speed of transaction. Bitcoin can be sent around the world at the speed of light, which is something gold fails to do. Bitcoin combines the successes of gold and the speed of fiat digital transactions of today's world but cuts out the middle man of banks and government to provide humanity with what could possibly be the best form of money we have ever known.

If you find this interesting and you are looking for more resources on Bitcoin, I personally recommend these books and podcasts below.

Books

The Bitcoin Standard - by Saifadean Ammous

Broken Money - by Lyn Alden

Layered Money - By Nik Bhatia

Podcasts

We Study Billionaires - The Bitcoin episodes come out every Wednesday

What Bitcoin Did

Blue Collar Bitcoin

Part 5 of the series can be found here.

Time Preference (Part 5)

In the preceding articles, we discussed the inflationary monetary system in which we operate and highlighted how Bitcoin differs from any fiat currency in existence today. Now, we will delve into how these two distinct currencies influence decision-making for individuals and societies by examining the concept of time preference.

Time Preference

Time preference refers to how far into the future people tend to look when making decisions, as they constantly weigh choices that trade present value against future outcomes. This concept applies to both individuals and society at large. A high time preference indicates that a person makes decisions favoring immediate benefits, potentially sacrificing future value. Conversely, a low time preference reflects a more long-term focus, involving sacrifices in the present for future gains.

To illustrate, consider a simple scenario: someone offers you a donut. In deciding whether to accept it, you weigh the immediate pleasure against the potential impact on your future health. Taking the donut signifies a high time preference, while declining it, considering future health, indicates a low time preference. Similar considerations apply to significant choices, such as starting a 401k or saving for a child’s college fund, where delaying gratification in the present promises greater benefits in the future. Lowering time preference is generally desirable for personal well-being and societal progress. Think about your health, your family, and your career and what sacrifices in the present you are willing to make in order to add value to these areas in the future. What situations in your life have you lowered your time preference for?

Fiat vs Bitcoin

Different types of money play a large role in individual and society time preferences. The financial environment of debt and fiat money printing has increased everyone’s time preference without us being aware of it. Despite being told that a 2% inflation rate is necessary for economic growth, the implications on time preference are often overlooked. If your money is inflating away at 2% per year, then every year you have to work 2% longer (assuming your wages stay the same) just to continue to keep the same life you had. Over ten years, this adds up and most people’s wages aren’t going to keep pace. The unprecedented money printing in 2020, coupled with ongoing efforts, such as the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP) that was set up in 2023 to backstop the banking sector when Silicon Valley Bank went under, and the funds being sent to support the war in Ukraine, exacerbates the situation, leading to higher inflation rates. Inflation reached 7-9% (true inflation was probably closer to 15-20% as you probably had a sense of this when you went to the grocery store, bought gas or tried to buy a house or car in the last couple years) which means that without any value being created in society, your money or purchasing power was diluted by that percentage. Now you have to work even more hours to get that back. Your time is essentially being stolen from you. How do you think this changes people’s time preference? This constant devaluation of currency forces people into faster and riskier financial decisions, exemplified by phenomena like the meme stock and NFT crazes (here are two brief articles explaining the meme stock hype and how people spent their stimulus checks from Covid-19: 1. Meme Stock Article 2. Stimulus Check Article). We go out to eat more because we have less time to cook, since we are working more hours, which in turn causes our health to decline. We get less time with our kids and feed them quick snacks which affects their health and well-being. We forget about saving for the future because it is hard enough just to pay rent. It is all linked together by the money. The more people struggle to get by, the more their time preference is raised. People cannot think about the future when we are just trying to get to the next paycheck.

It is no coincidence that consumer debt is at all-time highs and savings are trending lower and lower.

Now it is time to think about your financial health in a different way and potentially get a new perspective on a money that takes back all the time that has been stolen.

Bitcoin is arguably the soundest and best form of money that mankind has ever known. It brings with it the potential to restore time preference to society. Bitcoin is a money backed by energy and mathematics, not by a small group of people. It cannot be printed freely, and it is out of the control of any single entity. There is a fixed supply of 21 million coins which means that the price of everything against this asset will fall to its free market cost over time. Up until this point we have lived in a world where money was infinite, while all our resources are finite. In this environment prices have to rise in order to keep the system going, despite all the technological progress. A few questions to ask yourself in order to understand this are why is it so much easier to build a house, but yet all house prices and rent keep going up? Why is it more expensive to go to college even though all the same information is online? Why is food more expensive even though we can grow, harvest, and produce it more quickly and cheaply than ever before? The answer is because we inject more money into the system to keep it from collapsing and the more there is in the system the more the prices of goods and services must go up. We are creating money faster than we are producing goods and services. This also means assets are used to preserve wealth, such as houses, stocks, and artwork, instead of the currency. Society puts a monetary premium on assets because they are being used as a store of value as the currency is no longer providing us with the ability to save. Holding dollars or any other fiat currency is like holding a melting ice cube. It is no wonder why wealthy individuals and large corporations are buying up houses to preserve wealth, which continues to price the younger generation out of the housing market.

Bitcoin flips this on its head. The 21 million supply cap changes the equation to “everything divided by 21 million.” This paradigm shift takes away or at least significantly reduces government manipulation of markets, such as subsidies and bailouts because they cannot print more Bitcoin. This has the potential to bring back free market competition and technological progress which are naturally deflationary forces, meaning prices of everything will fall in terms of Bitcoin over the long run. In this sense Bitcoin can be used as the main way to preserve savings and purchasing power instead of all these other assets.

This can be tricky to wrap your head around because we have never lived in a world where that was possible but think what that would do for the individual and society. If prices were always falling in relation to the money we used, everyone’s time preference would change. It would naturally lower societies’ time preference as a whole. If we knew our purchasing power was appreciating in value, people would be more incentivized to save. This would allow us to allocate more capital to productive investments. It would give us the security to think 5, 10, 30 or even 100 years into the future instead of just worrying about next month’s rent. Imagine how homelessness, crime, and civil unrest would change as prices got cheaper. Think of the implications on citizens health when food becomes affordable again and how that would change the healthcare system over time. Architecture and artwork would be built to last instead of being thrown together as quickly as possible. People would have time in their lives again to spend with their family and loved ones instead of working two or three jobs which would drastically improve mental health.

