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Bitcoin is amazing and creates a world of truth and abundance that anyone can decide to join. But once you cross to the bitcoin world, living on a bitcoin standard and so on, you realize that there's nothing better to do with your time and energy than to convert your work into bitcoin and wait.

The Investment Dilemma

The depressing part is that there is no investment or entrepreneur opportunity that has a better rewards to risk ratio compared to just HODLing. One could say that bitcoin-based entrepreneurship still makes sense in that case, but currently in such an early stage of bitcoin adoption, the main problems to be solved are related to turning fiat into bitcoin - which are usually pretty tricky and risky from a regulatory point of view.
And there are already very good solutions for those. And also for self-hosted nodes, self custody, etc. But still the biggest problem is adoption.

The Orange Pill Challenge

Are there ways to make orange pilling profitable? Then there's bitcoin privacy, which has solutions that could be made more user friendly but with huge risks of going to jail. And same goes for real freedom money enabled businesses like silk road or paid "piracy".
So it's a bit sad to realize that the best move is probably to keep a good paying tech day job and just stack hard. But it sucks that there aren't logical options of "investing" your bitcoin, as there should be once adoption settles and just grows with deflation.

The Waiting Game

Isn't Bitcoin a bit depressing? Hear me out. The very success of understanding Bitcoin's superiority creates its own constraint - knowing that the optimal strategy is simply to hold makes everything else feel suboptimal. We're in this strange interim period where the best thing to do is... wait.
47 sats \ 1 reply \ @freetx 5h
It is a paradox and its hard to know if its going to get better.
In theory, once a significant portion of the population owns bitcoin and adoption slows, then there will be better things to do with Bitcoin than just hodl it.
The community itself is torn.....there are those who are passionate that we must spend bitcoin in order for it to fulfill its vision....simultaneously there are those who don't like the idea of buying a $3.50 coffee that winds up costing $35.00 in 5 years.
Due to very clear deflationary pressures on bitcoin (ie. constant lost coins exceeding mining issuance, etc), its not clear that it will ever improve. Certainly growth will slow, but it may always compete against the best investments within a few percentage points, making it uneconomical to dispose of.
Given its inherent deflationary nature, will it ever be possible to make investments and receive income in bitcoin? I don't know.
Would you agree to a job that pays you in bitcoin with the following terms: "1 BTC per year, 20% less each year"? That requires you to believe that Bitcoin will not have any extended bear markets....likewise your employer would probably never agree to just "1 BTC per year" so its hard to see how a successful negotiation would ever happen.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @m0wer OP 5h
Bitcoin's purchasing power grows following a power law, stocks grow exponentially. So they will intersect for sure.
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I did a haiku on this a week ago.
There is no depressing paradox. Only if you measure your happiness in satoshis.
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Nice.
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29 sats \ 0 replies \ @plebpoet 3h
I'm definitely hearing you out on this. It's a little depressing seeing other people foolishly playing the game - and still, they end up with and I end up without
but at the same time, I'm super comfortable being humble. I have learned to manage my peace well in this place.
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In my opinion, saying "the optimal strategy is to hodl" is still a fiat driven mindset. At worst, you are literally only in it for the growth in fiat denominated value. At best, you are only in it for the growth of your own purchasing power down the road.
If you really were excited about bitcoin's prospects for a better financial system, you'd feel some intrinsic value and desire to participating and trying to grow the ecosystem and the community.
So, in my opinion, this "dilemma" is only a dilemma if you're only interested in fiat-denominated growth or growth of your personal purchasing power.
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30 sats \ 5 replies \ @m0wer OP 2h
Preserving purchasing power across space and time is the problem that money solves. Bitcoin does that with the nice additions of limited supply, low cost of self custody and censorship resistance.
If for chance apart from that we have the luck to be early adopters and experience a growth in purchasing power due to its expansion, even better.
Putting my salary into Bitcoin, self custodying it, running a node, running LN nodes, and sharing knowledge is something that comes naturally as the bare minimum and a nice contribution to its success.
The question of Bitcoin entrepreneurship is not so clear. For example, if I sell part of my stack to acquire or start a business, it only makes sense for the world, Bitcoin, and myself, if I expect to make even more Bitcoin than I spend from it. And there is where things get complicated.
Playing around with Bitcoin, LN, NOSTR, sure, happy to do so. But a serious commitment to an economic activity needs to be better than HODLing for it to make sense. And I haven't found such opportunity yet.
Forget about what I think or my motivation. Think about what's best for Bitcoin success better than just HODL. Which is perfectly compatible with participating to grow the ecosystem. The dilemma is that it seems that the best thing one can do for Bitcoin with their accumulated purchasing power is just HODLing. Fine. But less exciting than entrepreneurship in the new cleaned up financial system.
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So are you saying there is not enough ROI on building bitcoin apps relative to just hodling bitcoin?
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30 sats \ 3 replies \ @m0wer OP 2h
I'm curious about it! And would love to be “proved wrong”.
Boltz and SN come to mind. The question is if the profitability to risk ratio, considering the opportunity cost of the man hours put into them, exceeds hodling.
What do you think? Any data or more examples?
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I'd have to think about this some more. Maybe some examples on a spreadsheet of a few scenarios could help clarify:
  1. Working a fiat job, investing it into bitcoin and hodling
  2. Building a fiat business by spending fiat and earning fiat
  3. Building a bitcoin business by spending fiat and earning bitcoin
  4. Building a 100% bitcoin business by spending bitcoin and earning bitcion
Could project out a 20 year scenario based on different assumptions about fiat devaluation, bitcoin appreciation, opportunity cost, etc.
I don't have time to do this now, but maybe i'll return to it later!
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30 sats \ 0 replies \ @m0wer OP 1h
Sounds great!
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@remindme in 30 days
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