My son,

I was not expecting this to happen whatsoever, but you were born during my hardest hold with Bitcoin.

In 2025, I had moved my wealth completely into Bitcoin. Every dollar from my earlier exit, liquidated from my previous ‘diversified stock portfolio,’ and now concentrated into a single thesis I had spent over a year building conviction around. And Bitcoin was climbing. The macro environment looked very favorable. I believed the trajectory would continue upward through events I anticipated on the horizon. And I told myself I could not miss that train.

And as you may be thinking… it didn’t pan out exactly how I had hoped.

Bitcoin fell from its all-time high of ~$126,000 to ~$60,000. And it stayed there. For months, it consolidated… no dramatic crash, no dramatic recovery. Just a long, flat silence while what felt like the rest of the world had moved on without me. The stock market, especially AI stocks, and metals were all ripping higher. The assets I had liquidated just months prior from were now climbing parabolically.

And there I sat, watching almost 50% of my net worth disappear (on paper) in a span of months, wealth that had taken years to build in my 20s. That was painful to experience to watch the train I jumped off continue its climb, just without me now.

I had never experienced anything like it. That’s because I had always played it safe financially: diversified investments, large cash reserves, the conventional playbook everyone agreed upon.

But the last prior years had been a deliberate shift; I was approaching my mid-30s and wanted to challenge myself to take calculated risks in what I recognized as my wealth-building stage. $10m net worth by age 40 was the north star.

So as I went deep down the Bitcoin rabbit hole during the 2025 rise, you could imagine why I felt like I found my answer to accomplish that with Bitcoin, so I went all-in. I didn’t expect the drop to come so hard or so fast, even though I had heard and seen on the sidelines bear markets play out on the news countless times. Let me say this… watching it from the outside with no exposure and living inside it with everything at stake are two entirely different worlds.

Then you arrived. One month after a big, continuous drawdown starting 5 months prior.

Bills were still stacking up after upgrading our lifestyle to welcome you. Child care costs due to safely bring you into this world. My net worth on paper was declining while my financial responsibilities were growing. I had never been in this position before:

the provider instinct colliding head-on with a conviction that was being tested in real time.

My internal dialogue was relentless. On the worst days, when Bitcoin fell further after I thought the worst was over, the voice in my head said: “Did I misunderstand something? Did I get tricked? I have put our family in jeopardy financially.”

On those quieter days, when Bitcoin sat flat and the stock market climbed, a different voice showed up: my ego. It was very convincing to sell Bitcoin and chase whatever else was making money in the short term. The dopamine of quick gains were calling, especially after months of pain.

I would do the only sane things I knew: put my phone down, stop checking the price, and go back to the studies. Someone had once shared that was the best thing to do during these self-doubting times in a bear market, and they were right. I hit the books. I picked up more podcasts. I watched more educational content. Every time I went deeper on the problem of our fiat system, the conviction rebuilt itself stronger than before. A sigh of relief from my inner worries.

The quote above was very apt reminder on the daily for me. And the only antidote to that wear or scare was consistently strengthening my conviction. As I mentioned previously, real conviction is formed in the bear market. Especially when one’s thesis is being challenged by short-term price action. When everything is going up, conviction is easy. It costs nothing. Everyone is a believer when the number goes up. But when I was sitting in a 50% drawdown, watching everything else climb, with you as a newborn in my arms and bills still arriving… that’s when I found out if my conviction was real or borrowed.

Suffice to say, mine was real. But it was being forged, not just confirmed.

I had naively convinced myself the drawdown would recover before you arrived. That by the time you were here, my personal finances would be back to normal and I could focus entirely on being a new father. But it didn’t recover at the time I wanted. It extended through your arrival and then some. And as the weight of financially providing for our family unit started to settle in — really settle in — the worry got louder.

It was already a big enough bet to concentrate my wealth into Bitcoin the year prior. But now there was an amplifier I hadn’t fully accounted for being this was the first time in my life: the daily, real responsibility of caring for you and your mother who brought you into this world.

What made it heavier was something I’ve carried my whole life. I never experienced a present, providing father growing up. I had no model for what I was trying to become. And here I was, in probably the most financially uncertain moment of my life, stepping into the exact role no one had ever shown me how to fill.

I knew in my bones and in my heart that your arrival during this hardest hold moment was my opportunity to break the generational cycles that had been passed down subconsciously for decades.

Looking back, I wished I could have ‘timed’ everything better; hindsight is 20/20. But I am grateful for the version of me who went all-in, because that was the first time I truly exemplified conviction through action, especially with my money and personal finances. That comes with a set of values and lessons I have been documenting throughout here that I hope is starting to land for you.

But if I could go back and shift something differently, I would change how I managed this all-in transition. I would tell that version of myself to play the longer game. To not chase the dopamine rush. To not set such high expectations on timing. To stay humble. My conviction was right. My bet on direction was correct. My patience needed more work. This quote I once heard sums it up well:

And my son, you know that tattoo I have on my right forearm symbolizing my belief that “Everything Happens for a Reason?” I believe your birth coincided with my hardest financial moment for a symbolic reason. You arrived at the exact time I needed to ask myself the hardest questions: Do I truly know what I’m holding and my greater why?

The answer was you. It was always for you.

Holding you every day was my fire to keep going, to keep putting in the work during the most difficult stretch. Knowing that what I was enduring and holding would mean something real for you in the future. To give you that optionality I mentioned throughout this book already.

Everything I went through in that bear market — the drawdown, the isolation, the ego battles, the early mornings with you sleeping on my chest and a Bitcoin book in my hand — it was all worth it. Not because the price recovered. But because it made me the father and the man who could hold something this important (through all the noise and chaos) for someone who couldn’t hold it yet himself.

That was my hardest hold. And you were the key reason I never let go.

— Dad

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My son,

Conviction is expensive and can be quite lonely.

I want you to know that as you build your own for the Bitcoin I pass down to you.

Denominated in dollars, at least, during the bear market that I lived through 1 year after I fully went all-in. It was a hard pill to swallow to see my hard earned money I earned from my earlier exit ‘vanish’ just like that (in unrealized terms).

During that time, it cost me dinners out, trips your mother and I would have taken, the easy generosity of picking up the check without thinking, gifts I wanted to give. Your mother and I pulled back on everything that wasn’t essential. We cooked more. We stayed in more. We spent more time in nature with you, doing simple things that kept us present as a family.

What remained after the cutting was better than what was removed.

But I won’t pretend the bear market was easy. There were months where I watched all the previous investments I had sold or exited from, go parabolically up. The assets I’d walked away from (to put it all in Bitcoin) were climbing, and there I was sitting in a 50% drawdown, starting to question my choice. To say the least, it was a very frustrating experience for my ego.

The opportunity cost felt enormous. I started considering selling. Close to admitting I might have been wrong.

But I didn’t sell. And it wasn’t easy. So I did the only thing I knew how to do when fear showed up… I went deeper in my studies. I picked up ten more Bitcoin books, reading them when you were napping on me. Every morning walk and every afternoon walk with our dog, I listened to another Bitcoin podcast with those I respected. I studied different perspectives, different stories, and re-derived the answer for myself. I didn’t need someone to tell me it would be okay. I just needed to remember again, from the ground up, why I had chosen this.