Of course, this is a theory that would need decades to play out. However, with a small individual example, we can see how true this could become. If you had a gold coin and a thousand dollars, which one are you going to spend first (assuming you could spend the gold coin as freely as the cash)? The gold coin will most likely hold its value or even increase in value over the long term while we know the dollars are decreasing in value, so we are incentivized to hold on to the better store of value. If we do spend the gold coin, it will most likely be on something that is going to provide lasting value or has the potential to increase our overall wealth. As we play this out with a currency like Bitcoin, where it has the potential to grow exponentially, we already see people making the long term decisions to hold onto these coins for longer and longer periods, as shown by the chart here. People using hard money tend to prioritize saving over spending. This will never influence every individual, but it could potentially change the way society looks at money over the long run.

In imagining a world where currency appreciation is the norm, one can foresee positive changes in societal behavior. Lower time preference on a global scale could lead to increased savings, productive investments, and enhanced well-being. Bitcoin, with its unique properties, presents an opportunity to reverse the trend of rising time preferences and, consequently, offers a potential solution to societal challenges.

Final Thoughts

The belief that inflation is essential for economic growth holds true within our current system. However, an alternative system, anchored in Bitcoin, prioritizes savings and abundance for humanity. Contrary to the notion that saving money impedes economic progress, a Bitcoin-based system promotes a lower time preference, encouraging prudent spending, emergency preparedness, and support for meaningful causes. Bitcoin aligns with the deflationary aspects of technological progress, challenging the traditional narrative that inflation is indispensable. In this context, saving money becomes a strategy for acquiring higher quality goods, waiting for prices to drop, and fostering sustainable growth. While fiat incentivizes debt, inequality, and growth by any means necessary, Bitcoin incentivizes savings, abundance, and healthy growth—a potential pathway to a more equitable and prosperous future.

For further exploration of these concepts, the book “The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future” by Jeff Booth is recommended. The author argues that our current inflationary monetary policy conflicts with the natural deflationary trajectory of technological progress, emphasizing the need for a monetary system that aligns with these advancements to create a flourishing and healthy future. Fix the money, fix the world.

The next article in the series can be found here.

Bitcoin: Savings Technology, Freedom, Hope (Part 6)

Bitcoin can mean different things to different people. Most, especially in the developed world, first come into it for the investment as they don’t often think of it as a currency right away. The idea of getting rich quick is typically the reason people first show interest in Bitcoin. People treat it as they would a stock, where they buy in and hope to sell at higher prices in order to convert back to dollars. Although Bitcoin is the best performing asset of all time, people who jump in and out realize that it is difficult to make a lot of money in the short term, but over the long run it tends to continue to rise in price. As people learn more about Bitcoin, they begin to view it as a long-term savings technology instead of a short-term investment.

With more conviction, people often hold through the ups and downs and appreciate the technology side of Bitcoin and what it offers to humanity. For many in developing nations living under authoritarian rule, Bitcoin represents freedom as they can send and receive money without their government confiscating it.

Between the ability to preserve wealth over the long term and the freedom that the technology presents over authoritarian rule, Bitcoin becomes a sense of hope for the future. What you may also find surprising is that Bitcoin has the potential to reduce global conflict as well as help reduce environmental damage. This article will delve into Bitcoin as a long-term savings technology, as well as freedom and hope for billions of people around the world.

Savings Technology

Bitcoin’s price action can be a bit intimidating to newcomers in the space. On a linear chart, the price fluctuates up and down violently and critics have compared it to the Tulip Mania of the 17th century where Tulip prices skyrocketed and then dropped back down to basically zero when the supply caught up to demand. Critics have also declared Bitcoin dead over 450 times and yet the fundamentals are stronger than ever. (https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/)

The key to understanding this asset is to extend your time horizon to at least 4 years since that is how often the halving or supply shocks take place. If we look at Bitcoin on a log chart, the price action seems much more systematic. The first chart below shows the price of Bitcoin in log and linear graphs and the second chart plots the four-year halving cycles into the log graph.

The charts clearly show how the halving creates a supply shock every four years, which creates a rise in price, followed by some speculative investments to come in later in the cycle which subsequently leads to a greater spike in price before the bear market comes and the price comes back down and settles into a higher equilibrium than the previous cycle; before the halving starts the rise again. On a linear chart these swings seem drastic, but in a log sense we clearly see a gradual rise in dollar terms over time. These swings can still be drastic, and newcomers should be wary of 80% draw downs, but patience has continued to pay off for those who hold long-term. For more proof of Bitcoin’s long-term performance, strategy.com is a great website that shows the performance of Bitcoin compared to other currencies and every company in the S & P 500.

Over the years, these cycles have brought in more and more people who become convicted holders. This creates even more of a supply shock to the system which creates the higher floor for the price. Bitcoin is the fastest asset to ever reach a $1 trillion market cap and as Bitcoin becomes larger and more secure it brings with it the ability for large institutions and nation states to get involved with it. Currently Blackrock, the largest hedge fund in the world, recently got approval for a Bitcoin ETF, as well as ten other companies. Two countries have already made Bitcoin legal tender in their jurisdictions (El Salvador and Central African Republic). This is all happening just 15 years since Bitcoins inception. The smartest money in the world is starting to get involved, and with only 21 million coins (divisible by 8 decimals), Bitcoin begins to look even more scarce. To put the scarcity into context, if everyone in the world were to have an equal share, we would each get about .002625 Bitcoin.

For a deeper look into Bitcoin as a plan for long term savings or as a part of your investment portfolio, there is a great book by Andy Edstrom called “Why Buy Bitcoin.” Edstrom comes from the traditional finance world and in his book, he breaks down why having an allocation of Bitcoin in your portfolio is important.

Freedom

The idea of Bitcoin bringing freedom to people may not resonate with citizens in the US as quickly as it does for people living under an authoritarian government, but Bitcoin still presents some tools for democratic nations as well. The main superpower of Bitcoin is that it gives people the option to become their own bank. This may sound trivial, but becoming your own bank comes with a lot of freedoms that many people around the world do not have. Currently there are around 1.7 billion people in the world that are unbanked, meaning they don’t have access to a bank. With Bitcoin, people have the ability to be their own bank, meaning as long as they have an internet connection, they can send and receive Bitcoin without needing a third party’s permission. This could include earning Bitcoin, receiving remittances in Bitcoin or exchanging their local currency for Bitcoin at a Bitcoin ATM without the need for an actual bank. If you know how to properly store your Bitcoin, which we will discuss in detail in the next article, then someone living under an authoritarian government can leave the country with their entire net wealth just by memorizing the “seed phrase” or password. This is not possible with gold or paper money.

