I can almost imagine your thoughts. You just fell down the bitcoin rabbit hole and you’re thinking:

“How the fuck am I supposed to digest all this information? How am I supposed to know which “crypto” I should invest in? Who should I listen to? When should I sell? Where should I buy?” Etc etc… Well, you’re in luck! Here’s a few truths you must discover for yourself if you want to become a strong handed, hodler of last resort, and not get shaken out of your bitcoin position.

1.) EVERYONE’S A SCAMMER

So, you just found out about bitcoin. MuCh WoW! NeW PaRaDiGmS! fAt gAiNz! 

Do yourself a favor please. Slow your roll, sit your ass down, and read “Everyone’s a scammer”. Put on the theme music. I’ll wait.

2.) HODL. DON’T TRADE.

The art of the hodl is easy, once you know why you hodl. 

In a world where insane kleptocrats make “money printer go brrr” ad infinitum, a hard capped asset that is verifiably scarce is invaluable. 

Sell bitcoins at your peril. You’ll never get 'em back.

Remember, there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin, and we know a few million have been lost.

Your future self will thank you. Keep it simple stupid. Don’t trade away your sats. A sat in the hand over two in the bush.

3.) CAN’T HODL SHITCOIN

I know. I know. Your shitcoin is different. Your shitcoin is gonna change the world. Your shitcoin is faster, moar better, moar decentralized. It’s going to $589, blah blah blah. Hate to break it to you chief: it ain’t.

Bitcoin was created with no intention of it ever being monetized. It was let loose onto the internet, and human action & free will propelled it into a trillion dollar asset, already lasting 13 years. No shitcoin can make this claim. No shitcoin is as decentralized as bitcoin. Compare bitcoin's hash power to any other bitcoin. I’ll wait. Nothing comes close.

4.) DOLLAR COST AVERAGE

I’ll assume you’re an average person that doesn’t have millions just lying around. If you by chance fit that bill - GO BALLS DEEP! What else are you gonna do? Hold dollars? Lol! But if you don’t have money lying around, you’ll need to have a disciplined capital allocation strategy into bitcoin.

Which is a fancy way of saying, buy a certain amount of bitcoin every day, week, or month, etc. Religiously. Remember your Bitcoin ABCs: Always Buy Consistently. Price doesn’t matter, just buy consistently.

So, whatever your income is, take a certain percentage of the incoming money, and put that into bitcoin. No if’s, and’s, or but’s, about it. As advised in The Richest Man in Babylon, take 10% of all money coming in, at least, and put that in bitcoin. And with the remaining 9/10th of incoming money, pay bills, live life, whatever. Trust me, it will be hard to stay at JUST 10% when you finally start understanding what bitcoin is.

5.) EXCHANGES AIN’T WALLETS

This lesson, if not initially observed, will hurt a lot of people. You should never leave your bitcoin on an exchange for long term storage. You should self custody your bitcoin ASAP. The sooner you hold those private keys, the better. You do know what a private key is, right? You know the 12 or 24 words you wrote down when you created a wallet? Google if not.

Don’t get Gox’d

Exchanges will be the first places governments, hackers, and scammers will go to extract wealth from bitcoin holders. Exchanges must play ball with authorities, and your bitcoin holdings are a stroke of the pen or a mandate away from getting taken by your government. Add to that the threats of scammers looking for easy honey pots, or straight up incompetent exchanges — your coins are not safe on an exchange for long term storage. This is still the wild west of finance.

Withdraw your coins to a wallet that you own, and can verify, and have backed up. The revolution is self custody. As long as you self custody your coins, someone has to use extreme force to extract bitcoin from you. Don’t make it easy for them. Protect yourself. Take your coins off exchanges.

6.) USE A FULL NODE

How do you know the bitcoin you just bought is the “real bitcoin” and not some fake shitcoin imitation? Your node verifies that the bitcoin you received is actually “playing by the rules of bitcoin. It traces every transaction back to the “genesis block” - the very beginning, the very first bitcoin block by Satoshi himself.