As I suspected and had heard from others who recommended this advice during previous bear markets and drawdowns, the conviction sank deeper. Into my bones. Into my heart.

What I couldn’t unsee, and what I still can’t unsee, is what I told you in the earlier chapter: the denominator is broken. When the whole world prices everything in fiat dollars, and those dollars can be debased by a centralized ruler at will, the measuring stick we value everything in is shrinking. Our purchasing power decreasing without our consent. Once you see that, you can’t go back.

But I had built the muscle for this before. In my psychedelic career, I developed unpopular convictions through my many lived experiences about consciousness, about spirituality, about the roots of trauma, about what was “Truth”. To be fair, many just had not awoken to them yet, and it was not my job to wake them up before they were ready, just like I would not wake you up when you were a baby sleeping during your naps. You got to wake up at your own time, and this was no different.

I had already understood what it felt like to see something so clearly that others couldn’t see yet, to have the courage to look past the comfortable illusions, and to hold that knowing quietly without needing anyone’s agreement. That muscle, worked out in my many spiritual ceremonies and tested in silence, was my preparation for Bitcoin. I just didn’t know it at that time.

During the hardest stretch of my conviction being tested, I carried the weight alone. Your mother’s trust was unconditional, and that made it harder in some ways. As the protector and provider of our family, I decided it wasn’t right to transfer my doubt to her… to create chaos, confusion, and fear in someone who hadn’t gone as deep into the studies as I had.

So I did the work. I sat with the fear. I observed the confusion within me. I found where it still lived in me, and I studied until it had nowhere left to hide.

When I came out the other side and finally told her what I’d endured through, she was grateful. It strengthened her trust in me even more because of what I had chosen to endure through by myself as my responsibility. She even shifted her own decisions more in support of enduring our first bear market together as a family unit. Please thank her after you finish reading this chapter.

There’s something I want to share with you that was even more magical that had happened from this conviction I developed. It didn’t just keep me holding Bitcoin… it pulled me into building in Bitcoin. Your mother saw it before I did. After my first full year of studying, I walked away from an idea I’d been building in the psychedelic space, a conviction I’d carried for seven years. My ego didn’t want to let go because I was comfortable in that industry. But when she asked me what I spent all my free time on while I wasn’t building that previous product, the answer was obvious: Bitcoin.

So I combined my previous 2 chapters (the technology skills from my first career and the depth of self-awareness from my second career with psychedelics) with my strong conviction in Bitcoin that had been brewing in me for over a year.

I decided to start building technology tools to help Bitcoin parents prepare their children for Bitcoin. Families just like ours who want to break generational scarcity cycles around money (with Bitcoin) and give their children something better to stand on, that restores optionality of career choice and family time.

Here’s the learning I want to pass onto you:

I took the risk with my money, my reputation, my career. All-in. With conviction, not conforming to the comfortable.

I want you to understand something about the difference between conviction and conformity. It’s easy to follow the crowd, to diversify into whatever everyone else is doing for the sake of feeling safe and not alone.

But the cost of that comfort and conformity is never knowing who you are, never discovering your own values, your own identity, your own truth.

Conviction is the antidote. It calls forth deep critical thinking, deep proof of work in studying, and deep understanding of self.

Another way I see conformity is diversification. Diversification is another way of saying “I don’t know what I’m doing, so I will spread my risk with many options by following the crowd of what’s already accepted and popular.” Or in the Bitcoin world: “Diversification just means less Bitcoin.” Diversification for safety will never get you truly ahead. It is for wealth preservation, not for growing your wealth.

Concentration is what builds wealth, and concentration requires conviction and risk. Conviction and de-risking only come after we put in the time and work to build our understanding of a thesis. That’s the difference between reckless gambling and proper risk management in all facets of life, especially with money.

As I write this to you, I am in my wealth-building stage, so after I woke up from the illusion of diversification, I have intentionally chosen to concentrate my time, energy, money, and career into my high conviction thesis:

Every wound in this chapter (the 50% drawdown, the lonely path, the doubts I carried, the career I walked away from) became a lesson I couldn’t have learned any other way. The bear market and confusions didn’t weaken my conviction. It forged it. And the man writing this letter to you is someone who only exists because he devoted himself to his chosen path however uncomfortable.

You will inherit your Bitcoin. But what I’m really passing down is the proof that a man can stake everything on what he believes, endure the price volatility, and come out the other side more aligned with himself than when he went in.

One day you’ll hold a conviction (with this Bitcoin inheritance) that costs you something real, maybe money, comfort, relationships, the easy approval of people around you. When that moment comes, I want you to know that your father stood in that exact place and chose not to budge. Not because I was stubborn. Because it was actually coherent with who I am and the values I stand on.

That’s what conviction costs. And that’s what it’s worth.

— Dad

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My son, Bitcoin didn’t click for me in a single flash. It finally clicked through 3 revelations that stacked on top of each other over months during my studies in 2025, each one building on the last, until the weight of all three made it impossible to go back to who I was before.

I want to share each one in hopes you will consider reflecting on these revelations.

This was the one that shook my foundation. After studying Bitcoin, I realized I had been exchanging my finite and precious time and energy earning a form of money (in this case paper US dollars) that is infinitely printable by another human being. When that landed, I felt embarrassed by my naivety.

Why had I poured my life into earning a government paper money that can be printed so easily, controlled by another human being who is flawed by ego, tempted by power, and seduced by manipulation?

And this wasn’t just theoretical or philosophical. I had seen this repeated abuse of responsibility prior; I just didn’t have the words to describe it. In the United States where I grew up, I saw it in the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, when there were fancy words masking money printing, bailing out banks who went on to profit from the debacle. I remember watching the news and being so confused by all the fancy words they were using them to mask the financial corruption happening behind the scenes.

I saw it again during COVID in 2020, when 40% of all US dollars in existence were printed in a matter of a couple years. Let that land. I hadn’t known it took over 200 years for America to accumulate the first 60% of its money supply and debt. Then 40% more appeared in two years, just like that. To help “stabilize the economy,” they said.

Imagine I came to you one day and said, “Son, in this household, we use monopoly paper money to exchange goods and services. I will give you monopoly paper money each time you provide value in this household that you worked for with your time and energy. But the next day, I am going to print a lot more of it just because, so the money you earned prior will be worth significantly less. Everything you want to buy in this household after will cost way more because the money you saved prior buys less… due to all the new money I just printed. And I did this without asking you.”

If money is time, and time is our life, then money printing is stealing your time, and thus your life. Don’t choose a system that does that to you.

That statistic is what finally snapped something in me. I had spent the last couple of years feeling something I couldn’t name. After my company exit, I had saved and expected my funds to carry me for quite some time.

But everything around me — groceries, housing, the goods and services I needed to live on a daily basis — was getting significantly more expensive, exponentially faster.

Something deep inside me knew something was not adding up, despite all the financial media or teachers I had followed pointing to some other generic reason meant to distract me from the root cause. Now I had the words for it: the massive money printing throughout history, and especially during COVID, was silently devouring the purchasing power of everything I had earned.

If this could happen, it most definitely will happen again for a different polished reason.