This ability is enhanced when individuals run their own Bitcoin node. Nodes are the validators of the Bitcoin blockchain. They audit the entire blockchain every ten minutes and keep the security of the network. Anyone in the world can run a node and the more nodes there are the more decentralized the network. The reason no government can stop Bitcoin is because there are tens of thousands of individuals running nodes around the world and even some in satellites orbiting the planet. Setting up and running a node is not in the scope of this article, but it takes freedom to another level. When you run a node, it means you can validate all of your own Bitcoin transactions as well as help secure and decentralize the network further. Governments may try to ban the purchasing or mining of Bitcoin, but they cannot shut down the network as long as there is at least one node running the Bitcoin protocol. Many governments have tried banning Bitcoin and none have successfully kept it out of their country. Today nodes come equipped with other freedom technology enhancements such as being able to run your own home server from your node, run ad blockers and VPN’s, self-host your own AI, and even allow you to host your own relays for decentralized social media applications such as Nostr. You can find more details about Nostr on the Bitcoin Resources page (part 8).

Remittances are another huge issue with today’s current system. Sending money from country to country can be a very cumbersome task. Wire transfers can be expensive to send after fees, require a lot of paperwork and can take several days or even weeks to get through. Depending on the country you are sending money too, it may not make it to the recipient if they live in a authoritarian government as dictators can simply seize the funds. With Bitcoin, money can be sent instantly using a QR code over a video call and does not have to pass through any intermediary. This can be done with 10 cents or $10 million. There is no other system in the world that allows this to happen at this speed.

Bitcoin has the potential to give people back their online privacy and financial freedom.

Hope

Bitcoin provides us with clear predictability in a money while we have 160 other fiat currencies in the world with zero predictability of issuance. The 21 million hard cap provides humanity with the ability to make true economic calculations unlike other currencies whose issuance and total supply fluctuate dramatically depending on governance and global events. When you do not know the issuance of future supply, making economic calculations it is like trying to build a house with a tape measure that is constantly changing lengths. With a hard capped supply, you can perform calculations much more efficiently as you always know how much of the total supply you have. Retirement calculations for example, become much more doable versus trying to guess how much inflation will reduce your savings in the next 30 years. We discussed in the last article how Bitcoin could pave the way to a more abundant future where people are incentivized to save money and the costs of most everything should fall to its free market value over time. This gives people hope in the future rather than worrying about being buried under a mountain of debt.

Bitcoin provides hope in many aspects of life that we didn’t know was possible. We have gone into detail on the potential for savings and abundance. Now we are going to touch on just two other areas where Bitcoin’s incentives provide hope for the future: the environment and global cooperation.

Environment

The environment is hot topic that people are losing hope over. We are always trying to “fix” the environment within a fiat system that is supposed to grow forever. That seems counterintuitive. It is with fiat money that we are incentivized to buy more and more things that are of lesser and lesser quality and yet we think we can fix the pollution of these products within the system that creates them.

Bitcoin is often thrown under the bus when it comes to its impact on the environment with many articles pointing to Bitcoin damaging an already fragile climate. However, much like many other topics on Bitcoin, most people have been misled on the impact it has on the environment. Bitcoin mining actually incentives renewable energy projects, can bring energy costs down, and uses mainly wasted or stranded energy.

We will keep these examples brief, but there will be links to look up companies working at the forefront of green bitcoin mining. Great American Mining is a Bitcoin mining company that takes the wasted methane of oil producers (methane is more harmful to the environment than CO2) and uses it to mine Bitcoin. The company does this by capping the pipes that flare methane into the atmosphere and convert that gas to energy to mine Bitcoin. This electricity is then fed to Bitcoin mining equipment that is brought right to the site of the oil producer since Bitcoin mining can be done from anywhere in the world as long as there is an internet connection. The entire process of connecting to mining pools and how mining works is out of the scope of this article, but essentially these powered up mining rigs can now participate in the global competition of mining Bitcoin (for more details on mining pools you can check out this article https://bitcoinmagazine.com/guides/what-are-bitcoin-mining-pools). So instead of releasing excess waste into the atmosphere the oil companies now make a small profit on their wasted gas, thus allowing them to provide reduced energy costs to their customers and while reducing pollution to the environment. A true win-win situation. The company was recently purchased by Crusoe who still continue to mine Bitcoin today. (https://crusoe.ai/blog/understanding-the-problem-crusoe-solves/index.html)

Vespene Energy (https://vespene.energy/) is a company who captures methane from landfills. Methane is released from materials decomposing in landfills and they capture the wasted methane and convert it into Bitcoin. Again, less pollution and cheaper costs as the landfill is now making a small profit on selling wasted methane to Bitcoin miners.

Bitcoin miners also incentivize more green energy infrastructure from wind, solar, hydro, and even nuclear. Most of these infrastructure projects have huge costs to them and the locations in which they are built are not in areas where there are a lot of towns and civilization. So even if they are constructed, there isn’t a demand for the energy they produce right away. The amount of energy they produce cannot simply be stored. Most is wasted if it doesn’t have a consumer to send it to as it is being produced. A majority of these projects don’t even make it to construction because the cost is so high with a risk of never being profitable. However, unlike towns and other energy consumers, Bitcoin miners can go right to the source. They will buy the energy cheap since no one else is using it, which gives the projects the ability to start making money years before they had a chance to otherwise. Bitcoin bootstraps the infrastructure project by purchasing power at very low costs until the project is fully constructed and towns are able to be built up around it. Then Bitcoin miners eventually get priced out of the market and go find another source of cheap energy.

The energy conversation is a complex and difficult one as most of us do not understand how energy grids work. Most of us still view energy consumption as a bad thing, but energy consumption is directly correlated with human flourishing. In other words, we do not need to use less energy, we actually need to use more energy to lift more people out of poverty around the world. We just need to learn to use that energy more efficiently with less pollutants. Bitcoin mining represents a way for us to use more stranded and wasted energy that we have not tapped into, as well as incentivizing a greener future with more stability in our energy grids around the world. This was a brief introduction to this topic and there are many more examples outside of the ones given above. Lyn Alden does a fantastic job delving deeper into this through a series of articles and videos if you would like to learn more. The series can be seen with this link.