No full node means you trust you own bitcoin.

Don’t trust. Verify. Download the time chain (aka blockchain) for yourself from the beginning, and build from a solid foundation of truth. Peer into the amber heart of Bitcoin, plug into the bitcoin standard, and build.

7.) IGNORE THE PRICE

We’re all here to see NUMBER GO UP, but don’t fixate on the price. Zoom out. In time, price dips will be seen as an opportunity and price rises will feel bitter sweet. 

The only number you should focus on is how many sats are under your control, and that number should continue to go up daily, weekly, monthly and/or yearly. Zoom out! How much do you think bitcoin will be worth in 10, 20, 30 years? Then why do you care what the price is today? Stack accordingly!

We’re playing a real life game of hungry hungry hippos, and only a very small — emphasis on very small — group of people know we’re playing it.

STACK SATS & STAY HUMBLE. Remember, you don’t have enough bitcoin. Stack your balls off.

8.) KEEP ON LEARNING

You’re never finished. You never “arrive”. Whether it’s studying Austrian economics, or learning to code, or taking a deep dive under the bitcoin hood, or studying nutrition & farming — you’ll never stop learning. Bitcoin is multi-disciplined and forever changing, as well as changing the world. The world is no longer as it once was.

There’s always something to learn. There’s always something to build. Never stop learning. Never stop building. Bitcoin is a way of life.

9.) RECLAIM YOUR PRIVACY

You may or may not be aware, but privacy in today's day and age is damn near non existent. You post everything you do to social media, you post everywhere you are on the internet, you take pictures and tag all your friends. There’s even social media bulletin boards within payment apps so you can make witty comments tagged to your bank transactions. Everything is out in the open, and the information is there for anyone who wants it. But it doesn’t have to be. 

The bitcoin base layer is pseudonymous, but totally transparent. Meaning your name isn’t directly attached to your bitcoin transactions, but since it's totally open and transparent, there is a possibility of linking your real world identity to your bitcoin transactions. 

Whether you should care is entirely up to you, but I will say that there is a possibility for you to take back your privacy. Whether it’s first layer solutions like collaborated spends, or second layer solutions like the Lightning Network or Liquid, or a combination of all of them, it’s up to you to reclaim your privacy on bitcoin. But it doesn’t just stop at bitcoin. You should be using VPNs, and privacy focused email providers, privacy focused operating systems, phones, faraday bags etc. The tools are out there. You will have to put in the work to get the results, but it will be worth it in the end when you’re a sovereign sonofabish, capiche?

10.) ENJOY YOURSELF

What’s the point of FUCK YOU MONEY if you don’t say fuck you from time to time? 

Be brave. Be bold. Be a bitcoiner. 

Speak your mind, say the crazy things. If people don’t like it, fuck’em. I ain’t for everyone. But I don’t have to care. 

You can’t cancel me, bitch, cuz my money is un-fuck-with-able. We’ve seen it time and time again, that when the mob comes to cancel you, they cancel your bank accounts, and then ostracize you in public. They can’t do that if your entire wealth is in bitcoin. Think about it.

11.) FIN

I hope you enjoyed this article. The accumulated wisdom in this article has cost more than 100 million sats, easily. It cost me a personal 70 million sats, so it’s easily worth a billion sats of wisdom. Don’t take it lightly. 

WE PAID OUR DUES. You can be clever and learn from this article, from our experiences, or you can put your hand on the stove.

It’s your choice. But I’ll tell you, as someone who’s made almost every mistake possible, and only survived by stubborn persistence and dedication: at my darkest moment when I thought I almost broke and lost a small fortune of bitcoin, I wish I had this information.

Bless up brothers and sisters. The way is narrow and few follow it. I’ll see you all on the other side.

THIS ARTICLE WAS INSPIRED BY THE AWESOME BITCOINERS REPLYING TO THIS TWEET