Unfortunately, I’m yet to be approached by either friends or family to enquire about bitcoin, I have very few friends, and my family are generally comfortable in their fiat lives. However, I often feel the need to prepare myself if the situation arises where I’m asked and I don’t do my usual, “ah, it’s just a hat” response and say nothing about bitcoin. As a result, I’m thinking through scenarios when I get asked, maybe even asked for advice and work out how to respond to people I care about, or even people I’m less bothered about, but I really don’t want to be the asshole who says; “have fun staying poor”.  As Tuur Demeester mentioned, we need to prepare ourselves mentally for when price goes crazy, so we don’t immediate start acting up with ridiculous Lambo shaped purchases but also not realise the cash to do something that will benefit you and your loved ones. We also need to prepare ourselves for the phonecalls we may receive “wen moon”. I’m not going to suggest that anyone should or should not do anything, but I’m going to try and work some things out, so that when I’m asked, I can respond in a way that is balanced, constructive and will help the person I’m speaking to make progress in their journey.

Firstly, if they say that I’m just luck to have found bitcoin before them, there are many useful quotes that can be used as a response to this, but one of my favourites has to be from Thomas Jefferson:

“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have”

Short, simple and to the point, while also bringing the idea back from success being related to some magical concept that some people have and some people don’t, that removes the individual’s agency to positively impact their lot in life.

After this, the next suggestion may be related to luck, but at least this can be measured; how early did you first hear about bitcoin? Obviously, there could be some factors that may be outside of one’s immediate control, such as whether your name was on the cypherpunk mailing list in late 2009. Saying this, very few individuals chose to act on the contribution of one of the unknown contributors (Satoshi Nakamoto) who suddenly appeared on the mailing list, so started directing resources towards the network at the start. Even those that did and accumulated large stockpiles in the early days may have not initially known what they had or may have simply lost what they accumulated (poor old James Howells is still trying to dig up a Welsh refuse site). There are also those infamous episodes where individuals were given bitcoin early on and didn’t understand what they had or were simply careless with the necessary information (Alex Jones once received 10k bitcoin from Max Keiser). Even more recently, Dave Portnoy purchased a significant amount of bitcoin, was walked through the whole process by Marty Bent, but later lost his keys, suggesting it is not sufficient to simply be earlier to bitcoin to benefit from it, but something else.

If the person you speak to mentions they are late, there are many opportunities to illustrate how being early may not have given a better outcome and even resulted in a negative outcome, “I lost so many bitcoins, I’m not touching that crap again”. After knowing that you once owned X number of bitcoin, to have then had to start again from zero would be a very difficult barrier to get over. James Howells may have been in a much better situation if he had never mined those early bitcoin, and arrive at the topic years later and began buying like most others, or started buying as soon as he realised what bitcoin was. To provide the counter argument, there is also a story of someone having their bitcoin seedphrase stolen from cloud storage (big respect to RMessitt), but rather than sitting back and complaining, instead began to accumulate once more, only this time with better security hygiene. While they may not have been able to reaccumulate what they had before, they are in a better position than if they had simply given up, attributing it to bad luck, rather than working hard. These examples suggest that it may not only be about being early, but also about something else that has allowed certain early adopters (such as Max Keiser), to both keep and continue accumulating bitcoin since.

This leads to a final type of early adopter, who may not have lost access to their bitcoin, but may be useful to helping explain to your friend or family, why luck nor timing are what they think they’re cracked up to be. If you had a family member or friend that you trusted, and they said they had bought some bitcoin and if you wanted, they would buy some for you, would this be a good, bad or indifferent thing to happen? If you didn’t get worried the first-time price dropped and sold, it might have worked out quite well for you financially if you held it for 4 or more years. However, unless you took this intervening time to investigate what you had bought (you’re likely a busy person if you’d been able to accumulate sufficient cash to throw a bit into bitcoin to make it worth your while), you may not know what you owned. As a result, rather than not selling when the price dipped (fingers crossed your friend would never have actually let you press the sell button), if the price rose considerably, you might sell some, and thought yourself very wise having maybe bought pre-2020, and then having made a humble 20x in late 2024.

From a dollar, pound, euro, yen perspective, this is very much a success, a good trade and positive profit, but from a bitcoin perspective, this is selling the best and buy a worse asset, this is ending up with fewer sats, but most importantly, this is not understanding why bitcoin. During the time you held (ignored or forgotten about), you would have missed the opportunity to explore what you had bought all those years before and why it might be of interest. If you had, you may have thought about exploring how to purchase some more, how to self-custody your bitcoin and any other bitcoin related skill you could develop, getting you to a point where when price rose, the idea of “cashing out” was not your immediate thought. In this final example, if you had chosen to sell all your bitcoin when the price rose, while you may have “made out like a bandit”, but you would also return yourself to your prior no-coiner state, ultimately only temporarily better off, until that fiat tended to zero. The questions can then be raised, what was missing from this lucky, early individual’s journey?

This will hopefully give your inquisitive yet naïve no-coiner friend a chance to take a step back, reflect on their earlier comments, and feel the warmth in their cheeks as they realise they are blushing slightly that they called you lucky (well, here’s hoping). If nothing else, these examples will help illustrate that neither luck nor timing is all it takes to benefit from bitcoin. The final example then illustrates that it isn’t only about owning bitcoin from when it is cheaper (in their mind, bitcoin is always undervalued) until the price reaches a higher level, there is something else that is important. For me, this something is being inquisitive to learn about what you own, to develop understanding and build sufficient conviction to be able to response calmly when someone you care about refers to bitcoin as a scam, a ponzi scheme or the currency of choice of child traffickers (that would be the US dollar). Conviction is also important for those moments when the fiat price may have fallen, as it did throughout 2022, so that rather than sell, you’ve continued to purchase more, in an attempt to offset the purchases you may be regretting that you made at the prior peak. If you have the conviction, you can also be comfortable that you will neither time the bottom, nor deploy all the dry powder at this time, but you’re still comfortable that you’re moving the product of your time and effort into an asset that you control, that over time will store value better than fiat currency. From listening to very close to 40 hours of podcasts a week (shout out to bitcoin Bugle) for the past 5 years (yep, that’s over 10k hours), much to the family’s annoyance, irrespective of the dollar value, it is better to hold bitcoin than anything else.

As a result, it is absolutely, definitely not about being lucky, don’t attribute to luck what I worked damn hard to accumulate! It is also not about being early. While the example above may have a much lower entry price than I ever had and my first purchase in April 2020 was only for £50, neither is important to where I am now. My average cost basis is now multiple times higher than this first purchase, but that is not the point, and this is what I’ll tell my friend or family if they ever ask the question. Yes, buy a little now, I’ll help you and hopefully you won’t lose it, but more importantly, try and answer the question of why someone would listen to 10k hours of podcasts about bitcoin? While trying to get an answer to this question, they may begin to realise for themselves that it is worthwhile working harder to learn about this asset and starting the save the value of your time and effort in it. If they are willing the build their own conviction about bitcoin, they will be able to realise that starting today is the earliest they’ll ever be able to start and if they do, maybe someone in the future will tell them they are early or lucky, and this whole process can begin again. The circle of being the “lucky” bitcoiner.

“There is no early or late, lucky or unlucky, there is only knowledge and those too proud to learn”