Global Cooperation

Global cooperation is a tricky subject and there are no promises being made as full cooperation is something that will probably never happen. The world is severely divided at the moment and with so many competing countries running their own currency there is a constant battle to raise and lower the strength of individual currencies. Let’s look at China for example. How did China become the supplier to the majority of the world? One of the ways is that they actually kept their currency weaker than the dollar in order to provide cheaper labor prices to the global market. It is not a coincidence that the American labor force was hollowed out and we shipped all our production jobs to China. With a strong dollar, the production of goods gets expensive, and China was willing to keep their currency weak in order to become the supplier of goods to the world instead of the US. If the citizens of the world chose to use digitally native currency with a supply cap tied to real world energy and resources that no one could manipulate, how would the incentives change in the labor force. Prices would be competitive around the globe. This would still mean low prices as it would usher in a true global free market so countries would naturally compete to bring prices down in order to keep customers, but the pricing mechanism would be fair across the world and therefore wages would be competitive everywhere. If everyone used the same digitally native currency, countries and individuals could shop for items around the world with no friction and with the same global measuring stick. This single incentive could change how countries cooperate entirely. While nothing is a sure thing and we don’t know how individual countries will combat this potential, it does trend toward giving individual citizens more options to opt out of the system or country they are in if they feel they are being treated unfairly or want to see a change in their circumstances. Citizens have never truly had an alternative system to opt into until Bitcoin was invented.

Not only does global commerce get simplified, but using one global currency that cannot be manipulated drastically changes the global war landscape. No war since leaving the gold standard has been paid for with taxes. Instead, the money is printed to fund war and the citizens get stuck with the bill through future inflation. It is a sneaky way of governments getting the wars they want with no opposition from the public. Think of the endless wars we have been fighting just in the US such as “the war on drugs” or “the war on terror.” How long would these wars have lasted if the public was expected to pay for them in actual taxes? They may have not even started.

Bitcoin has the potential to end or at least drastically reduce war by making it too costly. If there is a supply cap to the money and a country does not have enough money to fight in a war and the citizens do not support it, then leaders of these countries will have to find another way to solve their issues. Maybe this is just wishful thinking, but there is something drastically wrong with this system and for the first time in history there is another system that people can opt into. Whether it all plays out like this or not, it seems to be a system worth fighting for and all people need to do is use a different money than the one being forced upon them.

Come for the money stay for the revolution.

The next article in the series can be found here.

How to Buy and Secure Bitcoin (Part 7)

If you have become interested in buying and holding Bitcoin in your portfolio, congratulations, you are earlier than most. The more you educate yourself the more confident you will be in the long run. This is very important as this asset has wild price swings and you shouldn’t invest more than you are willing to lose. Bitcoin is still very young so there is almost a guarantee of another 80% drawdown at some point in the future. You need to be secure enough with your investing decision to be able to sleep at night. If you feel confident and you would like to start buying and holding your own Bitcoin, we will go through the steps on how to do that.

*Reminder - I am not a financial advisor. These articles are intended as educational material only, not financial advice.

Find a Bitcoin Exchange

Personally, I like to send people to Swan Bitcoin as they are a Bitcoin only company who not only run an exchange, but also put out great learning content, offer a retirement fund and have great support to help you through the process if needed. I also recommend Cash App and Strike which utilize the lightning network for low fees, and they are both very user friendly. Once you have an account created for any of these exchanges, the process of buying is pretty straight forward. Simply connect a bank account and set an amount you would like to buy. I have put some referral links in the Bitcoin resource page if you would like to use them. With that being said, I am not looking to get anything from this other than providing education and resources for others.

I would recommend avoiding Coinbase and Binance who are large “Crypto” exchanges that will promote any coin out there, whether it is a known scam or not. They have been known to openly give your data to other entities and they do not promote self-custody. There are many other exchanges out there so please do your own research when it comes to choosing an exchange that suits you best.

Get a Hardware Wallet

One of the highest recommended hardware wallets on the market is the Coldcard from Coinkite. It is one of the most secure, and the difficulty of setting it up is moderate. There are others such as Fountain Passport, which is a bit more on the pricey side, as well as two of the most popular wallets Trezor and Ledger. These two are cheaper and easy to set up but have had a few privacy concerns as of late. More hardware wallet devices are coming out all the time so please do your own research on which one is best for you. Links to view these hardware wallets are also on the Bitcoin resource page (part 8).

Once you have a hardware wallet you will be ready to self-custody your Bitcoin. The device will come with a step-by-step guide on how to set up your wallet. The most important part is that the device will give you a “seed phrase.” This is a 12 to 24 word phrase that you need to write down and place somewhere secure. This seed phrase is the “key” to everything. Imagine it is the key to your bank vault and whoever has the key has access to the funds. If you self-custody correctly and you are the only one that knows the seed phrase, then no one can take your funds. However, if you type them into a computer, someone finds them, or you lose them, then your funds are in jeopardy.

This is also relevant when you buy from an exchange. When you purchase Bitcoin from an exchange, the exchange owns the keys to the Bitcoin until you send it to your own hardware wallet. The exchanges have been known to be hacked or use funds in ways they are not supposed to. Examples of this are FTX, Mt. Gox and Voyager. There is a saying in Bitcoin, “not your keys, not your coins” (keys meaning your seed phrase). This is a reminder that whenever you get to a point where you feel uncomfortable with an amount of money on an exchange that you wouldn’t want to lose, it is time to send it to your hardware wallet to make sure you own the keys. I recommend starting with a small amount of money, like $5, and sending that to a wallet that you own to get a feel for it before sending a larger amount. Sending and receiving Bitcoin is just one of those things you must do a couple times before being comfortable with it. It is like riding a bike, a little intimidating and difficult at first, but once you try it and get the hang of it, you realize how simple and powerful it is. You can now send money on your own to anyone in the world with no middleman and no permission from anyone else. No one can freeze, delay, or confiscate your funds as long as you know the seed phrase. You can even recover your funds if your device is lost or broken, by entering your seed phrase into a new device. The seed phrase is the most important piece.

BTC sessions is a fantastic resource for step-by-step instructions on just about anything in this space. If you visit https://www.youtube.com/c/btcsessions, you can simply type in the name of your hardware wallet in the search bar and several how-to videos will come up showing you how to set them up.

Important

I know some of this can seem daunting or intimidating, and you will come across options such as an ETF, where companies will tell you that they will custody your coins for you. Please do not trust such options and learn how to self-custody. If you do not own the keys, there is a risk that that company will lose your coins. Again “NOT YOUR KEYS, NOT YOUR COINS.”

