Why I Own Bitcoin: A UPS Driver’s Honest Answer

I did not come to Bitcoin as a true believer on day one. I came to it the way a lot of working people do – slowly, skeptically, and only after getting burned by the wrong things first.

I lost $4,400 on Safemoon. I watched other altcoins bleed out. I bought Bitcoin at $14,000 and panic-sold at $10,000 because I had no idea what I actually owned. My Bitcoin journey is not a straight line from zero to conviction. It is a messy, expensive education that eventually led me to one of the strongest financial convictions I have ever held.

Here is the full story, including the parts that embarrass me.

The First Time I Heard About Bitcoin

It was 2016. I first heard about Bitcoin when it was trading around $800 a coin. I did not fully understand it and I was not looking for a new investment at the time. I let it go.

In December 2017, Bitcoin ran to $17,000. That got my attention. I could not ignore it. Everyone was talking about it. The news was covering it. Coworkers were asking about it at work. I started paying attention.

I Bought It Wrong the First Time

In early 2018, Bitcoin pulled back from the $17,000 peak to around $14,000. I thought: entry point. I opened a Coinbase account and bought $400 worth. I had no framework for what I was buying. No understanding of the technology, the monetary policy, or the thesis behind it. I bought it because the number had gone up a lot and I did not want to miss it going up more.

That is not investing. That is speculation on price. There is a big difference.

Bitcoin dropped to around $10,000. I sold. I lost money on the trade. I walked away thinking Bitcoin was a risky gamble and I had gotten out before it got worse. I did not think about it seriously again for two years.

The Altcoin Mistake

COVID hit in 2020. I was in the middle of the worst personal experience of my life – going through a divorce, losing my daughters to Texas temporarily, fighting in court. But somewhere in that period, I heard that Bitcoin had hit $60,000.

I remembered I had bought Bitcoin at $14,000 and sold at $10,000. This thing was now at $60,000. I thought: this thing is not dying.

But here is where I made my second major mistake. I looked at $60,000 Bitcoin and thought: too expensive. I cannot afford a whole Bitcoin. I need to find something cheaper that could do the same thing.

This is one of the most common and most costly mistakes in crypto. People compare coin prices without thinking about market cap. The price of a single coin tells you almost nothing. What matters is price multiplied by total supply – that is market cap, and that is what you are actually buying into.

Here is the math people miss. Take a coin priced at $0.0001 with a total supply of 100 trillion tokens – which is common in these projects. For that coin to reach $1, the total market cap would have to hit $100 trillion. The entire global GDP is around $100 trillion. The US stock market alone is over $50 trillion. You are betting that a random token with no fixed supply and insider-controlled distribution reaches a valuation that rivals the entire world economy. It is not going to happen. But if you only look at the price and imagine it going from $0.0001 to $1, the gain sounds incredible. That is exactly what these projects want you to think.

I looked at cheap coins and I bought several of them. Including Safemoon.

Safemoon Sundays

Safemoon launched in 2021 and it had a community. A real one. Every Sunday, the Safemoon team put out a video – they called it Safemoon Sunday – with updates, announcements, and roadmap teases. The energy was high. The community was loud. The promises were constant.

The big promise was the Safemoon Wallet – a Safemoon branded crypto wallet that was always just around the corner. Week after week. Sunday after Sunday. Always another update. Always another delay. It eventually launched months later but it was poorly built and never delivered on what was promised. By then, most people had already lost faith and money.

The price bled. Drama happened within the team. People started leaving. The founder, John Karony, eventually went to jail. The project fell apart the way these projects do – not all at once, but slowly, and then completely.

I got out relatively early. I lost $4,400. I know people who lost far more – tens of thousands – because they stayed convinced that the next Sunday video would change things. The pattern with projects like Safemoon is always the same: a charismatic team, a passionate community, constant promises, and a product that never quite materializes.

I also bought other altcoins during this period. Same pattern, different names. Some lost 90%. Some went to zero. Safemoon was the most painful single loss but it was not the only one.

What Bitcoin Actually Is

After the altcoin losses, something shifted. I started watching Robert Breedlove on YouTube – specifically the “What is Money” series he did with Michael Saylor. Then Simply Bitcoin. Then Bitcoin Magazine. I spent hundreds of hours over 2022 listening and reading.