Looking back now, that quiet money debasement is what led me to speculative investing because I felt the need to make up for the rising costs outpacing my earnings. When I am forced into speculative investing (which is adjacent to gambling by the way), it degrades the quality of my life and profession because I now need to learn how to be an investor and stay on top of my bets with more of my precious time, which would have meant more time away from raising you!

I should NOT work for money that another person can print! When I understood that philosophically, I learned to save in Bitcoin, not dollars.

This distinction completely changed how I understood Bitcoin’s durability. At first, I carried the common concern: what if something better comes along and replaces Bitcoin (ie. with a faster version)? Then I learned the difference between a technology and a protocol.

Technologies can be replaced by newer, faster versions (in my times it was the classic Facebook vs. Myspace). But protocols are different. Protocols are like the English language or the internet itself. There is no second English language. There is no second internet. And there won’t be a second English language or internet. Protocols are the base layer of something paradigm-shifting, and once a protocol achieves critical mass through the network effect — where the more people who participate, the more valuable and powerful it becomes — it is highly unlikely to ever be displaced by a newcomer starting from zero.

Bitcoin is a money protocol. And money protocols, unlike technologies, are winner-take-all, not winner-take-most. All money will eventually want to consolidate into one, because who wants to hold many types of currencies when one is superior? If Bitcoin’s money qualities and properties are stronger than every alternative — and I came to believe they are — then it is not competing with other cryptocurrencies. It is competing against what our current society deems as money right now as I write this.

My belief is Bitcoin will absorb all money (winner-take-all) when more people wake up to its pristine money qualities. For every new dollar printed, Bitcoin’s value increases measured in dollars (due to its quality of absolute scarcity). Bitcoin isn’t just inevitable because of network effects; it’s mathematically tied to fiat’s decline. Every act of debasement through more money printing strengthens Bitcoin. The more the system steals from us, the more valuable Bitcoin becomes. What a peaceful way to exit the money system matrix! Please tell me if this was correct when you’re reading this.

On the inside, Bitcoin is an ideology of Truth and fairness for all (because it is owned by no one and available for anyone). On the outside, it is the base layer money protocol for humanity. Both matter. But understanding the protocol distinction is what made me see Bitcoin as inevitable, not just interesting.

This one punched me in the gut. When I had read this in the past, I glazed right over it. But studying Bitcoin had me re-examine every form of wealth & money I had ever “owned” and realized none of it was truly mine.

Cash in banks? It’s not actually sitting there. The bank uses it for their business of lending. I have a claim, not possession. Stocks? Owned by another company. I have a right to a share, but the underlying asset is owned by someone else. Real estate? I have a deed, a right to the property, but it is still under the control of the government or someone more powerful than me (ie. eminent domain). If I stop paying property taxes, it gets taken away. If something is truly mine, why do I have to keep paying for it?

Why is this important? Because each current form of money I have is owned by a third-party I have to trust. If I for whatever reason piss them off, they can freeze it. If I for whatever reason I dissent to a new law that I fundamentally disagree with, they can seize it. The tradeoff for convenience of someone else ‘securing’ my money, is my actual sovereignty to live life how I truly feel most aligned to.

Even gold, which may have been the only sound money that could actually be held by the individual, has a fatal vulnerability. History has shown us: people more powerful, with guns pointed at our heads, could take it. Executive Order 6102 in 1933. Physical seizure with military power (a key reason for war, for centuries). Gold failed not because of its monetary properties, but because it couldn’t resist force.

And then I examined Bitcoin. A form of money that I could finally truly own. Held in self-custody with a private key that exists in my mind! Unseizable. Unconfiscatable. Not dependent on any third-party institution, any bank, any government to validate that it is yours. For the first time in my life, I understood what it meant to actually own my money, fully under my control. And that is very, very freeing and liberating.

Who I was before & Who I stopped being.

Before these three revelations, I am humble enough to admit that I was a sheep, or dare I say, a slave, to the fiat money system. I say that with full honesty. I was filled with naivety and unearned trust in a centralized government. I never questioned money. I just listened to what my mom or school taught me, which was mainly about earning broken money, never about how to save in sound money. I was blinded from the truth, running on a hamster wheel, stuck in a system I couldn’t put into words but knew something was not adding up. Some would say ‘stuck in the matrix.’

The moment I took Bitcoin into my own self-custody and truly owned my money for the first time in my life, was when I stopped outsourcing responsibility, especially with my money and financial education. I stopped outsourcing my wealth management to wealth managers by taking it in my own hands. I stopped giving unearned trust to governments and central banks by opting out with and converting into Bitcoin. I stopped believing the government owed me anything, let alone save me from any monetary collapses.

Which is even sad to say that we need other humans to stabilize a money system because it’s filled with flaws and vulnerabilities caused by… other humans. I finally understood the wisdom to be governed by mother nature and laws of the universe (non-human world), especially when it comes to money. Rules without rulers, without human ego susceptible to corruption. Money should not be in the hands of human beings. Money should not be controlled by human beings.

I had deeply weaved 3 principles into my life from my psychedelic journeys, that now looking back, prepared me well for finally understanding Bitcoin:

1. The power of something egoless → Bitcoin owned by no one to print more of

2. The power of Truth as base layer of our identity → Bitcoin as base layer of money

3. The power of owning our mind → Bitcoin in self-custody as owning our money

My son, I didn't arrive at these revelations because someone told me to. I arrived because I finally had the courage to question what I had been taught and verify for myself. These three revelations are mine, and shattered old paradigms that took me from a sheep to a sovereign. I'm sharing them so you have a head start I never had. But they won't truly be yours until you examine them yourself, challenge them, and decide whether they hold for you. That is your work to do. And I believe you will, to allow Bitcoin to click for you.

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My son, I came into Bitcoin a bit differently than most people. I didn’t arrive through finance or technology or trading. I arrived through a seven-year journey with psychedelics and plant medicine… a career devoted to seeking truth in a world of illusions and deep subconscious programming.

By the time I sat down to seriously study Bitcoin in late 2024, I had already spent years cultivating the muscle of questioning things that look real or were told to me was real, but are perhaps just illusions. I had to unlearn a lot in my life that was fed to me, that I just accepted when I was younger and naive.

That muscle is the reason the crack opened as fast as it did.

The first crack came from a book: The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous. A classic that have ‘orange-pilled’ many Bitcoiners today.

In the book, I clearly remember reading the history of different types of money that have been used throughout human civilization, and the book alluding to a simple but devastating question: why did those forms of money either not exist today, or get outdated and replaced?

I had vaguely known some of this money history. I knew cacao beans were used as money in certain ancient civilizations during my plant medicine days. I knew gold was used in the Roman times. And vaguely remembering someone teaching me seashells were used as money in simpler societies. But I had never asked the deeper question: what happened to those forms monies and why they didn’t last to present day?

Two examples widened my (fiat) crack significantly.

Seashells. In ancient times, simple societies used seashells as money. When more modern civilizations discovered these simple societies, they realized they could go find more seashells elsewhere or import massive quantities and collapse their economy. The money failed because its supply could be manipulated and exponentially inflated by an outside force.