Multi-Signature Storage

There are ways to set up multi-signature storage which includes multiple keys. This can be done in ways such as a 2 of 3 multi-sig where you hold a key, a company such as a wallet provider holds a key, and maybe your spouse holds a key and all you need is 2 of the 3 to access the funds. This takes some of the fear of losing a key away. I would recommend doing your own research with companies such as Unchained Capital who make this very simple if that is something you want to do in the future. Sparrow Wallet and Specter Desktop also offer multi-sig solutions that you can set up on your own for free without a company holding a key. Mult-sig does add a level of security to holding your coins, but it may not be what you want to start off with in the beginning of your journey, especially with a smaller amount of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin vs Crypto

I hope these articles helped you get a better understanding of Bitcoin and money in general. The rabbit hole is endless, and I still learn something new about Bitcoin almost every day. With all that information you may have noticed that I never touched on any other “crypto” coins. This is my own personal opinion, but I believe there is no reason to look at the other coins as none of them are trying to compete to potentially be the global monetary network that underpins society. For full disclosure, I did buy altcoins before learning about Bitcoin and making the switch.

Most altcoins are scams and all are trending to zero against Bitcoin. You will hear the Proof-of-Work vs Proof-of-Stake argument if you are in the space long enough and the Proof-of-Stake coins will claim that they are faster or better for the environment, but what they will not touch on is that we have had proof of stake for hundreds of years. Our fiat currencies all run on proof of stake. This means the more coins or wealth you hold the more powerful you become in the system. This is akin to lobbyists and large corporations swaying politicians. The larger holders of coins in these Proof-of-Stake ecosystems can bend and change the rules to what they prefer. It ends up being a very centralized feature in the long run as more power and more coins consolidate to the top holders. Proof-of-Work is about undoing that and giving the world a system built on fair rules that no one can change. In Bitcoin, just because you have a lot of coins, does not mean you have any more power over the protocol than anyone else.

All the other coins promise something faster, cooler, or full of features, but they all make tradeoffs to security, privacy or scarcity when they make these claims. I personally view Bitcoin as a path to a better future for humanity by giving the world a monetary network that gives everyone in the system an equal chance. While I see Bitcoin as allowing humanity to save which can provide a more abundant future, I see the rest of the crypto market as a casino, where you might get lucky in the short term, but will have difficulty timing the market trying to pick the next winner in the long run. If you do want to look at altcoins, please ask; What value do they bring to society that Bitcoin doesn’t?

Unlike Bitcoin, which has been recognized as a commodity by the SEC, most coins have been viewed as unregistered securities. These other coins have a centralizing feature, single points of failure or lack a network effect. There is a lot of “smart money” (institutions and hedge funds) beginning to pile into the newly approved Bitcoin ETF which should be telling. Before buying any other coins, I would highly suggest Jeff Booth’s article that delves into Bitcoin vs Crypto called, “The Greatest Game” if you would like to learn more.

Please do your own research with whatever you are investing in and know that nothing is guaranteed, not even Bitcoin.

The final article, Bitcoin Resources can be found here.

Bitcoin Resources (Part 8)

Here is a full list of books, articles, podcasts, exchanges, and apps that I recommend. There are many more out there which you will most likely find as you go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. I am also available for questions and recommendations if you would like to discuss anything in more detail at brady@factoryfitnesscenter.com.

Books

The Bitcoin Standard - by Saifedean Ammous

Broken Money - by Lyn Alden

Layered Money - by Nik Bhatia

The Fiat Standard - by Saifedean Ammous

Why Buy Bitcoin - by Andy Edstrom

Bitcoin is Venice - by Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers

The Progressive Case for Bitcoin - Jason Maier

The 7th Property - by Eric Yakes

The Book of Satoshi - by Phil Champagne

The Blocksize Wars - by Jonathan Bier

The Price of Tomorrow - by Jeff Booth

Check Your Financial Privilege - by Alex Gladstein

B is for Bitcoin - by Seb Bunney

The Hidden Cost of Money - Seb Bunney

Podcasts

We Study Billionaires - Bitcoin Fundamentals - Preston Pysh

What Bitcoin Did - Peter McCormack

Blue Collar Bitcoin - Josh and Dan

Bitcoin Audible - Guy Swann

Stephan Livera Podcast - Stephan Livera

TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Marty Bent

The “What is Money” Show - Robert Breedlove

Bitcoin Rapid-Fire - John Vallis

The Bitcoin Standard Podcast - Saifedean Ammous

Articles

“The Greatest Game” - by Jeff Booth

“The Number Zero and Bitcoin” - by Robert Breedlove

“The Bullish Case for Bitcoin” by Vijay Boyapati

“Schelling Out” - by Nick Szabo

“7 Misconceptions about Bitcoin” - by Lyn Alden

“The Masters and Slaves of Money” - by Robert Breedlove

“Gradually then Suddenly” - by Parker Lewis

Bitcoin Exchanges

Swan Bitcoin - referral code - for $10 in Bitcoin - https://www.swanbitcoin.com/bsteig

River - https://river.com/

Cash App - referral code to get $5 - http://cash.app/app/LQGMPKC

Strike - referral code to get $5 once you make a deposit - https://invite.strike.me/YOJ778

Bitcoin Wallets

Coldcard - https://coldcard.com/

Foundation Passport - https://foundationdevices.com/

Trezor - https://trezor.io/ (phishing email concerns as of Jan 2024)

Ledger - https://www.ledger.com/ (installed a recover feature that is a bit controversial on the privacy side in 2023)

Apps and Others

Fold - a debit card that gives you bitcoin back on every purchase - referral code for 20,000 sats -use.foldapp.com/r/lz0LuG90

Lolli - Get bitcoin back for online and in store purchases - referral code for $5 - https://lolli.com/share/9F24DG

Yzer - like Duolingo for Bitcoin - referral code for 50 sats once you reach level 2 - SteigerBTC

Orange Pill App - find other Bitcoiners and meetups - referral code for 10,000 sats -

https://signup.theorangepillapp.com/opa/steigs

Bitcoin Magazine - Find the newest articles in the Bitcoin space and get paid in sats to read them.

Fountain - A podcast app that allows you to get paid in Bitcoin for listening.

BTC Sessions on Youtube– How-to videos on just about anything you want to do in the space.

Nostr - A decentralized social media platform (akin to Twitter) with many different clients such as Amethyst, Damus, Primal, Iris, Snort, Plebstr and Yakihonne which can be found on the IOS and Google Play Stores. Bitcoin is the native currency of this platform and can be sent to anyone else in the world using the platform instantly. You can use private keys to take your information from one client to the next and take complete control of your data without risk of being de-platformed.

Website

https://bitcoin-resources.com/

https://bitcoin.org/en/

https://unchained.com/

Gordon the Guided Missile

Gordon the guided missile sets off in pursuit of its target. It immediately sends out signals to discover if it is on the right course to hit that target. Signals come back: “No, you are not on course. So, change it up a bit and slightly to the left.”

