Open Letter To Iowa Representatives about Bitcoin

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I have written the below open letter to my Iowa representatives about Bitcoin. I have also emailed it to them with a link to this post so they are able to get to the links below. I encourage you to go to your own representatives websites and email them this also.

I am writing this letter to you directly, you can also find the text below with links to specific articles I recommend you read. https://mywheellife.com/2023/12/18/open-letter-to-iowa-representatives-about-bitcoin/

Senator Grassley, Senator Ernst and Congresswoman Hinson

I am writing to you concerning Bitcoin in general and Senator Elizabeth Warren’s “Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act” in particular. 

I would like to first refer you to the video “Elizabeth Warren’s Anti-Bitcoin Agenda with Perianne Boring” on the “What Bitcoin Did” podcast. 

“Warren’s bill, the Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act, aims to solve a problem that no one has. It that would classify nearly all crypto industry participants — from wallet providers to miners to validators — as financial institutions, subjecting them to the onerous compliance regime of the Bank Secrecy Act. Under this bill, a teenager running a bitcoin mining rig in his basement could be subject to the same compliance burdens as JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.

But wallet providers, miners, and validators are not banks. They do not hold custody of assets. They certainly should not be collecting or storing the sensitive personal financial information of individual users of an asset. They merely provide infrastructure — the open-source software and computing power to help secure the network. Much like Microsoft, which also supplies a lot of software and cybersecurity products to financial institutions, they are not financial institutions. 

It would be impossible for the industry to comply with Warren’s requirements, and she knows this. The point of her bill is not to improve national security or stop money laundering, but to kill digital asset innovation.” – The Hill

Please also investigate Elizabeth Warren and her collusion with the banks and SEC. I am concerned she is not regulation in good faith. 

Lawyer Says Senator Elizabeth Warren Conspires With SEC Chair Gary Gensler, Violating Her Oath

I want to encourage, you, my representatives, to learn about Bitcoin and it’s many benefits.


I also want you to learn about the benefits of bitcoin mining and it’s ability to mitigate emissions. Specifically, please learn from Daniel Batten and his work into bitcoin mining reducing methane emissions. 

Flared Methane as a Sustainable Power Source for Cryptocurrency Mining

I would also like you to learn from Alex Gladstein about the human rights benefits that Bitcoin provides. He has already tried to speak to congress on this.
Human rights advocates tell Congress bitcoin is essential in countries with ‘collapsing’ currencies

As my representatives, I encourage you to learn about Bitcoin and be a champion and advocate for it. 

Sincerely

Axel Hoogland

Investing In Developing Countries

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I’ve had an interest in developing countries for years. Often this has been in the form of donations to charity. I have also personally been giving money to a couple men in Haiti for school for years.

Direct Payment of Education in Haiti

The Last Hunger Season – A Book Review

I recently visited India to visit some friends and also to attend a Business Summit for JoyCorps. 

“The JoyCorps Fellowship is a group of carefully selected, visionary leaders who operate agrarian and small manufacturing businesses in Asia’s under-resourced communities.

We offer Accelerator and Incubator services that provide business expertise, structures, encouragement and community — all vital for growing a thriving business in a challenging environment.”


I was able to meet many entrepreneurs in India and learned about their challenges in starting their businesses.

I was also able to get an advanced copy of the book The Heart of A Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied to about African Poverty, and What That Means for Human Flourishing 

by Magatte Wade due to following Magatte Wade on LinkedIn. It was very timely and I listened to this while I was in India. A lot of the challenges faced in different developing countries are all the same. 

One other organization I became aware of while I was in India is AgGrandize.They have a fund available that you can invest in. Actually making an investment in a foreign small business directly is still not nearly as easy as a donation to charity. I am going to continue learning and looking for options to make this easier. 

If anyone knows of a fund that you can invest in in monthly increments, that invests in small foreign businesses, please let me know!

If you are interested in this topic below are a few books I would recommend to learn more about investing in developing countries to help them help themselves. 

Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help, And How to Reverse It – 

by Robert D. Lupton 

The Last Hunger Season – A Book Review

The Heart of A Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied to about African Poverty, and What That Means for Human Flourishing 

by Magatte Wade

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo 

World Wage and Work

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I have been reading and thinking about money, economics, wages,fair wages, trade imbalances and business stuff for years. This is a list of links and some books that I have found interesting related to the topic. I don’t have a take away conclusion from this reading yet. 

“It is utterly clear to me that the highest priority  need of world society at the present moment is a realistic economic accounting system which will rectify, for instance, such nonsense as the fact that a top toolmaker in India, the highest paid of all craftsman, gets only as much per month for his work in India as he could earn per day for the same work if he were employed in Detroit, Michigan.  – Page 112 Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth, Buckminster Fuller

 I am sharing a few articles I’ve read the last years about various impacts of higher wages in different parts of the world. I still don’t have a big conclusion from this.

As jobs are exported slowly the world wide wage should rise, but likely America’s will fall, which is fine. 

View at Medium.com

I do share the concern that some businesses “can’t afford to pay people $15/hr” but if that is the case should they be businesses?

I mentioned that there are a lot of things that challenge starting businesses (wages/paying SS, and medicare/insurance).

I have been a big proponent that nationwide healthcare will allow smaller businesses to be more competitive with larger businesses because they should only have to compete on wages, not healthcare. This same idea came from Andrew Yang. His book “The War on Normal People” is very good, for many ideas, not just UBI.

 I like the below articles for worldwide perspectives on income and economics.

Australia = $15/hr. Less for 16-18 year olds.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-magical-world-where-mcdonalds-pays-15-an-hour-its-australia/278313/

The country allows lower pay for teenagers, and the labor deal McDonald’s struck with its employees currently pays 16-year-olds roughly US$8 an hour, not altogether different from what they’d make in the states. In an email, Greg Bamber, a professor at Australia’s Monash University who has studied labor relations in the country’s fast food industry, told me that as a result, McDonald’s relies heavily on young workers in Australia.

Jobs moved to Mexico. Seems to have worked out well for the new employees in Mexico. Seems to have “busted” the people who lost jobs in USA,

https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/gen-politics/what-happened-when-factory-jobs-moved-from-ohio-mexico/kntmqdH7H95KQBhwBHgixN/

https://jalopnik.com/gm-factory-workers-in-mexico-make-3-an-hour-and-want-a-1848855358

The reason many jobs are moved to Mexico is because the labor rates are so much cheaper there. 

Janevsille: An American Story – Book about what happened when GM plant left Janesville, WI.

These are some of the jobs that moved to mexico from the Janesville book above. 

 Haiti $5 day? – Very interesting discussing moving production based on wages.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/06/10/137064161/would-a-5-a-day-minimum-wage-make-life-better-in-haiti

Now, of course, to an American audience this seems so minor, so unbelievably reasonable, it’s hard to see how there can be any opposition: Five bucks a day? As a minimum? It’s easy to be outraged that the U.S. government wouldn’t push for a minimum of more. Who can live on five bucks a day?

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/06/10/137064161/would-a-5-a-day-minimum-wage-make-life-better-in-haiti

Haiti’s industry is focused on commodity white T-shirts for brands like Hanes. The commodity white T-shirt is one of the cheapest, easiest things in the world to make. With $500,000 you could buy a bunch of used sewing machines in Alabama or Guangzhou, rent a cement shell in some poor country, and be in business in a few weeks.

In short, Dominican textile workers have real bargaining power because they have real, globally competitive skills. I’m sure manufacturers would love to pay them $3 a day, but they can’t because the Dominicans know how to do stuff that commands a higher wage.

I have no idea what would happen if Haiti did have a $5-a-day minimum wage. But I do think it’s reasonable to assume that some factories would close and far fewer new ones would be built. Far fewer Haitians would be allowed to take that first tentative step on to the ladder of industrial development.

https://qz.com/1064679/a-new-t-shirt-sewing-robot-can-make-as-many-shirts-per-hour-as-17-factory-workers/

It looks like LOWRY sewing robot has been made into a company.

