What started with satoshis became a philosophy of soil.
And no, I’m not being poetic. I’m just old enough in this space to remember what it felt like when the idea of Bitcoin still smelled like dust and disobedience. Not ETFs, not points, not SEC filings or newsletters: something fragile, slightly underground, and full of untapped potential.
I’ve mentioned it before, but years ago, when Bitcoin was first making its way onto TV and into radio interviews, I was already following along, reading the very first posts online that spoke of it like a rumor passed between those who were paying attention. This was the post-2008 crash era, the time of Occupy Wall Street, when a certain kind of person started to feel that something had gone permanently wrong with the system. And even though I was there to see it unfolding, I didn’t jump in; and that, like many others, I would come to regret.
But perhaps that was part of what gave it weight: that it wasn’t immediately absorbed by the mainstream, but lingered instead in the shadowlands. That it retained its mystique, precisely because only a few people found it compelling enough to try and understand it. People talked about it without even being able to imagine how one might actually acquire any. I remember newspapers, and maybe even a few books, beginning to mention Bitcoin sometime around the mid-2010s, but I still didn’t feel drawn in. In fact, I distinctly remember a girl telling me how a guy once offered to send her Bitcoin because she’d bought him a coffee, and how hilarious she found that. I remember us laughing at how ridiculous it was. The irony, of course, is that today that coffee would be worth quite a bit.
This was back in 2013; you can check the historical price if you’re curious.
Some time after that, I had what I’d now call an early mentor, someone who kept bringing up different cryptocurrencies: which ones were promising, which ones he was holding, and how he planned to retire in Germany and live off crypto tax-free. He just kept going. I won’t lie – it bored me half to death. But that slow drip of persuasion did its job. Eventually I found myself visiting the websites he’d mentioned. I made a few wallets (their names are long gone from memory, and so are the seed phrases), and I started clicking, farming satoshis that now feel substantial in hindsight.
I claimed small rewards, converted coins, transferred tokens between wallets. I made my first crypto purchase. Then I lost interest. Then it returned. And through that cycle I eventually stumbled into Binance.
Looking back, I don’t regret it. This entire journey has led me to a kind of autonomy that fits my personality – the freedom to buy, convert, plan, or not. No pressure, no obligation. If I go a month without a transaction, so be it. (That’s never actually happened, and maybe I wouldn’t survive it, but it sounds better to pretend I would.)
The knowledge I gained through crypto began to bleed into the rest of my life. Even in TradFi, I found myself gravitating toward the same approach: one IPO, that’s it. The rest: gold, mining stocks, and essential components tied to computation. No hype, just conviction.
Same here.
I don’t care about new coins. I don’t care who launched them or what they claim. A little research reveals the truth. I’m not interested in holding dozens of flashy tokens that do nothing but paint my wallet with colors while silently dragging down the PNL. No, thank you. I couldn’t care less about short-term flips. I think in terms of years. And I treat my crypto the way someone tends a garden.
Because in a garden, you don’t just plant an invasive flower because it looks good in May. That doesn’t belong. Same with the Colorado potato beetle, or the mole. Sorry: not even the European ground squirrel gets a pass.
I’d rather grow six or seven familiar flowers, selected not because they’re trendy or rare, but because they’ve proven they can coexist. They don’t block each other’s light. They don’t choke each other’s roots.
That’s how I see a portfolio.
And a garden like that – if you take care of it – it gives back.
Thank you for reading.
