Bitcoin as Philosophy and as Asset

Somewhere between 2011 and 2013, I was twenty-something years old and certain I understood the internet. A friend told me about this digital money that could buy illegal things on the dark web—a detail that sparked curiosity but also triggered immediate dismissal. My young mind filed it under “another dumb trend,” the kind that gets hyped for six months and vanishes. We downloaded mining software anyway. With my mediocre GPU grinding through the night, I managed to mine about 0.2 Bitcoin in a couple of evenings. It felt like Monopoly money—worthless tokens from a game nobody serious was playing.

What did we do with this fortune? The most rational thing two bored college kids could think of: we gambled it away on a dark web roulette site with a 0.05 BTC buy-in. We lost. The coins disappeared into the digital void, and with them, any lingering interest I had. We briefly discussed mining through university servers we had access to, but the motivation was close to zero. It was all just noise.

Then 2018 happened. A friend got scammed—someone demanded Bitcoin as payment. Hearing the word again, I looked it up and discovered that the “worthless” thing I’d mined years in the past had peaked at $20,000 in 2017. That number didn’t make me angry about what I’d lost. It made me curious about what I’d missed. I started reading—about the 2017 bull run, about Satoshi Nakamoto, about decentralization and the promise to cut out the middlemen. I read about “Be Your Own Bank.” And in Greece, after the capital controls of 2015, that phrase hit differently.

On my birthday, July 21, 2018, I bought my first €200 worth of Bitcoin. Not to get rich. To understand.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice. These are my personal opinions and experiences with Bitcoin. Always do your own research and consider your own financial situation before making any investment decisions.

The Moment You Stop Trusting the System

The Greek economic crisis taught an entire generation something most people never learn: your money isn’t really yours when someone else controls the vault. In 2015, the banks closed. ATM withdrawals were capped. Savings were frozen. The government decided how much of your own money you could access. It wasn’t theft in the traditional sense—it was control. And control, dressed in the language of necessity, feels just as suffocating.

Bitcoin’s core message—digital sovereignty through cryptographic self-custody—resonated because I’d watched the alternative fail. The idea that I could hold value in a form no bank could freeze, no government could confiscate, and no institution could debase was not abstract philosophy. It was a practical escape hatch from a system that had proven itself untrustworthy.

Freedom, in Bitcoin’s context, doesn’t mean anarchy. It means responsibility. When you hold your private keys, you are the bank. There’s no customer service line, no insurance, no bailout. If you lose your keys, your Bitcoin is gone forever. This terrifies most people. But for those who’ve lived through capital controls or hyperinflation, that tradeoff—total responsibility for total sovereignty—feels like a fair deal.

As Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in Bitcoin’s genesis block: “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work…the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust”. Bitcoin doesn’t ask you to trust a central bank, a government, or even a company. It asks you to trust math, cryptography, and a distributed network of over 17,000 nodes enforcing the same rules.

It’s Not Anti-System. It’s a Better System.

People assume Bitcoin is rebellious—a middle finger to banks and governments. I used to think that too. But the longer I’ve held Bitcoin, the more I realize it’s not about tearing down the system. It’s about offering an alternative to a system that was never designed to serve individuals.

The traditional financial system runs on intermediaries. Banks, clearinghouses, payment processors—each one extracting fees, imposing delays, and maintaining the power to say “no.” They control access. They control liquidity. They control the narrative. And every time a government prints more money to cover deficits, they dilute the value of every dollar or euro, or pound you hold.

Bitcoin removes the middleman. It’s peer-to-peer electronic cash, as the original whitepaper promised. It’s a public ledger maintained by thousands of independent participants who have no allegiance to each other except the incentive to keep the network secure. No single entity can change the monetary policy. No government can inflate the supply. The 21 million cap is hardcoded into the protocol, enforced by consensus.

That’s not rebellion. That’s engineering. It’s designing a system where the rules are transparent, immutable, and enforced by code rather than bureaucrats. As Balaji Srinivasan puts it: “No matter what political faction you’re in, everyone agrees on the raw fact of who owns what amount of BTC”. Bitcoin is politically neutral property. It doesn’t care about your ideology—it just works.