ABOUT SOFTWEAR AUTOMATION

We are an Atlanta-based advanced machine-vision and robotics startup disrupting the $1.5 trillion apparel industry. Our fully automated Sewbots enable on-demand manufacturing by moving supply chains local and closer to the customer, while creating higher quality products at comparable cost to imports from low-wage countries.

About Us

This is the future of everything. Automate as much as possible, for mass production. It is how the past has always gone and it’s the way of the future. More things will be automated. Automated things will be cheaper, or they wouldn’t be automated! Cheaper things means people can actually buy more things! Think of TV’s. In 1990 a 20” tv was relatively expensive and maybe a family had 1. Now it’s cheaper to have 3 55” tv’s. 

LA garment worker pay- Many garment workers in the USA are here illegally. The employers should be held responsible for hiring illegal immigrants. They are also taking advantage of these people. 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/la-garment-factories-investigation/

A 2016 U.S. Department of Labor investigation found pay violations in 85% of the L.A. garment shops it looked into. – How do these places stay in business? If they are investigated and found to be violating the US DOL how do they stay in business????

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/10/haitian-dominican-republic-sugarcane-immigration-poverty-rights

Vernette speaks in Haitian Creole, as he has trouble communicating in Spanish.

He arrived in the Dominican Republic “under the fence,” or irregularly, about a year ago.- It appears that illegal immigration is a problem worldwide, and they are treated poorly everywhere.

Bitcoin Doesn’t Need Anything, Bitcoin Is Already A Store Of Value

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Bitcoin is a store of value, over time.

Bitcoin doesn’t need to have a perfectly stable price over time.

Bitcoin doesn’t need to be used in daily transactions. 

Bitcoin doesn’t need to be able to be transacted in 1 second.
Bitcoin doesn’t need to cost $0.01 to send $1 billion across the world. 

Bitcoin doesn’t need to be the only money in the world, it can exist alongside government currencies, just like gold does today. 

Bitcoin doesn’t need intrinsic value

Bitcoin doesn’t need a government to give it value.

Bitcoin doesn’t need to run NFT and smart contracts on it’s base chain.

Bitcoin doesn’t need to change the maximum number of 21 million bitcoin.

Bitcoin doesn’t need BIPS (Bitcoin Improvement Protocols)!

Bitcoin needs the properties of a sound money.

It should be scarce. 

It should be divisible.

It should be transmissible.

It should be immutable. 

It should be difficult  (or impossible) to counterfeit.

It should be assayable (easy to verify it is what it says it is).


Bitcoin has all these things already. 

It just needs to be “adopted as a treasury reserve asset” to quote Michael Saylor. Meaning people just need to choose to preserve their wealth in bitcoin, over time.

People don’t need to store all their money in bitcoin. A small percentage of people in the world own gold, but it still has value.

Bitcoin doesn’t need to be used in daily transactions to have value. Gold has value but it is not used in daily transactions.

Bitcoin doesn’t need to be “legal tender” to have value. Gold has value but it is not legal tender. 

Money should only be used as money. If you give it some other use or value, it’s possible that it’s main use, as money, is twisted such that it’s monetary value gets distorted and it is no longer a good money!

I encourage you to ask questions about “What is Money?” What is the purpose of money? Why do we need money? What things does money need to do to make it useful?

Bitcoin Market Cap, How Much Could 1 Bitcoin Be Worth?

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Much of this post was taken from this tweet from  MD₿TC@MDBitcoin. I felt this information was very helpful so I wanted to share and expand on it.


Original tweet below

The Inevitable Path of #BTC 

I. Global wealth = between $400-$900T

II. Let’s say 10% of Bitcoins are lost.

III. Let’s do a conservative estimate that #BTC captures  ONLY 1% of global wealth, the value of one #Bitcoin would be? 

then imagine 5%?, 10%? 20%? 50%?  