I thought: how was it fair that those in the simple society worked and earned seashells with their finite time and hard labor, but others outside could just find them elsewhere and use it in their society? Especially without any permission or consent from those in the simple society.

When I read that, something clicked.

Gold. Gold served as money for centuries, including in the Roman Empire. But gold had its own vulnerabilities, especially to manipulation or debasement. Coin clipping in the Roman times (shaving edges off gold coins to secretly extract value) was so prevalent that to this day, coins have ridged edges as a remnant of that era.

And in more recent history during 1933, President FDR issued Executive Order 6102, which required all citizens to turn in their gold to the banks at a set price. Because gold was a physical bearer asset and visible to the eye, it could be threatened by military force or violence if someone refused to. In simple terms, it could be seized.

Was our money really our property if someone else with more power could take it from us? Gold failed not because it wasn’t valuable, but because it couldn’t resist centralized power with guns who wanted to take control of it.

That was the intellectual crack. But the deeper shift came from somewhere else.

I watched a video essay by Tomer Strolight called “The Legendary Treasure of Satoshi Nakamoto.” It presented Bitcoin from a spiritual and philosophical lens, which resonated deeply with the worldview I had cultivated in my psychedelic career.

Strolight asked a question that made me pause: “what happens if we can separate essential services (hospitals, schools, churches) from their current institutional structures? When we strip away the institutions that have wrapped themselves around these core concepts, we may find that the source of our frustration or anger is not the idea itself, but the controlling institutions behind them.”

His answer: by using Bitcoin as a template for purity, individuals are empowered to ask what education is apart from the schooling system, what healthcare is apart from the medical and pharmaceutical industry, and what morality is when stripped of church authorities claiming a monopoly on it.

It’s the contaminants of the institutions that have tainted these core and pure ideas.

I personally experienced this with the system of church at a young age, and thus vehemently rejected spiritual realms for many years. It was only through many of my personal lived experiences with plant medicine and psychedelics that were pure and personal, that it showed me my disdain originated from my mistrust of earthly institutions that had tainted it.

This is where my psychedelic career became the bridge. One of the central themes I learned across close to 400+ ceremony experiences was the fragile and easily tempted nature of the human ego when presented with opportunities for self-benefit.

I had been in the rooms, over and over, when people shared the realization that their ego had gripped onto choices that led them down paths they were not proud of. As parents. As partners. As family members. They attributed their ego for many of their regrets.

So when I looked at centralized money systems through that lens, it was obvious. If there is a centralizing force of humans controlling the money system, and human ego is as fragile as I have witnessed it to be hundreds of times, then of course that force will be tempted. And of course they will take advantage. Of course they will manipulate to their own benefit, for power. The Cantillon effect — where those closest to the money printer benefit first at everyone else’s expense — is simply one simple example what human ego does when handed the keys to money.

One of Bitcoin’s mantra is “rules without rulers.” Philosophically, what that means is it levels the playing field for all. There is no one central ruler who can change the rules. No ego at the controls. It is an egoless, paradigm-shifting technology, powered and run by all the contributors in the network. It is no wonder to me that I see the news everyday showing how the gap between the rich and poor is greater every day, and when that happens, societies turn to more violence.

Between the intellectual crack from The Bitcoin Standard and the spiritual crack from Strolight’s work, there was a moment where I crossed from “this might be real” to “I can’t unsee this anymore.” It came when I personally connected the parallels between psychedelics and Bitcoin.

I had dedicated seven years and close to 400 ceremonies to psychedelics and plant medicine. That journey forged an understanding of self so deep that there was nothing anyone could say that would change my mind about the positive benefits of what I had lived through and experienced.

And I began to see that Bitcoin and psychedelics share the same architecture. Both are decentralized technologies, not ruled by human beings or an ego. Both are ideologies of pursuing Truth. Both are available for anyone to use and work with for betterment of self. One is for the mind. One is for money.

Because I had such a strong foundation in my psychedelic journey, I leaned on how I traversed through to navigate my early fragile days of Bitcoin. It was difficult to navigate because there are no central ruler to ask for guidance, no governing force to follow “this is how it’s done.” And that was exactly similar to my early days with psychedelics.

As I understood these parallels between these two technologies, I felt it: I could not unsee Bitcoin anymore.

With that revelation, I arrived at another deeper realization: when human ego is in control of something as powerful as money, backed by a system that has the power to print, to legislate, and to enforce with military, it is futile to fight it. It is in my humble opinion, that is a battle we will never win, and perhaps not worth our time to even fight.

But we don’t have to fight it. We can opt out of it.

Buckminster Fuller once said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Bitcoin is that new (money) model. It doesn’t ask permission from the old system. It doesn’t need to defeat it. It simply exists as a better alternative and stronger incentives, and those with the awareness and courage to see it can choose it.

Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, saw this coming decades before Bitcoin was created. He wrote: “I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can’t stop.” Bitcoin is that sly roundabout way. It wasn’t introduced through politics or revolution. It was introduced on an email list back in 2008, and through the years, was enforced through code, mathematics, and energy — forces that no human ego can manipulate and no government can shut down.

The crack in my (fiat) certainty about the old system didn’t come from a chart or a price target. It came from a question I had been trained to ask for seven years: what if what appears real is actually an illusion? And what emerges when you finally see through it?

No wonder Bitcoin’s central reminder is to verify everything for ourselves. Just like with psychedelics asks us to experience for ourselves.

So before you inherit my conviction, I urge you build the muscle to seek Truth for yourself. Question what everyone around you accepts as true. Question what you were taught, including from me.

If you were inspired by this chapter, you can:

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My son, I want to tell you about the decade I feel like I wasted ignoring Bitcoin. Not because I’m proud of it, although sometimes I’m a little embarrassed by it, but because it was an integral part of my journey, and I want you to understand why even someone who eventually builds their life around Bitcoin can spend ten years pushing it away.

I first heard about Bitcoin in 2014. I was 24 years old, CEO and founder of my first technology company in San Francisco. I distinctly remember it clear as day. My team and I were in our first office, this small little house in the middle of the bustling city.

On the second floor, our first hire, an engineer, and our fifth hire, our product manager, started discussing about Bitcoin and brought it to my attention that this was something worth understanding more.

My first reaction: “I don’t have time for this. I’m running a company.”

Even though I was a technologist, I completely dismissed Bitcoin and just ignored it shortly after. The excuse was that I was too busy. The real reason was deeper.

From 2014 onward, I was so enamored with scaling my company that Bitcoin essentially disappeared from my awareness. I would see it on the news or in article headlines and dismiss it as some speculative gamble. Nothing more.

It wasn’t until 2020, during COVID, that Bitcoin crossed my path again. There was a big price run-up again, largely because of all the money printing that was happening behind the scenes dressed in fancy names no common person like me would understand (as designed).

By then I had exited my company in 2018. I had money to invest and was looking for where to park it. So I was drawn in, but purely for the gains and price. I was not yet at a stage in my life where I could feel the pain of my money losing its purchasing power, nor understand the very concept of it. I was still oblivious to what purchasing power even meant.

I was so focused on earning money that I could not yet understand the value of keeping or storing value with money.

