Tag: Money

  • HOW TO KEEP YOUR HODLER ALIVE AND WELL: A Manual of step by step procedures for the crypto noob

    You bought Bitcoin. Congratulations.

    Now you have a choice: Leave it on Coinbase like everyone else and hope nothing goes wrong, or actually own what you paid for.

    Most Bitcoin books fall into two camps: technical deep-dives written by coders for coders, or hype-filled manifestos promising you’ll retire on a beach. This isn’t either of those.

    How to Keep Your Bitcoin Alive and Well is a practical manual for regular people who bought Bitcoin for regular reasons, maybe your nephew convinced you, maybe inflation scared you, maybe you just didn’t want to miss out. Whatever brought you here, you’re holding something you don’t fully understand, and somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that’s dangerous.

    This book is your wake-up call and your repair manual.

    Inspired by John Muir’s legendary How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive and delivered with the irreverent honesty of a friend who’s done this before, this guide walks you step-by-step through taking actual ownership of your Bitcoin, from moving off exchanges to securing your seed phrase to planning for the unthinkable. Each chapter includes checkpoints. Accountability. No skipping ahead.

    You’ll learn what you actually bought, why it matters that you hold your own keys, and how to stop trusting strangers with your financial future.

    But here’s the real secret: This book isn’t just about Bitcoin. It’s about competence. Responsibility. Building the muscle of doing hard things correctly. The same skills that protect your Bitcoin will teach you to rely on yourself in a world designed to keep you dependent.

    You thought you bought an investment. You actually bought an exit door.

    This is the manual for walking through it.

  • Before Satoshi

    Before Satoshi: A Hundred Year History of Bitcoin

    paperback version

    What is the “water” you’ve been swimming in your entire life without knowing it’s there? For most people, that invisible reality is money. While we know how to earn, spend, and save it, few have spent ten minutes thinking about what money actually isBefore Satoshi explores the fundamental shift that occurred on August 15, 1971, when the dollar was severed from gold and money transformed from a neutral measurement into a policy tool managed by central banks.The Century-Long Quest for Honest Money

    Since the 1880s, a lineage of Nobel laureates, eccentric visionaries, and world-class engineers have asked a radical question: What if money measured something real? This book traces the intellectual history of “energy money,” a concept anchored to the most fundamental reality of the physical universe: energy.

    You will meet the thinkers who tried, and failed, to build this new kind of “water”:

    • The Scientists: Nobel winners Wilhelm Ostwald and Frederick Soddy, who realized that an economy ignoring the laws of thermodynamics was a “perpetual motion machine” destined for collision with physical reality.
    • The Industrialists: Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, who proposed an “energy currency” backed by the hydroelectric power of Muscle Shoals to break the control of the banking establishment and stop wars.
    • The Technocrats: A movement that sought to replace the “Price System” with Energy Certificates, offering a world of abundance at the cost of absolute technical control.
    • The Utopians: R. Buckminster Fuller, who envisioned a Global Energy Grid that would make war obsolete through physical interdependence.
    • The Academics: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and H.T. Odum, who proved that the monetary system was physically incoherent and ignored the relentless pull of entropy.

    The Final Synthesis

    Kindle Version

    Every attempt at energy money failed for over a century because each required institutional permission or political will that never materialized. From Friedrich Hayek’s call for the “denationalization of money” to the Cypherpunks’ development of the cryptographic toolkit, the pieces were slowly assembled.

    In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto finally solved the puzzle. By using proof of work to achieve consensus, Bitcoin became the first system to anchor digital scarcity to the physical cost of energy without requiring a trusted third party or anyone’s permission.Exit, Not Voice

    Before Satoshi is not a book about speculative mania; it is the story of why Bitcoin was inevitable. It argues that Bitcoin is not a petition for reform, but an Exit—a door that allows individuals to walk away from a managed fiat system and into a monetary network governed by the immutable laws of mathematics and physics.

    By the end of this journey, you will understand the hundred-year question and be able to decide for yourself: which water do you want to swim in?