There is no other path, accumulate as if your life depended on it. 🟠

Complete Calculations:

Available Bitcoins:

Total Bitcoin Supply: 21,000,000

Lost Bitcoins: 10% of 21,000,000 = 2,100,000

Available Bitcoins: 21,000,000 – 2,100,000 = 18,900,000

1% of Global Wealth:

Lower Bound:

1% of $400T = $4T

Value of one Bitcoin = $4T / 18,900,000 ≈ $211,640.21

Upper Bound:

1% of $900T = $9T

Value of one Bitcoin = $9T / 18,900,000 ≈ $476,190.48

5% of Global Wealth:

Lower Bound:

5% of $400T = $20T

Value of one Bitcoin = $20T / 18,900,000 ≈ $1,058,201.06

Upper Bound:

5% of $900T = $45T

Value of one Bitcoin = $45T / 18,900,000 ≈ $2,380,952.38

10% of Global Wealth:

Lower Bound:

10% of $400T = $40T

Value of one Bitcoin = $40T / 18,900,000 ≈ $2,116,402.12

Upper Bound:

10% of $900T = $90T

Value of one Bitcoin = $90T / 18,900,000 ≈ $4,761,904.76

20% of Global Wealth:

Lower Bound:

20% of $400T = $80T

Value of one Bitcoin = $80T / 18,900,000 ≈ $4,232,804.23

Upper Bound:

20% of $900T = $180T

Value of one Bitcoin = $180T / 18,900,000 ≈ $9,523,809.52

50% of Global Wealth:

Lower Bound:

50% of $400T = $200T

Value of one Bitcoin = $200T / 18,900,000 ≈ $10,582,010.58

Upper Bound:

50% of $900T = $450T

Value of one Bitcoin = $450T / 18,900,000 ≈ $23,809,523.81

Buy the quantity that you can and put it in cold storage, wait a decade and watch the inevitable path.

-End original tweet. 


There is a lot to unpack there. 

Let’s start with the basics. 

There is between $400T and $900T of wealth in the world. 

For reference at bitcoin’s current price of $26,000 and total coin maximum number of bitcoin ever of 21 million coins, bitcoin’s current market capitalization is $546 billion. This is between 0.067% and 0.13% of all the value in the world. That’s pretty small currently!

Gold has a current market capitalization of $12 trillion. 

That comes to between 1.3% -3% of all the value in the world. 

As noted above, if bitcoin was to capture 1% of the world value  it would be worth between $211k and $476k per coin. This doesn’t even get it to the same market capitalization as gold!

Lower Bound:

1% of $400T = $4T

Value of one Bitcoin = $4T / 18,900,000 ≈ $211,640.21

Upper Bound:

1% of $900T = $9T

Value of one Bitcoin = $9T / 18,900,000 ≈ $476,190.48

Since bitcoin has many features that make it more useful than gold it has a good chance of at least gaining the adoption of 1% of the store of world value. Bitcoin doesn’t have to be used for every daily transaction for it to be useful or valuable. Gold has value and it is not very useful at all for daily transactions. 

Bitcoin has multiple benefits over gold, it can be sent around the world nearly instantly, it can be broken down into very small units (1 satoshi = 0.00000001 bitcoin  which at $26k/bitcoin = $0.01 is equal to 37 satoshis) and various other benefits that bitcoin has). 

These are just a few of the reasons that I think Bitcoin will likely continue to stay around as a store of value and continue to gain adoption and grow in price and value.

How To Buy Bitcoin

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As bitcoin continues to be adopted many people will have a lot of questions. One of the main questions is probably “How do I buy Bitcoin?”

Here is the quickest and likely one of the safest ways to buy bitcoin, go to the google play store (or apple store) on your phone and download “Cash App”. 

Link your bank account. 

Click “Buy bitcoin”. 

Boom, you now own some bitcoin!