Unfortunately, I had outsourced most of my financial responsibility to a wealth manager, and they definitely did not recommend Bitcoin either. So I had to do it myself, which I felt uneducated to do so intellectually. In 2021, I started buying my first Bitcoin through dollar-cost averaging — $250 per week. Something small.

But only a year in, the infamous FTX collapse triggered a cascade, and the Bitcoin exchange I kept my Bitcoin on BlockFi froze all my funds. I had maybe $20,000 worth of Bitcoin on there.

Little did I know the real lesson. It wasn’t that Bitcoin had failed me. Nothing changed with the protocol. (Remember this as first principles when future chaos emerges).

It was that I hadn’t taken full self-custody. I had trusted a third party to hold my Bitcoin — the exact mistake that Bitcoin was designed to eliminate. But I couldn’t see that yet. Because I had come for just the price gains, and the price action fell hard post the collapse, it was just as easy for me to dismiss Bitcoin… once again.

So for the next two years, I completely ignored it (again) and was fully immersed in my career in the psychedelic retreat space. It was disheartening to feel I had lost that $20,000, and it made me that much more risk-averse with money and investing.

Then something mystical happened with the timing.

In the summer of 2024, I received an email saying I was about to get the Bitcoin that had been frozen for two years back in my custody. I clearly remember I was at a conference in Texas at the time, and I felt elated… I would finally get those funds back.

The timing was quite magical, because that summer I had been closing all the chapters of my second career in the psychedelic space, where I had devoted myself to deep self-development work and cultivated a philosophical understanding of life and myself that would soon lead me to grasp Bitcoin quite quickly. To this day, I credit my speed of understanding Bitcoin to my psychedelic experiences, particularly my relationship with my ego, but that’s a story for another chapter.

I finally received the funds back in October of 2024, one month before the United States election, where Trump won on a pro-Bitcoin agenda. There was another massive, exponential price run-up that caught my attention. This was the second time in a couple of years that the price was rising fast, but I was so oblivious to why.

So this time, armed with more time post 2nd career, without any previous similar excuses, and a deeper lens to life and my inner world, I decided to finally put in the time to study what was happening. Not just the price action. What was actually going on with this asset. What was going on with money itself. What is money.

What really helped me begin to understand what was going on was after the aftermath of COVID and massive amounts of money printing: groceries, housing, everything I needed were all inflating at such a rapid pace that would soon out-price me. Here I was, a successful exited tech founder feeling this, and then I wondered “if I was experiencing this worry, what were others not as fortunate as I was experiencing?”

That felt personal; the pain finally became undeniable. I thought the money I earned from my exit, that I poured 7 years of my life into, would last me much longer than the reality setting in. It was that awareness that finally tipped something in me… something was off with the money system I had never questioned. And I could finally feel it.

Looking back at that full decade of dismissal — 2014 to 2024 — the honest, deeper reason I kept pushing Bitcoin away was twofold:

If I’m honest with myself, I’m OK acknowledging that the decade wasn’t exactly wasted. The truth was I simply wasn’t ready. I hadn’t yet felt the cost or pain of not knowing.

My son, if I could go back to that office in San Francisco in 2014, when my engineer and product manager first brought Bitcoin to my attention, and I could whisper one sentence to my younger self, not to convince him to buy, but to plant a seed that might have shortened the decade, I would say:

“No man should work for and earn in what another man can print. If you understand this philosophically, it is worth your time to study Bitcoin.”

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My son, there is a pattern that has run through our family for at least three generations, up to our great-grandparents. I am the one in our family who finally spotted it. And I am the one who gets to end it.

I call it financial parentlessness.

It is not just the absence of financial education. It is not just the silence around money. It is the full cascade of what happens when a family does not understand money, does not talk about money, and does not know how to steward money, across generations. What does that look like?

Your grandmother lived through this, and I experienced the net effect of that. It started, at least as far as I can trace, with your great-grandparents. It was the same. Scarcity. Silence. Lack of knowledge.

Your great-grandmother was a stay-at-home mom. Your great-grandfather served in his country’s military, often away from home, working to provide. Money was tight. Thus your great-grandmother was very frugal. And that frugality, that silence, that unspoken anxiety, continued to be passed down to your grandmother.

Your grandmother was a single mother raising three children, including me. She juggled two to three jobs at once for years, just to make ends meet. My babysitter and my grandparents were the ones who filled the gap while she was working 15+ hour workdays. I remember moments where she would break down from the sheer weight on her shoulders. Needing to financially provide, alone, for three children.

She was gone a lot. Working. Hustling. Grinding. And I want to be very clear about something: it was not her fault. It was not neglect. It was pure financial necessity.

And while I am deeply grateful for the hard work ethic she passed down to me by witnessing her diligence, the truth is she was physically absent for much of my childhood (by the way I completely forgave her and have no animosity).

That absence shaped me in ways I am still understanding, especially how I relate to love and parenting myself.

I believe my mother’s physical absence is what ultimately motivated me to hustle throughout my first startup at such a young age to create the financial foundation to have choices, and realized one of the most important ones is to be able to spend more time with you. It motivated me to earn the option of presence with life, and more importantly with you.

But here is the part that took me the longest to see. When I exited my first company and received a financial windfall, more money than anyone in my family had ever earned, I still felt like it wasn’t enough. I had done the thing, won the Monopoly game. The first one in my family.

And yet my scarcity worries were still running. I didn’t know how to manage the money, grow it, or preserve it. And as I was living my life, prices were inflating rapidly, due to massive amount of COVID-era money printing and stimulus in the early 2020s. The purchasing power of what I had earned was greatly eroding in real time without being able to name it.

And of course, it was the Bitcoin rabbit hole that revealed it. I finally understood the fiat money system and the inflationary pressure built into it by design.

I saw that the pattern of financial parentlessness wasn’t just emotional… it was being reinforced by a monetary system that quietly erodes the purchasing power of every family that doesn’t understand what’s happening.

A system that keeps parents working harder for money that buys less, leaving them less time with their children, who then grow up without the education or the presence they deserved.

Three generations of the same pattern. Passed down unbeknownst to each one. My grandparents didn’t know. My mother didn’t know. Each one unknowingly robbed of their time to be able to spend with their family due to financial pressures. And it does carry grief. It pains me to know they are oblivious to what I now see.

But it humbles me that perhaps this was not the lifetime they were meant to understand this. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to question the programming they were raised in, to question the system itself. Not everyone arrives there. And I hold compassion for that.

But I did arrive. And so that pattern finally ends with me, by firstly choosing to save in Bitcoin for our family name, and secondly preparing you to properly steward it so you can continue for your family someday.

The combination of personal finance skills & understanding of money systems (especially Bitcoin).

My hope is that by the time you are an adult and on your own, you carry a regulated, healthy relationship with money because you were educated and taught.

And that you take everything I pass down to you — the education, the skill sets, the presence, the time, and Bitcoin inheritance itself — and carry it forward to your own family and children you raise.

That is the new pattern and my commitment with financial parenthood: Financial literacy passed down from me to you alongside presence and family time that shapes your capacity to love.

What ends with me does not reach you. What begins with you carries forward for generations.

This is why I choose Bitcoin for our family name, especially you.

