Operation Saylor - Episode 19/120

Hi again and welcome to another episode of the Operation Saylor. This is update number 19, corresponding to January 2024.

If you are reading this for first time, you might want to check Episode 1, where my plan and details are explained. That will get you in context.

Happy new year! With this episode, we leave behind 2023 and start 2024.

Another natural year has rolled by as part of Operation Saylor. Regarding the Operation itself, it has been a rather simple and boring year: update our dear episodes, sell a bit of BTC some months, and that's it. In total, the BTC stack has decreased around 13 million sats, and I still hold 133 million. So far so good. I won't dive into the numbers: I'm planning on doing that in the second anniversary of the Operation, in July.

At the start of the year, I was hoping for 2023 to bring several things. Some have happened as planned, some didn't.

For example, I was planning on helping local merchants accept Bitcoin payments. Overall, I've definitely done that, although not 100% the way I pictured. I've had the pleasure of onboarding a few of them and help them out with both the technical and the financial bits of dealing with Bitcoin. Some are sticking to it and are fully orange pilled, which makes me extremely happy. I'm also happy because I've spent a lot more Bitcoin in 2023 than I did in 2022, which is great. Unfortunately, my Lightning node died in May, so I haven't been able to act as a service provider for merchants as I was hoping. Nevertheless, I could point them to many other great tools that I use myself. And honestly, I think it's better this way. I wouldn't want a merchant to depend on some crappy amateur node.

Another thing I hoped for when the year started was to see the both my local community and others around the world expand. The trend has been surely positive, although not as intense as I would have liked. I've seen my local community and others grow in headcount, with more people, more merchants, more events, more knowledge, more education. But not as much as I was hoping, especially for a year that has had a great financial performance, which should attract new people like flies to shit. Perhaps 2024 becomes a year of madness in terms of price rises and I finally see a horde of new people coming our way. One thing I didn't like about 2023 was how price-centric it has been. 2022 was nice and quiet on that kind of conversation, and most of the hot topics were around technical stuff being built. 2023, on the other hand, has felt like the typical year when the moon boys go loud and drown out the interesting conversations.

Finally, I was hoping to keep a low time preference attitude in 2023. I think I did. Financially and professionally, things are going great. Besides Operation Saylor, I'm also planting other little seeds that should yield great returns in the future. I've also been doing very well in the health front. I am proud to say I'm the best physical condition I've ever been at, and I'm slowly improving each month. I hope to keep the trend in 2024. Let's see how high can I go before I plateau.

Overall, I'm very happy with how 2023 went.

Now, about 2024, I'm expecting good things. In Bitcoin, I'm expecting an even more noisy year with a lot of price action, many noobs coming in and the usual bull run madness. It's not going to be pleasant to see Internet infected with that craze, and I expect to retreat from many online spaces and mostly only visit dark private corners of cyberspace that won't be plagued with the moon army. In my local community, I expect to be a bit more generous and patient with them and try to educate new people towards the good way so that the can avoid the typical rookie mistakes and start their path towards being hardened Bitcoiners.

I also hope to keep promoting free markets and people trading goods and services P2P without government involvement. This topic is increasing its importance in my brain. I'm starting to realize how much value society can unlock from returning to free markets, and Bitcoin is slowly fading into a secondary role as a simple tool to achieve it. As @Darthcoin brings up regularly, the truly important thing is not Bitcoin, but having sovereign individuals. Bitcoin is simply their weapon. No amount of state cucks owning Bitcoin (or worse, ETF IOUs) will make the world any better.

As for Operation Saylor, I look ahead another boring year ahead without any special action required. Financially, my expectations are positive: we are clearly above the Operation's entry price, and I think it will continue to be this way. So I'll just go selling a few sats here and there for the installments. As promised, I'll do a more thorough review of the performance so far in July.

On the personal level, I'm wondering how far am I from being free from having to fiat mine full time. I know that, once I reach a certain financial safety, I would like to give myself a break from fiat mining to give it a shot at certain crazy business ideas that I have around Bitcoin. Being conservative, I think it's still early for that, and I don't expect 2024 to be the year when I break free from the mine. Although, somewhere deep within, there's a small drop of wishful thinking that whispers... maybe.

Thanks for sticking around during 2023, and I wish you a great 2024. Let's all do our part to look back at 2024 as a year of achievements and success. And, as always, see you around next month.