I recommend Cash App because they are a Bitcoin only company. There are many copies of Bitcoin like Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) and many others. Don’t be fooled. Only buy Bitcoin (BTC ticker symbol). Since Cash App only sells Bitcoin (BTC) this is not a problem. That is why I recommend Cashapp for starting.
Companies like Robinhood, Coinbase and others sell Bitcoin (BTC) but also sell others like Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV), Ethereum (ETH) and thousands of other cryptocurrencies. You want to buy Bitcoin (BTC) only. 

Now you can start learning about bitcoin. Luckily Cashapp has news articles about bitcoin linked in it’s app so you can read there.

You can also follow Michael Saylor on Twitter. He has a lot of great information about bitcoin. One of the best podcasts I have heard about Bitcoin is “The Saylor Series” By Robert Breedlove on the “What is Money Show”. 

Now, owning bitcoin and holding it on the Cashapp app isn’t the safest way to hold bitcoin. While Cashapp is relatively safe, there is still risk that Cashapp goes under. 

An option now is to download a hot wallet to your phone like Muun Wallet, or GreenWallet (from the company Blockstream),  also from the google play store. You can then transfer your bitcoin from Cashapp to your hot wallet, if you want. You don’t have to do this. You can keep your money on Cashapp. It’s like keeping money at a bank. Using Muun wallet is like keeping cash in a safe at your home. I would suggest learning more about wallets before you transfer your bitcoin to a wallet. I also wouldn’t buy thousands and thousands of dollars in bitcoin until you understand it more. 

Continue to learn more about Bitcoin through various articles. Don’t buy more Bitcoin than you need. You only need as much as you’ll never sell. Bitcoin is not a thing to sell. Bitcoin is a thing to buy, regardless of price.
Don’t panic sell your Bitcoin if the price goes down from $100k to $50k or even $30k again! This is the nature of bitcoin, it is volatile.

Don’t FOMO into thousands and thousands of dollars of Bitcoin unless you are ready to temporarily lose 50% or more.

Don’t invest any more into Bitcoin than you are willing to lose. While I think it will be fine, it’s always possible something wild could happen and it could go to $0 (I doubt this but keeping all possibilities open).


Welcome to Bitcoin!

Oh, and you can always contact me with Bitcoin questions!

BIPs Biggest Threat to Bitcoin

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Reply to – 

A u s t i n | Open Source Fitness

@_AustinHerbert

If #bitcoin fails, we’re fucked. But at this point, how does #bitcoin fail? one sentence ↓

My 1 sentence reply – 

Biggest threat to bitcoin is BIPs Messing with the btc code and making it not btc. BIPs should take min of 10 yrs to review/run on another chain first etc. Mostly I’m against BIPs  “Bitcoin Introduce Peril’s”

My longer reply – 

What is the point of a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Protocol)? It is to change the Bitcoin base code that is running on nodes to “improve” Bitcoin in the eyes of the people proposing the improvement. But what needs to be changed with Bitcoin?

The critical things to make Bitcoin Bitcoin are:

21 million coins which supply never increases – That already exists. 

Bitcoin needs to be able to be transferred – This is possible on the base layer. That is the whole point of bitcoin, to transfer value.

These are the only things that are important to bitcoin. Lightning network (allows very small transactions to buy a coffee, etc) is very nice and convenient. But you don’t need it for a currency or store of value. Gold has a market cap that is 10x bitcoin. No one is buying coffee with gold.

I think the Bitcoin community needs to be very skeptical of any BIPs and should really resist most BIPs aggressively. 

The necessary thing for bitcoin is adoption. From all the people I have talked to about bitcoin and money a total of 1 has really understood how money works or the value of a store of value that doesn’t have inflation as a possibility. I think people who are working on BIPs could serve bitcoin much better by teaching people about bitcoin and how it works than trying to change it and potentially destroying it.

Is Now A Good Time To Buy Bitcoin?

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Is now a good time to buy Bitcoin? I think it’s going to $10k in a few months. These are the type of things people say when I ask why they don’t own any bitcoin. 

Questions I prefer to ask them are “What is your time horizon?” What is your goal with buying this bitcoin?