And Gordon changes course as instructed and then, rational little fellow that he is, sends out another signal. “Am I on course now?” Back comes the answer, “No, but if you adjust your present course a bit further up and a bit further to the left, then you will be.” He adjusts his course again and sends out another request for information. Back comes the answer, “No, Gordon, you’ve still got it wrong. Now you must come down a bit and a foot to the right.”

And the guided missile goes on and on making mistakes, and on and on listening to feedback and on and on correcting its behavior until it blows up the nasty enemy thing. And we applaud the missile for its skill.

If, however some critic says, “Well, it certainly made a lot of mistakes on the way”, we reply, “Yes, but that didn’t matter, did it? It got there in the end.” All its mistakes were little ones, in the sense that they could be immediately corrected. And as a result of making many hundreds of mistakes, eventually the missile succeeded in avoiding the one mistake which really would have mattered: missing the target.

The story of Gordon the Guided missile is a great analogy to many of the endeavors we will pursue in life. If we are unwilling to make mistakes and adjust course, we are less likely to achieve what we set out to do. The key is to get started and allow the little mistakes you make along the way inform you of what changes you need to make to ensure a better future. Too many people are too afraid to get started in the first place for fear of making mistakes. Another group is willing to get started but then unwilling to make course corrections when necessary due to stubbornness or ego. You can find tremendous success if you are willing to be in the third group. The group that is willing to get started no matter how scared they are. The group that is willing to make adjustments to make sure they stay on track and aren’t too stubborn to change. This is the group that hits the eventual target.

The Obstacle is The Way

When is the last time you did something truly challenging? Something that made you uncomfortable and stretched your abilities as a human? How happy are you currently? Are you living the life of your dreams? If you are like most of the population, your answers are probably along the lines of “A long time ago” (if not “never”) and that you are “trying to find happiness but not there yet”.

If you were able to answer differently, then that is amazing, and I am truly happy for you! Unfortunately, that isn’t the case for a huge percentage of the people you share the planet with. Depression rates are at an all-time high and most people are running from one thing to the next- certain that the “next thing” is what will bring them happiness. The problem is that more people than ever are also searching for a life of pure comfort. They want to live in the big house, with the fancy car and they want it right now. They want to be lean and muscular without having to exercise and eat right. When that doesn’t happen, they resign themselves to a life of being overweight and being unhappy with how they look and feel because working hard to achieve what they want is too much work.

Too many people have decided that happiness lies in the comforts in life. While the comforts are nice to have, it should be known that if you can’t find happiness in what you have now, you won’t find happiness in material things or comfort either. I blame a lot of these issues on social media (although there are plenty of other sources). Social media has created a false online world in which it seems like the grass is always greener somewhere else, doing what someone else is doing, living someone else’s life. Overnight success stories are all too common as well as posts from people who will show you how they made their millions overnight doing almost no work. Of course, they want to charge you for this knowledge and people that fall for the trap pay gladly. Little do they know that these people are actually making their millions preying on desperate people who believe the road to happiness and riches is ever an easy one that can be bought for $99 and distilled into an hour-long seminar. The chance of gaining riches that quickly and easily is almost nonexistent unless you have a hefty trust fund. Gaining happiness is even more elusive because even a trust fund alone won’t provide that without the proper mentality to accompany it. The good news is that material success and happiness can be found at the end of the same road. A difficult road, but a fulfilling one.

That road is the one paved with obstacles. Challenges that build skills. Situations that are so uncomfortable that you have no choice but to grow and adapt. It is scientifically proven that your brain releases more sustained happiness chemicals while pursuing an end goal and that the achievement of that pursuit results in a much shorter spike of happiness that leaves just as fast as it came. You can probably think of examples in your own life when you achieved something you set out to do and the happiness you felt was short lived after you reached it. You may have even thought to yourself “Wow, I thought I would be happier at this point”. Some of your best and happiest memories are most likely from the time leading up to the achievement. We get so caught up in the accomplishment that we don’t always truly appreciate the fun we had overcoming the obstacles along the way.

I’m still figuring this all out and I am by no means an expert. But I have learned a lot in my 34 years. And one of the most important things that I have learned is that the way to happiness can be found through the obstacles that we face, whether we choose them or not. Intermittent success is important to maintain the motivation to keep pushing forward, but each success needs to be followed by another obstacle to work through and overcome. Don’t ever settle for simple comfort. Don’t ever settle for complacency. It is easy to get caught up in it and forget what it is like to be challenged, face adversity, and come out on the other side a stronger and more confident person.

The best news is a lot of us live a life that allows us to choose our obstacles. Not everyone has that luxury. Some have obstacles forced upon them. If you are not in that boat, and it has been a long time since you truly challenged yourself, now is the time to start. Struggle with exercising regularly? Challenge yourself to set goals that will require dedication and persistence. Struggle with sticking to a diet? Challenge yourself to maintain a diet for “x” number of days without breaking it to test your willpower and prove to yourself you can do anything you set your mind to. Want to be more financially free? Challenge yourself to save more than you think possible or start that business that you have always dreamed about. These are challenging things. They will test you and make you questions yourself. But in the end, you will thank yourself. You will have found something that many people will go their whole lives never understanding. You will have found purpose and a path to happiness as well as material success if you choose to set your sights on that.

Everything you want is out there, you just have to be willing to do what others won’t to get it. You have to be willing to do what is hard while others choose what is easy. You have to learn and truly believe that the obstacle is the way.

“I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.” ― Vince Lombardi

*Looking for a good challenge and don’t know where to start? Look into the 75 Hard Program. Your first thought will most likely be “Hell no, I can’t do that”. That response is an even more sure sign you should do it. My wife Kendall and I completed it a couple of years ago and thought it was a great experience that resulted in a lot of self-confidence and pride in knowing we did it. A lot of people have even started doing it once every year.

**Obviously consult your doctor to get clearance before starting any challenging routines. Don’t use it an excuse to do nothing if you have health issues that limit you but use it as a way to find something that is challenging FOR YOU. It isn’t a competition with anyone else. This is about you and what you are capable of.

Warning: Absolutely No Brown M&Ms

There is a very important lesson to be learned from Van Halen; one of the most well-known rock bands in the last 50 years. Despite their fame, there is something about their shows that is less well known and the source of the lesson. One of the requirements to have them perform at a venue was that, along with their other requests, there needed to be a bowl of M&Ms backstage for them but there couldn’t be any brown ones. Their contracts were decently long so this one line could be easy to miss. The problem with the venue’s show coordinators missing this line? Van Halen would refuse to perform if they showed up and found brown M&Ms in that bowl. A hefty price to pay over something so trivial. Or is it a more important issue than it seems?

