This is a 21-chapter series of a father’s Bitcoin Heirloom Book. Raw, honest, and open about his Bitcoin journey and the wisdom & values learned. To be passed down to his son to read before receiving his Bitcoin inheritance. You can read the other chapters here.
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:
Start your own at Bitcoin Heirloom Book
Read the other chapters here
Subscribe to be notified when more like this comes out