If you want to double or triple your money and “get rich” when bitcoin goes to $100k and sell it then no it’s not a good time to buy bitcoin. It actually never is. That is speculation and I hate speculation, in the stock market, or in anything really. That shows you don’t understand the point of bitcoin. Bitcoin should be held forever or at least until $1 million/ coin. I pick $1 million/coin because I think once it’s worth $1 million per coin it will be much more obvious that it is a store of value.  When it’s worth that you may think “Why would I sell this for USD?” You can probably trade it directly for goods and services at that level.
If you have any plans to sell bitcoin in the short term, just don’t even buy it. 

Consider if you buy bitcoin now the downside is $26k to $0, or whatever amount you invest.

The upside is infinite, when measured in dollars.

21 million bitcoin that will ever exist, divided by 8 billion people = .002625 bitcoin per person. 

X$26,000 (current bitcoin price) = $68

So if you invest just $68 you can at least secure your equal amount of bitcoin. 

Get your fair share of btc today.

Realistically even owning 0.002625 bitcoin is more than a lot of people ever will because as we know no money is equally distributed. So the average person will likely own less. That is actually ok. Wealth inequality is the expected state since people have unequal talents and are willing to take different levels of risk.
Bitcoin is your chance to opt into a system that doesn’t reduce your wealth via inflation though!

Once you own a little bitcoin you’ll be more inclined to learn more about it. I bought it for the first time in 2017. Then got distracted by a different coin , litecoin, that was “a better bitcoin”. I lost money on litecoin but continued to learn. Eventually I came to learn the problem that bitcoin solves and why there can’t be a better bitcoin.

“If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry” – Satoshi Nakamoto ,  creator of bitcoin.


While Satoshi is probably right that he didn’t have time to try to explain it to you, I think I do. I enjoy trying to help others learn about bitcoin. Don’t hesitate to ask questions if you are genuinely interested in bitcoin!

You Probably Aren’t Saving Enough to Retire

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This is an update and expansion of “You Might Need $3 Million to Retire at Age 65”.

See disclaimer at end. There are assumptions in these calculation that inflation is 3% constantly every year.

Your investments will return 7%/year.

These tables change if either of those numbers change. But these are useful historic numbers to help people start thinking if they are in the ballpark of saving enough or not. 

In the previous post I considered how much someone my current age at the time (28), might need to retire when they are 65. I have thought about this and it’s actually quite easy to make a table so that anyone whatever age and income level they think they might need could identify how much they need to save without doing any math!

How you read the below table is:

Identify from the top row “how much yearly income you need to retire (in 2023 dollars). So if you are spending say $50,000 this year and you think you’ll continue to spend that much in retirement go to that column.

Then identify your age and the age you want to retire. 

For this example say you are 40 and you want to retire at 60.

60-40 = 20 years to retirement. So you look in the left column and go to the row “20 years to retirement”

Where the column and row intersect is how much you might need to have at that age to retire. 

So in the example, if you are 40 years old, and you want to retire in 20 years and withdraw $60,000 a year (in 2023 dollars) from your portfolio you would probably need to have saved $2.7 million dollars in 2043 dollars)

The dollars in the resulting boxes are all in the calendar year of the year you’d retire. 

So in 2043 you’d need to have $2.7 million to retire. 

The table assumes you can safely withdraw 4% of your portfolio a year. 

4% of $2.7 million is $108,000, but that $108,000 is in 2043 dollars. 

Adjusted for inflation $108,000 is worth $60,000 in 2023 dollars, which is what the top column tells you. 

I tried to make this easy since everyone knows what their current spending is. That is why the top column is in present day dollars.

The next step would be to identify how much money you have now and determine if you’ll have enough at the time you retire to reach the goal in the table above!

The table below helps with that. 

How to read this table is to sum up your investments in all your accounts today.

Ex: 401k, IRA, Brokerage account etc. 

That is the top row.

Again, look at the column to identify “how many years until you want to retire”

The resulting orange box will tell you “how much you will have in that year if you don’t invest another dollar today.”