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My son, nobody taught me what I believe to be one of the most important lesson about money. Not my mother. Not her parents. Sadly not the schools I attended. Definitely not the financial advisors I later hired. I had to discover it through years of confusion, pain, and quiet suffering before it finally revealed itself.

I was taught to measure everything — value, prices, wealth, success — in US dollars. Fiat paper money. That was the only lens I was ever given. So when I exited my first company and became the first millionaire in my family, I measured my success in dollars. That’s all I knew. And what I believed would be enough for the rest of my life in actuality couldn’t last more than 15 years for the decent cost of living I felt I earned.

I couldn’t figure out why. I grew up frugal, borderline stingy. My single mom taught me well about saving, and I did quite proudly. But it was just in dollars. So it took me some time and confusion to understand it wasn’t my spending that sparked my fears of not having enough. Something else was happening, and I was in frustrated, confused, and lost.

After my first company exit and earning millionaire status at 27, the first thing I did was hire a wealth manager, hand them all my money, and outsource the responsibility entirely. Out of pure naivety. Little did I soon come to understand: it made me feel powerless. Disheartened I told myself I wasn’t literate or adequate enough to manage my own wealth. And for six more years, I stayed in that position of disempowerment by outsourcing not just the management of my money but the understanding of it as well.

It took six years of that suffering before I finally decided to take it into my own hands and self-teach myself. Little did I know it would be 2 years before you were born. I believe there is a greater meaning for that I am currently listening for.

When I started studying, the first thing that broke open was this: I saw a visual of housing real estate priced in dollars always going up in what looked like value. “It will always go up and thus a very safe invesment,” your grandmother would tell me. But when I saw that same housing priced in Bitcoin, it was going down.

I then saw another chart showing the strong correlation between money printing and the growth of the stock market, almost one to one. But when the stock market was measured in Bitcoin instead of dollars, it was going significantly down too. Not the illusive up and to the right that mainstream media and governments always touted. That felt like a circuit breaker moment in my brain.

That was when I understood. When the denominator is fiat US dollars, there is a very powerful illusion upheld. What looks like it’s going up in value may be right nominally, but it is not the case when you think about purchasing power.

What we think is more money is not what we actually want. What we want is more purchasing power. And the dollar, by design, erodes purchasing power over time, guaranteed, due to non-stop money printing to fund social services, wars, and bailouts.

When I first encountered this, it felt like I had found a glitch in the system. An awakening moment, this time with money. It took time to land intellectually. I had to verify it myself through my own research.

Then I had to hear if others were saying the same thing. They all were; I had just discovered it later. Reading books like The Bitcoin Standard gave me the historical depth. The fact that humanity has used many different forms of money throughout history, and that when you measure value in those previous forms, I started wondering why I lived in a moment in time that we used paper money?

When it finally clicked intellectually, it immediately hit my body. The scarcity wound I had always known in myself could finally be viewed not just as a personal and emotional wound, but also through a structural lens.

That led me to the question: how did we get to this current US dollar fiat system, and why is it still being used as the global reserve currency?

The answer I arrived at was sobering. Beyond the typical history you may have learned in other books, I want to present you my lens.

Human nature and our ego will always be tempted to manipulate for power. And what better way to gain power than by controlling a money system? Very often, undeveloped human self-awareness falls for the seduction of controlling money (to gain power) and uses every excuse to justify those means (often masked as a good deed for the public).

When I finally learned about Bitcoin as a money system of rules and not rulers — completely egoless, devoid of human fallibility that have always plagued every previous money system — that deeply landed. A fair system, governed by immutable rules protected by energy and mathematics, can finally enforce fairness for all on a level playing field. And it turns out, when you solve for that, it addresses the root cause of roughly half of the world’s biggest problems.

My son, if I could go back and tell my 20-year-old self one thing — the version of me who had just started a company and was about to spend down to $15 in his bank account — it would be this:

I was naively working for what another man could easily print with a snap of a finger. When I think about that now, I feel a deep sadness for my 20-year-old self who didn’t know better. And I feel that same sadness for the millions of people around the world who still don’t understand this — most likely because of their own financial upbringing, their own version of financial parentlessness.

That is why I’m writing this for you. So you never have to spend six years outsourcing your this important understanding. So you never have to wake up one day and realize the unit you measured your life in was a complete lie. So the denominator is something you understand before you earn your first dollar — or your first sat.

The denominator matters. Nobody taught me that. Now I’m teaching you.

If you were inspired by this chapter, you can:

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My son, I want to tell you what money felt like in the home I grew up in. Not how much there was. What it felt like, viscerally. Because that feeling shaped a lot in me: how I spent, how I saved, how I showed up in relationships financially, how I built my first company, and ultimately, why I chose Bitcoin for you.

Money felt scarce.

My parents divorced when I was two years old. My single mother raised me and my two older siblings on a single income. There were many times finances felt very tight, and there were things I wanted that simply weren’t possible. I didn’t fully understand why at the time. But what I did understand was the weight my mom was carrying.

I was around eight years old when I saw her crying by herself by the staircase, trying to hide it from us. I went up to her and naively asked what was going on. She told me there was just a lot of pressure, specifically financial, to support everything. What I understand today is she was feeling the full pressure of financially providing for three children alone, in the wake of a volatile divorce. That moment is still a ‘core money memory’ inked inside my heart. I could feel her pain, and I could feel her heart of service, wanting to provide for us despite everything she was going through.

But something else happened in that moment that I didn’t connect the dots until much later. A seed got planted. A scarcity seed. Without her intention, the fear she was carrying passed on to me. From that point, I became very financially conservative. I cut back. I hoarded money. I developed an unconscious belief that there would never be enough. It was a survival mechanism in scarcity mindset.

Money was also invisible in our home. It wasn’t talked about much. I was encouraged to save and earn an allowance, which I’m grateful for. But the deeper concepts around how to think about spending, what’s worth value, how to have a healthy relationship with money were completely absent. Not because my mom was intentionally withholding. I just don’t think she really knew much about money and money systems herself. And I don’t think her parents knew either. This is what I’ve come to call financial parentlessness: not having financial education passed down from your parents, not because of neglect or bad intentions, but because they simply didn’t have it to give.

I also knew that my father was a gambling addict. That planted a powerful story of its own — a deep aversion to squandering/gambling money. So between the scarcity from my mother and the cautionary tale of my father, my early relationship with money was built on fear, not understanding.

That scarcity seed carried into my adult life. In high school and college, I worked multiple jobs but wasn’t diligent about saving. So when I left college and started my first company at 20, it did not take long (as I didn’t have much to begin with) until I had $15 left in my bank account to fund the business. Running the company forced a certain frugality. I had no choice but to be intentional with every dollar, but it wasn’t from gained wisdom. It was survival mechanism. The scarcity was still running underneath.

Even after I exited the company and had more money than all my family combined for the first time, the wound still didn’t heal. I quickly realized I didn’t know what to do with it: how to preserve it, grow it, or manage it. I still didn’t understand money despite being a successful exited founder. So I outsourced everything to a wealth manager I had no resonance with, who invested in a collection of index funds I couldn’t explain. That felt very disempowering and made me feel stuck and lost for years.