Most who heard about the infamous brown M&M rule attributed it to the ego of the band, assuming they had developed a self-important attitude that caused them to overreact to minor slights. The real cause was divulged later by David Lee Roth, the bands lead singer. It turns out, the brown M&M clause was a test to ensure that the event coordinators had a high level of attention to detail.

At the time, the band traveled with 9 semi-trucks full of gear and stage equipment. The weight of the equipment combined with the precision required to ensure it was all staged correctly was unfamiliar territory for many venues. Van Halen was also one of the only bands traveling with such an extensive setup. The band needed to know that the people leading the engineering of the stage had the attention to detail to do it correctly with zero mistakes. If they showed up and they saw brown M&Ms in the bowl it was clear that those in charge had not thoroughly read the band’s requirements and thus were likely to have serious issues with the setup of the equipment. For them, it could have been a matter of life and death. If any of the heavy equipment wasn’t secured properly, all or part of it could come crashing down during the show resulting in potential injury or death to the band, crew or audience. If the coordinators couldn’t get something as simple as not having brown M&Ms in the bowl, how could they have had the attention to detail necessary to set the stage correctly. There was no way of knowing, so instead of taking the risk the band would cancel gigs at the last minute.

The lesson here is that details, big or small, always matter. Those who pay attention and get them right all the time have an immediate advantage over those around them because so few people will do the same. Here at The Factory, we harp on the details A LOT. We care about getting them right A LOT. If we pay to have something printed and later find a typo, no matter how small or unnoticeable, we will immediately throw them away and order new ones. * We want it to be a part of who we are. It is so important that it is even one of our 10 Factory Directives for every person who works here. Never let yourself miss small details and think it doesn’t matter. It will come back to hurt you over the long run. Start being more present. Start being more observant. Start setting your own standards so high that you won’t allow yourself to settle for less than excellence. It will change your life. It will give you the best chance of becoming legendary, just like Van Halen.

*When we started the Factory Library, we ordered bookmarks to be used with the books. They were awesome. They looked slick and we paid good money to make sure they made an impact whenever anyone used them. We pulled the trigger on ordering them after multiple proofs with multiple people. It wasn’t until we received them that we noticed it… a typo. So small that at least 5 people had read them multiple times without noticing it. It didn’t matter that most people would never notice, it was there, and we couldn’t unsee it. They never went into circulation, and we paid to have new ones made with the typo fixed. We ended up keeping them as a keepsake instead of throwing them away. Now they are just a reminder of how much we care about the details.

Brady's Top 5 Books

1. The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous

   The Bitcoin Standard was my first real introduction to Bitcoin, and it started me down a rabbit hole about what money really is. This knowledge forced me to relook at the world from a different point of view and has reshaped my thinking. The big takeaway is how money touches and impacts everything in our lives, including your health and food, your time preference and how you think about the future, the decisions you make, the way you spend your time and who you spend it with and much more. This book changed the way I looked at the entire world.

2. The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin

   “The Art of Learning” is all about Josh Waitzkin’s journey to becoming the youngest Chess Grandmaster in history and then going on to become a world champion in Tai Chi by the age of 28. It is a fun read and an unbelievable story. As amazing as it is though, he is very relatable and breaks down how his amazing feats are just him learning about himself and the skillsets that he is working on more efficiently than everyone else. He took every win and loss in anything he was doing as a chance to learn and improve. I highly recommend this book to anyone, but especially young athletes who want to know what it takes to get to the next level.

3. Relentless by Tim S. Grover

   “Relentless” can be a bit of a slap in the face at times. Just when you think you are pushing yourself, this book shows you just how much further there is to go. Tim Grover is the man who trained Michael Jordan and other top athletes such as Dwayne Wade. Grover takes you through an amazing story of what these athletes put themselves through to reach the pinnacle of sports and business. Their mindset is different than the rest of the world and Grover shows you why, along with the hard truths that go with being the best of the best.

4. Deep Nutrition by Catherine Shanahan

   “Deep Nutrition” opened my eyes to a different way of looking at our modern diet. When we get back to food that comes straight from the earth your body begins to heal, food tastes better and your overall health and energy increases. This sounds like common knowledge, but this book broke it down to a science for me and I found that it really isn’t that difficult to change the way you eat for the better.

5. Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana

   Meditation is a whole new world for me and something I am very much a novice at, but so far, the journey has been amazing. “Mindfulness in Plain English” is one of the first books on meditation that I read, and I found it so helpful. As you progress through the book, the sensations, and experiences you encounter are very accurate to what the author is explaining. For anyone looking to find a little more peace, to slow down their minds or to experience something very different in our everyday lives, I highly recommend this book.

Jesse's Top 5 Books

I love to read. After not reading much for a few years after college, I discovered that my reason for not reading was because I rarely enjoyed what I read. When I discovered that I do enjoy the right books, I dove in and now read between 30-50 books each year. Most of the books I read are non-fiction and business related so that I can grow and develop as a business owner, manager and leader. It was hard enough to narrow down to my favorite five so I will be listing them in no particular order. I believe everyone should read these books. They will provide value to everyone, not just entrepreneurs and business owners. The concepts are wide ranging and will be useful no matter what your profession is.

1. Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink

   In a world where everyone has an excuse for everything, choose to take ownership of your outcomes, both good and bad. People are constantly blaming everything on pretty much anything they can outside of their control. The weather, their boss, the economy, politicians, their kids, their upbringing, etc. The list goes on and on. Dare to be different. Dare to take ownership and responsibility for everything. Your life will improve when you start doing. Reading Extreme Ownership is a great way to get in the proper mindset to start. The book won’t change you overnight. It will take time and effort, but it will be time and effort well spent.

2. Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

   This is by far the longest book of the bunch which makes sense when covering a topic as broad and complex as economics. Despite the complexity of the subject, Sowell does an incredible job of explaining how markets function with different policies in place. The biggest takeaway from this book, in my opinion, is that you must look at the incentives that market conditions and government policies create, not the intentions. Intent rarely matters on an economic level and plenty of well-intentioned ideas have had disastrous consequences. This is a topic that can’t be looked at emotionally and Sowell does a fantastic job of providing plenty of examples and context to explain his points. This should be mandatory reading for all high school and college students.

3. Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday

   The second of a three book “series”, Ego is the Enemy was my favorite of the three (I recommend all three but if you can only pick one - this is what I would choose). The line between confidence and arrogance is becoming slimmer by the day with the rise of social media. There are more people than ever acting like they are the greatest thing on the planet without doing anything of actual worth in the world. The idea that you are such a small speck in the cosmos and that the world doesn’t revolve around you is a difficult concept for some people to accept; however, it could be key to building a legacy worth leaving. Do good for the world and have confidence while doing it but keep your ego in check at the same time.

4. Automatic Millionaire by David Bach

   Simply put, everyone should be required to read this book in high school. Financial literacy is sorely lacking in society today and, with how fast the world is evolving, it is more important than ever. Learning to make your money work for you so that you can live a comfortable life or even retire at a young age can bring a level of comfort that few other things can. I am a big advocate that working for a worthwhile cause is important for mental health and happiness, so I am not saying the goal of this book is to make enough money to not work. Making enough money that you are comfortable no matter what happens is the goal. For most of the population, this is achievable. Does it take some sacrifice and planning? Absolutely. Is it worth it? Absolutely. Automatic Millionaire will give some great ideas for how to think about money. Even if you don’t apply every concept, there is a good chance that you will think about money differently after reading it. If you do choose to apply the concepts, you will be giving yourself a great chance to become financially free at a younger age than you would have otherwise.

5. The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason

   Another financial literacy book that is just great. The author uses parables set about 4000 years ago in ancient Babylon to portray the concepts. The stories are short and easy to understand which makes them easier to remember. It essentially lays out the 7 rules to gain wealth as well as why those rules apply. I also love that one of the points is to enjoy life while you are alive. Many financial books talk like you aren’t allowed to spend money on anything other than investments that are meant to garner you more wealth. I hate that mindset because it makes it sound like we are only here to accumulate wealth and die and that is not how I want to live. There can be a balance when done right. Save and invest to build wealth but also set some aside to enjoy your life in the meantime. Every person can work hard for a worthwhile cause, enjoy life, do good, and become wealthy at the same time. If that sounds like a good life to you, you should read this book.

There you have it, my top 5 books! Like I said, it was incredibly hard to pick just five so I may change this list on occasion. I will most likely post any changes as future posts to make sure these great ones are not lost. All five of these can be found in The Factory Library so if you are looking for your next book, this list is a good starting point. I know that they have all been incredibly valuable to me on my journey in my life, both on the personal and business side.

Burn The Ships

In 334 BC Alexander the Great and his army reached the Persian shores with the intention of increasing the size of their already vast empire. The result of the upcoming battles would be set to change the course of history as their victory would unseat the Persians as the greatest power in the world at the time. He sailed with approximately 50,000 troops, while it is estimated that King Darius III of Persia was in command of a total of 2.5 million soldiers spread across his empire. Knowing they were severely undermanned and faced a daunting opponent, Alexander the Great ordered his troops to burn the ships they used to reach shore. When questioned about the order, he simply stated they would return in Persian ships or not at all.

This is just one story of many over the centuries that illustrate an important concept. When faced with overwhelming odds or difficult tasks, it is easy to find excuses for following another path or to abandon the road ahead completely. On the other hand, if you burn the ships and have no other option, no plan b, the only option is success. Had Alexander not ordered their ships to be burned, his troops would have entered battle knowing they had an escape plan in case their attack failed. Burning the ships ensured that all of his men fought to the best of his ability and would persevere despite the unfavorable odds. Ultimately, this succeed or die mentality resulted in their success against a much larger army and allowed them to secure victory.

We may not be living in 334 BC, but the same principle can be applied to everything we do. Get rid of the excuses, don’t rely on backup plans that will save you from the hard work or difficult decisions. Have the courage to do everything necessary to achieve what you set out to do. Make success the only option. Burn the Ships.

When All Else Fails

“I can’t see a way through”, said the boy.
”Can you see your next step?”
”Yes”.
”Just take that”, said the horse.

-The boy, the mole, the Fox, and the Horse

Sometimes it feels like everything is going wrong or there is no clear path forward. In our lives, in our communities, and in our society, it is easy to get caught up in the negatives and the obstacles. What can you do when it feels like nothing is going right and you need some positive momentum to snap out of a slump? You can regain focus on what you can control.

You can’t control the price of gas. You can’t control the constant flow of negative stories on the news. You can’t control whether more people are choosing to buy from your small business. You can’t control how your boss treats you. You can’t control the people around you at all. However, you can control:

• Being conscious of your budget and sticking to it.

• Turning off the news and putting more positive content in front of you.

• Putting out good content and consistent marketing to ensure as many as people as possible see the product or service your small business offers.

• Doing your job to the best of your ability.

• Getting consistent exercise to put yourself in a better state of mind.

• Eating well to give your body the nutrients it needs to feel your best.

• Getting in bed in time to get plenty of sleep.

The list goes on and on. When you focus on yourself and what you can control, the extraneous falls away and you can double your efforts on the things that will provide real value in your life. You will no longer spend time fretting over the doom and gloom that seems to be a constant and, instead, you will spend your time improving your life as the doom and gloom slowly disappears into the background. You will no longer stress about whether people will come support your small business because you will be so busy providing value and content to the people around you that it will be obvious to you how much progress you are making. Your boss may never treat you differently but the pride from crushing your job is of much more importance because it will allow you to master skills that will make finding a new job easier, if necessary. The sense of accomplishment will be everything you need to keep going.

Now, I’m not saying that any of this will be easy. Far from it. With the rise of social media, comparison and negativity are at an all-time high. It seems like everyone is doing better, living more fulfilling lives. It seems like there is so much negativity in the world that it can be tough to find the positives. You need to understand that most of that is a facade. At best, social media is a highlight reel of the best parts of people’s lives. At worst, it is a flat out lie. Everyone is struggling just like you. Almost everyone is fighting similar battles. It is time to stop comparing the everyday aspects of your life to the highlight reels of everyone else’s. It is time to realize that negativity sells and that is the only reason the news is shoving it down your throat. The positive side is always left behind because it doesn’t sell as well - that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. You just have to be willing to look for it.

FOCUS ON WHAT YOU CAN CONTROL. Stay off the news, stay off social media as much as possible. Go outside and get fresh air. Read as much as you can. Exercise and eat well. Most of all, make yourself proud by doing what needs to be done. Success is out there. Progress is out there. It comes to those who are willing to focus and execute every single day- even on days that they don’t want to and think it might not make a difference. IT DOES. You just have to live it long enough for it to work. Courage is putting one foot in front of the other when you can’t see the future. Be courageous. Take the next step.