So in the below table our 40 year old person who wants to retire in 20 years and has $600k in their 401k & IRA & any other investments  will have $2.3 million in 2043, assuming they don’t invest another dollar between today and 20 years from now. 

Now this might at first seem unhelpful because you might be thinking “but they will likely be investing more between now and then”. 

And that is true!

But what this table tells you is that you NEED to invest more to reach you $2.7 million goal from table 1 if you want to retire with your expected withdrawal of $60k a year. 

Here’s a clean table for you to identify yourself on. 

Let’s look at a different scenario:

Say you are 40 years old and think you can live on $50,000/year in 20 years when you retire.

You’d look up that you’d need $2,257,639 in the year 2043 when you retire.

If you look at table 2 you can see that if you have $600,000 invested today, and plan to retire in 20 years you’d have $2,321,811 when you retire. 

Since you need $2.2 million but your investments will grow to $2.3 million this might mean that you don’t need to invest anything else for the next 20 years! 

This idea, that you might not need to invest any more money to retire in the future is known as “CoastFI”.

You can learn more about CoastFI here. 

Now as I mentioned right at the start there are 2 assumptions in all these tables.

  1. Inflation is 3% every year. It might be more or less in the real world.
  2. Your investments will grow at a steady 7%/year. This will certainly be more or less every year. It’s easy to do math with averages though and over time the ups and downs of the market average out. 

You have to make assumptions like this when doing these types of calculations. These are based on historic averages. Every person needs to do their own calculations or work with a financial advisor to get these numbers exactly right for themselves. 

But these are good starting points to just give you a high level view if you are even close to having enough money or if you’ll need to continue investing!

For most people you are likely going to not have enough invested now that you can stop investing. But how close are you?

Are you millions of dollars away? Or hundreds of thousands? Or only thousands?

I will create another post in the future to try to help understand how much you will need to invest to reach your goal, but I thought this was a sufficiently long post for now.

Bitcoin Catalysts

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Bitcoin has a slew of catalysts on the horizon. The first three are increasing demand/buyers.

  1.  As I’ve written about before Microstrategy, the public company that owns the most bitcoin is selling $750 million worth of new stock to buy more bitcoin. 
  1. El Salvador, the first country to make bitcoin legal tender, is on their way to selling $1 billion in bitcoin bonds. $500 million will be used to buy bitcoin directly.   $500 million will be used to buy bitcoin miners. 
  1. At least 7 Bitcoin Spot ETF’s have been filed in the USA. This in itself is not new. There have been many filed in the past that have been rejected, for no good reason. The first one filed in this latest round has been pushed off by the SEC and opened for comments by the public, a delay tactic. But they can’t delay forever. They have to give a final ruling in January 2024. Many other countries around the world have bitcoin spot ETFs active. There is no good reason to not approve one. One will eventually be approved in the USA either now or later. Once that happens there will be a lot of new buyers of bitcoin. Currently it is rather difficult to buy bitcoin with many funds, 401k’s, IRA, regular brokerage account. But when you are able to buy a bitcoin spot ETF in any of those funds with money you already have in those accounts that just opens a lot more money to buy bitcoin. 

The 4th catalyst is a supply reducing catalyst. The next bitcoin halving is currently going to happen on April 17th, 2024. Bitcoin miners are rewarded for protecting the bitcoin network with “new” bitcoin. They have to sell a lot of these bitcoin to pay for their electricity costs. They currently receive 6.25 BTC per block. In April 2024 it will drop to 3.125 BTC. Since there will be less bitcoin being sold by miners, if the demand remains the same it’s likely bitcoin will appreciate in value. 

While bitcoin is very volatile it should be remembered that the goal of bitcoin is to not be volatile. It is currently volatile due to all the people speculating on its future value. Some people bought it 6 months ago and it’s doubled in price so they are selling because they have made 2x their initial money. In the long run bitcoin’s price will only go up as the value of goods grows. It will only go up with inflation. That is the end goal of bitcoin.