The only thing I DID know what to do and felt safe with was I kept an excess amount of cash in a high-yield savings account because that’s exactly what my mom taught me and did very well herself: save dollars. It felt safe on the surface. But underneath, there was always a constant anxiety. Prices kept going up around me from groceries to a home purchase. The money I thought would last me a long time didn’t feel like it would.

The scarcity showed up in my romantic relationships too. I believed in providing for my partner and family, but there was a constant wrestle between that desire and the fear that I didn’t have enough. I’d be stingy at the grocery store. I wouldn’t buy something extra because I told myself I didn’t deserve it, that I needed to save more. It created strain, this awkward tension between who I wanted to be for my loved ones and the wound that kept weighing on me with very little knowledge or understanding why.

Then in 2024, I finally started studying Bitcoin, despite hearing about it first in 2014. And what I found wasn’t just a new financial asset. It was the explanation I was yearning that fully landed.

Through consistent reading, podcasts, probably hundreds of hours of study, I was led down a path into the monetary system itself (as Bitcoin rabbit holes lead people down). I started to realize that the scarcity I was feeling wasn’t entirely a personal wound, though I take full responsibility for it and still self-examine. The other hidden part of it was structural.

During COVID, an unprecedented amount of money was printed and flooded into the system. I finally realized that the ‘expensive’ goods didn’t suddenly become higher quality to justify it's increased price. The money and cash I was so good at saving and holding in my bank account tucked away, simply lost its value at a frustrating rate.

It was being debased in the background quietly, while I followed every rule I was taught: save money, invest in index funds, keep cash stored for rainy day. I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do, taught from financial gurus to my own loved ones, and the system was eating it away quietly. Boy was that so frustrating to finally learn that and feel so behind.

As an example of my financial naivety, I remember during the COVID stock market crash in 2020, I panicked and exited the stock market at a big loss simply because I didn’t understand what was happening. I felt afraid and absolutely disempowered. That was the culmination of a lifetime of financial parentlessness: no education, no foundation, no understanding of the game I was playing. And thus the story played out in my mind that I was not fit to manage my money; I had to further rely and outsouce it to ‘the experts.’

When Bitcoin showed me what was happening behind the veil, a lot of the scarcity eased. Not all at once. But the anxiety that had been running since I was seven years old — the feeling that there would never be enough — finally had a name. And more importantly, it had a solution.

My son, I want you to understand something about my childhood and my relationship with money. The wound I carried was not born just from neglect. It was an inheritance of ignorance. Three generations deep. My grandparents didn’t know. My mother didn’t know. She’s 67 now, still working past the typical age of retirement, still keeping excess cash in a bank account that’s being debased, still absorbing the pressure in silence.

I even once gave a Bitcoin talk that she attended about fiat debasement. It still didn’t land. And I felt a combination of a quiet loss of hope due to her age and financial programming that was hardened inside her for decades and also deep empathy. Compassion for a diligent woman who has worked so hard her entire life inside a system she doesn’t know was rigged and working against her the entire time.

What I am doing with Bitcoin, with this book, with this inheritance is ending this cycle. Breaking the pattern of financial parentlessness. Replacing silence with clear and relevant financial education. Replacing ignorance with understanding, finally. Replacing scarcity with a foundation built on the hardest money ever created that I’ve purposely and intentionally saved for you throughout your whole life.

That old cycle ends with me. And a new one now starts with you.

If you were inspired by this chapter, you can:

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My son, if there was one sentence that summarizes my Bitcoin journey that I would love to pass onto you, it would be this:

Conviction cannot be borrowed from others; it can only be formed by you.

That single line is a major central learning of my entire Bitcoin journey. Everything else in this book — every chapter, every story, every lesson — is building from this profound truth I learned.

When I first started studying Bitcoin, I didn’t have much foundation in personal finance or money. I was trying to understand an entirely new form of money while also trying to understand what money is itself. And because Bitcoin has no central authority (no CEO, no ruler, no single voice), the landscape was flooded with dissenting, divisive opinions. It got noisy fast. Everyone had a take. Many of them were confident. Many of them contradicted each other. Some were tempting to follow blindly. And without a foundation of my own, I could feel myself reaching for whichever voice sounded the most sure.

That’s when I had to turn inwards and self-reflect: if no one is coming to save me and I am fully responsible for myself, then what is it going to take for me to build my own conviction, instead of just following other’s advice blindly (which I had been doing for some time)?

I started where I always start when things feel confusing and lost: my foundational moral values. Who I choose to BE based on my principles. That will guide me on what to DO (or where I contribute my time, energy, money, and myself to). From there, I will HAVE joy & peace by being in alignment.

Three emerged.

1. Truth. Before Bitcoin is a monetary network, it is a system of truth. Every transaction, every coin in existence, every rule of the protocol is verifiable by anyone, anywhere, at any time. Nothing is hidden. Nothing can be rewritten. There is no authority that can quietly change the rules in the middle of the game. And I’ll tell you this: it requires a lot of courage to pursue and stand for Truth, especially when it can be against an overwhelming majority saying otherwise. After seven years of my own spiritual and self-development journey, I had promised myself that I will always summon the courage to pursue Truth, even when my ego is fighting with every convincing argument to do otherwise. And when I saw that Bitcoin was engineered around an uncompromising commitment to that same value — that it does not bend, does not lie, does not flatter whoever is in power — I knew this was more than money. This was a moral instrument.

2. Fairness. Bitcoin does not discriminate. The rules are the same for the billionaire, for your grandmother, for a child born in a country I’ve never heard of. No one gets an early allocation. No one can print more for themselves. No one can confiscate what is properly held. To see others manipulate the old financial system to benefit themselves at the expense of others’ well-being is not something I could ever contribute to, and it’s not something I want you to accept either. Bitcoin is the first form of money in human history that enforces fairness not through trust in human institutions, but through math and code that cannot be bribed, lobbied, or coerced.

3. Radical self-responsibility. Bitcoin empowers me to take full control of my money. Full ownership. Full agency. It does not ask me to trust a bank, a custodian, a wealth manager, or a government. It hands the keys — literally — to me. And with that comes a cost: convenience. It is harder than pressing a button on an app someone else built. But with that cost comes a reward I had never experienced before I studied Bitcoin: real freedom. The freedom to choose how I live and how I transact without needing anyone’s permission. The freedom to take full responsibility for my own decisions and the consequences that come with them. Bitcoin does not let you outsource. And that is exactly why it changes you.

My values are the first thing I return to when my conviction gets questioned.

The second thing I return to is first principles.

First principles. First principles are the foundational truths of something: the bedrock facts that cannot be reduced any further and do not depend on anyone’s opinion. When you think from first principles, you stop arguing about surface-level noise like price, sentiment, headlines, who’s bullish, who’s bearish, and you return to what is actually, objectively true about the thing itself. The reason it matters is simple: when the noise is loudest, first principles are the only ground solid enough to stand on.

Bitcoin has its own set of first principles, and I want you to know them by heart. Not as slogans. As foundations.

Fixed supply of 21 million. There will never be more. No authority can change this. Scarcity in Bitcoin is not a marketing claim; it is mathematically enforced and economically incentivized by every participant in the network.