I read The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous. I read The Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth. I read The Fiat Standard. I read The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin. I went deep. And what I found changed how I see almost everything about money.

Here is what made Bitcoin click for me, compared to everything else I had bought:

Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million coins. That limit is enforced by code and by consensus. No single person, company, government, or committee can change it. There is no CEO who can decide to issue more. There is no board that can vote to inflate it. There is no founder whose interests I have to trust.

“It’s way easier to trust a commodity. Bitcoin is a digital commodity. It’s the hardest money ever discovered.”

Compare that to Safemoon: a founder who went to jail, a wallet that launched months late and underdelivered, Sundays full of promises that rarely materialized. Safemoon required me to trust people. Bitcoin requires me to trust math and code – things I can verify and that cannot lie to me.

“No CEO, no team, no missed earnings, no insider fraud. Just a thing.”

Why Fiat Is the Problem

Once I understood Bitcoin’s fixed supply, I started asking a different question: what is wrong with the current system?

Money is a store of energy. When I drive a tractor trailer through Pennsylvania at 3 in the morning, I am trading my time, my body, and my skill for dollars. Those dollars are supposed to store that energy – to hold value so I can use it later. That is what money is supposed to do.

But the dollar does not hold value. It leaks it. Every year, through inflation, the purchasing power of every dollar I hold decreases. The Federal Reserve creates new dollars. When more dollars exist, each existing dollar buys less. This is not a bug in the system. It is how the system works by design.

Since 1971, when Nixon closed the gold window and severed the dollar’s link to any hard asset, the dollar has lost the vast majority of its purchasing power. Things do not cost more because they got better. They cost more because the dollars used to buy them got worse.

Housing is a clear example. Homes have gone up 40% or more since COVID. Did houses get 40% better? Did the wood and concrete improve that much? No. The dollars got weaker. The house is doing what hard assets do – it is holding its real value while the dollar loses its nominal value. The house looks like it is going up. The dollar is actually going down.

My hourly wage will never keep up with real inflation. Even as UPS pays me more over time, the purchasing power of what I earn is being steadily eroded by a monetary system I have no vote in.

Think about how wars get funded. If the government raised taxes to pay for a war, people would notice. They could vote on it. They could push back. That would be the honest way to do it. Instead, governments print money. They do not need your approval. They do not need a tax hike that shows up on your paycheck. They just create dollars out of thin air and use them to fund whatever they want – for as long as they want.

The United States spent twenty years in Afghanistan. Trillions of dollars. No tax hike to fund it. No vote on whether to keep going. The money came from printing, and the cost was paid by every person holding dollars – through inflation, through rising prices, through purchasing power that quietly disappeared. The US national debt is now over $36 trillion. That debt does not sit on a government balance sheet in some abstract way. It sits on yours. Every dollar in your wallet is worth less because of it.

That is why fiat enables things that sound money never could. When money is hard – when you cannot just print more of it – governments have to make real choices. Wars become expensive in a way that voters can actually see and respond to. With fiat, the cost is hidden. It is spread across every dollar in circulation, felt slowly, blamed on supply chains or corporate greed or bad luck. The theft is real but it is invisible.

The left blames corporations. The right blames the government. Both sides think they have the answer. Meanwhile prices keep going up, the middle class keeps shrinking, and nobody in the debate is asking the one question that actually matters: what if the problem is the money itself?

Bitcoin fixes this for me personally. I cannot fix the government. I cannot stop the printing. But I can choose to store my labor in something they cannot inflate. Whatever percentage of Bitcoin I own today is the same percentage I will own tomorrow. Nobody can print more.

That idea connects to something Jeff Booth argues in The Price of Tomorrow. Technology is deflationary by nature – it makes things cheaper and better over time. We should be living in a world of falling prices and increasing prosperity. Instead we see rising prices, because the monetary system is constantly fighting against that natural deflation by printing money. The rich benefit because they hold assets. Workers who hold dollars get robbed slowly. Bitcoin puts workers on the same side as the asset holders – for the first time with a monetary asset that has a hard cap. There can be an infinite number of dollars. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin. That is the difference.

“Money is a store of my energy. Our life’s energy is being stolen from us.”

Bitcoin fixes this. 21 million coins. No one can print more. Your stored energy stays stored.