Proof-of-work. Every Bitcoin in existence was created through real energy expended in the physical world. Unlike fiat currency, Bitcoin cannot be willed into existence. It must be earned through work. That is what gives it integrity.

Decentralization. There is no central server, no central company, no central founder with a kill switch. The network runs because thousands of independent participants around the world voluntarily run it. It cannot be shut down without shutting down the internet itself (and the incentive of that happening is 0).

Immutability. Once a transaction is confirmed and buried under enough blocks, it cannot be reversed, censored, or altered. Not by me, not by a bank, not by a government. The history of Bitcoin is permanent.

Permissionless. You do not need anyone’s approval to use Bitcoin. No application, no credit check, no government ID, no gatekeeper. If you have the keys, you have the money.

Self-custody. You, and only you, can hold the private keys to your Bitcoin. This is the line that separates true ownership from IOUs. If someone else holds your keys, you do not own Bitcoin. You own a promise.

Open source. The code is public. Anyone can read it, audit it, run it, or fork it. There are no secrets, no back doors, no privileged access.

When my conviction wavers, I do not argue with the noise. I come back to these. I ask myself: has any of this changed? Is 21 million still 21 million? Is the network still running? Is proof-of-work still securing it? Can I still hold my own keys? Every time I run through these first principles, the noise collapses. The foundation is still there, and what’s happening is human emotion at play. My conviction walks back onto solid ground.

My son, I want you to do the same. When the world gets loud, and it will, return first to your values, and second to Bitcoin’s first principles. These are the two anchors that will hold you when opinions, prices, and personalities try to pull you off course.

I want to tell you about a mistake I made before I learned this, because it’s the exact mistake I’m writing this book to help you avoid.

When I exited my first company, I had earned a financial windfall. First of the family. Despite feeling successful, I felt completely powerless with it. I didn’t know how to manage it, grow it, or preserve it. So I handed it to a wealth manager I had no resonance with, and I recited a story in my mind: I’m not capable to do this work. That story sounded like humility. It was actually abdication. I was not just outsourcing the management of my money; I was outsourcing financial responsibility. I was borrowing their conviction. And it did not feel good. What pains me even more is that I see so many people around the world doing the same thing, probably unconsciously.

It was only when I started studying Bitcoin that it took me down a deep rabbit hole of what money is, the history of money, different types of money, and so on. After months, I started to feel like I FINALLY understood what I had been so oblivious to in the past. And one day soon after, I decided to take action on that knowledge and value alignment by shifting my wealth into Bitcoin. I knew I was ready when not only my conviction was forming stronger, but also that I was able to fully own my decisions and any consequences that came with this massive shift. That felt both empowering and liberating.

Funny thing was this was during a bull market, which I’ll admit made it easier. But the real test came in the bear market that followed, when the voices got loud again and I found myself questioning.

Here’s what I learned in those moments: conviction is not a one-time arrival. Conviction is formed under pressure. When the noise is loudest and confusion feels chaotic. It’s a muscle to keep working out. And the way I made it stronger, every time, was to go back to remembering my personal values I stood for (and ensuring those were absolutely true for me) and self-reflecting on Bitcoin’s fundamentals and first-principles.

Once I understood this, it reinforced the value of self-responsibility via personal agency. I am fully responsible for the financial success of my life and thus our family’s, so I get to keep building my conviction by putting in the hours, time, and work. And soon it will be your responsibility for your family.

My son, I know you will face this exact temptation. When you receive your Bitcoin inheritance and you feel unsure of what you believe, there will be voices louder, smarter, and more confident than yours telling you what to do. Some will tell you to sell. Some will tell you to outsource it to someone who “knows better” and thus give up your self-custody. And if I am not here when that moment comes, I want you to do one thing: come back to this book.

Not to follow my journey blindly. Not to borrow my conviction. But to study my process and the values, the wisdom, and the lessons I accumulated in the exact moments I was questioning myself, so you can reflect on them, get clear on what values you stand for, critical think from first-principles, and form your own firm conviction.

Because that is the only kind that holds.

Conviction cannot be borrowed from others. It can only be formed by you.

If you were inspired by this chapter, you can:

1. Start your own at Bitcoin Heirloom Book

2. Read the other chapters here

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My son,

Before you touch a single sat of your Bitcoin inheritance, I ask that you read this book. Cover to cover. Not because I don’t trust you, but because what I’m handing you is more than an asset. It’s a worldview, hopefully a profound one. And without the context of how our stack was built, why it was saved, and what it cost, you’d be inheriting coins without conviction.

I want you to know the greater why. Why I chose Bitcoin for our family. Why I saved it specifically for you. Why I believe it is a once-in-a-species discovery that, if stewarded properly, can end a financial wound that’s been carried through at least two generations before you — from your grandparents, to your mother and me, and almost to you. Almost. Because that cycle ends here, with Bitcoin.

I grew up with a single mother who didn’t have the time or capacity to teach me personal finance. Living paycheck to paycheck, she didn’t have assets to pass down. And without anyone teaching me about money and how to have a healthy relationship with it, I unconsciously absorbed a single message: go make it. Fast. At any cost.

So that’s what I did. At 20 years old, straight out of college, I started my first technology startup. For seven years I built that company, and for most of those years, I felt confused, bored, lost, and hollow. I kept waking up asking myself if this was really what life amounted to. I was doing everything I was told to do and still coming up short.

That experience taught me something I want you to carry: when a person is driven by financial scarcity — when there’s no foundation, no education, no safety net — they give up optionality. They take the first thing that pays. They optimize for survival instead of meaning. And they can spend years, even decades, building something that was never really fulfilled them in any way.

I don’t wish that for you. I can feel you have a heart of service. So what I want is for you to have the financial foundation to go pursue that — to achieve personal fulfillment in whatever you choose to serve or create, without scarcity dictating the terms. So you can choose what to work on because it matters to you, not because you have to eat. So you can can prioritize your schedule around the people you love. So you can be present with your own family the way I’ve chosen to be present with you, something I did not have the privilege growing up with a hardworking single mom trying to make ends meet.

This is what Bitcoin has already made possible for our family. And if I’m right about where it’s going, what you’ll be receiving will be a meaningful amount of financial security.

But here’s what I ask of you, my son. I ask that you don’t take it for granted. That you receive this with gratitude and deep responsibility, not entitlement. There is a difference between a child who inherits something and feels owed to, and a child who inherits something and understands the significance of it. The difference is story. The difference is knowing what it took. That’s why this Bitcoin Heirloom Book exists.

This heirloom book is our family’s Bitcoin Standard book. It’s less about financial advice nor typical Bitcoin education you’ll abundantly find elsewhere, but rather wisdom and values etched into my heart that learned through the journey I’ve personally been on with Bitcoin.

My deepest hope is that when you receive your Bitcoin inheritance, you inherit our family’s learnings alongside to properly steward it. From there, I want you to steward it onwards for your family, for your children, with the same intention it was saved for you. Bitcoin is the hardest money ever created… a once-in-a-species discovery. I am grateful to have been alive during the adoption phase, and I’m proud to have taken action for me and for you. This will take responsibility. And I want you to be ready for that.

Read this first. Then we’ll talk about the keys.

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