How I Buy and Hold It

In 2022, I started buying Bitcoin consistently. By consistently, I mean I dollar-cost averaged – bought fixed amounts on a regular schedule regardless of price. Bitcoin went from around $40,000 at the start of 2022 all the way down to $16,000 by the end of that year. I bought through all of it. I bought fixed dollar amounts on a regular schedule. At lower prices, that same dollar amount bought more Bitcoin – that is the math behind dollar-cost averaging.

And I never stopped. I kept buying on the way back up – through $30,000, $50,000, $80,000, all the way up to $115,000. I still buy today. Some people look at the price and think they missed it. I think it is still cheap.

Here is why. Gold has a market cap of roughly $20 trillion. Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million coins and is a superior store of value in almost every measurable way – harder to confiscate, easier to transport, verifiable, divisible, and unseizable if held in self custody. If Bitcoin ever reaches the same market cap as gold, the price per coin would be over $1 million. We are nowhere near that. At current prices, I consider every purchase a discount.

For self custody, I use a Trezor hardware wallet. Trezor is open source – you can audit the code yourself. I specifically chose Trezor over Ledger because Ledger had a customer data breach that exposed user information. For a hardware wallet, that matters. Coldcard is another option I respect. The principle is simple: “Not your keys, not your coins.” If you hold Bitcoin on an exchange and the exchange goes under, you may lose access. Self custody means you hold the keys. You are the bank.

In my 401k, I cannot hold Bitcoin directly. So I hold IBIT – the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF, which uses Coinbase as custodian – and FBTC – the Fidelity Bitcoin ETF, which uses Fidelity’s own custody. I hold both intentionally. Different custodians means different counterparty risk. If something happened to one custodian, the other is separate.

I also hold some Bitcoin treasury company exposure: MSTR and ASST. These are companies that hold large amounts of Bitcoin on their balance sheets. Owning their stock gives Bitcoin exposure inside a regular brokerage account.

I also run a small Bitcoin home miner. It does not make me rich. It is for learning, for fun, and for a few extra sats over time. Running a miner means you understand the network better at a practical level.

What I Know Now

By the time my divorce was finalized in 2020, the total I had paid out came to $130,000. I had worked 60-hour weeks. I had budgeted every dollar with an app. I had done everything right by the traditional playbook. And I still ended up starting over.

That experience was the moment the question changed for me. Not “how do I save more?” but “what am I actually saving into?” I had saved dollars. Dollars that got split in a legal process. Dollars that lose purchasing power every year regardless of what I do.

I had a need to know. That is a phrase Michael Saylor uses – you do not get Bitcoin until you need to. The divorce and the fresh start gave me that need. I started asking the hard questions: why is the money I earn worth less over time? Who benefits from that? What can I do about it?

Bitcoin is my answer. Not because someone told me to buy it. Because I spent hundreds of hours learning why the problem it solves is real and why no other solution has worked as well.

“Bitcoin represents hope. The ability to store your hard work for a better tomorrow. To transact without being censored. To live without permission.”

Bitcoin has played a major role in rebuilding what I lost. I am not writing this to brag or to tell you to do what I did. I am writing it because the question I was asking – why is my labor losing value – is a question every working person should be asking.

“Bitcoin is the hurdle rate. If you can’t beat Bitcoin, you gotta buy Bitcoin.”

Real estate is a great asset. I love the idea of owning property. But real estate has taxes, maintenance, management costs, and you cannot move it. Buying a home is not my immediate priority. My focus is on building my Bitcoin position first. When I do buy, I want to do it without liquidating assets I believe in. The concept of borrowing against Bitcoin rather than selling it – using it as collateral instead of spending it – is something I am actively researching. The rich do not sell their assets. They borrow against them. That is the play.

“The rich keep assets forever. Make inflation your friend. Hold hard assets.”

My wife believes in Bitcoin and in what it represents. We are building toward the same vision: a family that holds hard assets, that does not get robbed slowly by inflation, that has options because of the choices we make now.

I am passionate about helping people reach their financial goals and not getting stolen from. That is why I love Bitcoin. Not because the number goes up – though it has. Because it is the first honest money I have ever found. A fixed supply. No manipulation. No printing. Just a thing that exists, with rules that cannot be changed by people in a room I was never invited into.

If you have questions about how to get started, read The Bitcoin Standard first. Then come back here.