Over time, I’ve come to accept that Bitcoin won’t replace the traditional financial system overnight. Maybe it never will. But it doesn’t need to. It can enhance it—force it to compete, to innovate, to justify why we should trust institutions that have repeatedly failed us.

Between Faith and Logic

Investing in Bitcoin requires both. The logic is straightforward: finite supply, growing demand, network effects that dwarf any competitor, institutional adoption accelerating year over year. The faith is harder to articulate—it’s the belief that a decentralized system, despite its flaws, represents something worth preserving in a world increasingly centralized by tech giants and state surveillance.

I’ve done both DCA (dollar-cost averaging) and active trading. Guess which one worked better? DCA and HODL, by a mile. Trading is seductive—it feels like control, like you’re outsmarting the market. But Bitcoin’s volatility makes fools of traders. The price swings 50-100% annually. You can’t time that. What you can do is acknowledge that over the long term, the fundamentals remain intact: scarcity, decentralization, security.

People ask me if it’s too late to buy Bitcoin. In 2025, when most people still don’t own a single satoshi, when institutions are just beginning to allocate serious capital, when the next generation will grow up with Bitcoin and AI as default assumptions—no, it’s not too late. The question isn’t whether Bitcoin will succeed. It’s whether you’re willing to hold through the volatility to find out.

And then there’s the institutional question. BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF became the fastest in history to reach $50 billion in assets. The same BlackRock that represents everything Bitcoin was supposed to disrupt. Senator Cynthia Lummis proposes a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve for the U.S. government. The system is embracing the anti-system coin.

Part of me sees this as validation. If the smartest institutional investors in the world are allocating billions to Bitcoin, they’ve done the homework. They’ve run the models. They believe. Another part of me wonders: when the system adopts the tool designed to bypass the system, has Bitcoin won—or has it been co-opted?

The tension is real. Bitcoin’s philosophy is decentralization, self-custody, individual sovereignty. But 61.4% of Bitcoin ETF assets are controlled by BlackRock. Most new holders enter through custodial platforms where they never touch their private keys. Convenience is winning over sovereignty, at least for now.

I don’t have a clean answer. Maybe both can coexist. Maybe the hardcore Bitcoin maximalists will self-custody while the mainstream treats it like digital gold in a vault. Maybe that’s fine. The protocol remains decentralized—17,000+ nodes still enforce the rules. No institution can change Bitcoin’s 21 million cap, no matter how many coins they hold.

From Hacker Tool to Pop Culture Symbol

In 2013, Bitcoin was the dark web’s currency of choice. Media coverage centered on Silk Road, drugs, weapons, money laundering. When Silk Road was shut down and the price crashed, the narrative was simple: Bitcoin is a failed experiment for criminals.

Then Mt. Gox collapsed in 2014, losing 850,000 BTC. The media declared it a Ponzi scheme. The public moved on.

But Bitcoin didn’t die. It survived because the protocol kept running, because miners kept mining, because developers kept building. By 2017, the narrative shifted to “digital gold”—a store of value rather than a medium of exchange. CME launched Bitcoin futures. Square and PayPal entered the market. It was no longer just a hacker tool.

2020 brought the corporate treasury revolution. MicroStrategy bought billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. Tesla followed. El Salvador adopted it as legal tender. By 2024, when the SEC approved Bitcoin ETFs, the transformation was complete: Bitcoin had gone mainstream.

But mainstream doesn’t mean understood. In 2025, 21% of American adults own cryptocurrency, but only 1% use it for purchases. Most people treat it as speculation, not philosophy. They buy because the price is rising, not because they believe in decentralization.

The meme culture around Bitcoin—HODL, “number go up,” laser eyes on Twitter—reflects this dual reality. It’s part ideology, part absurdism, part genuine belief in a better monetary system. Bitcoin has become a symbol in pop culture, referenced in TV shows and news segments that once dismissed it as a joke.

The dark web association is fading. Illicit Bitcoin transactions dropped to $2 billion in 2024, down from $2.3 billion in 2023. Criminals have largely moved to privacy coins like Monero. Bitcoin’s transparency—every transaction recorded on a public ledger—makes it a terrible tool for crime at scale.

What remains is a global movement. A generation that distrusts central banks. A philosophy that values autonomy over convenience. A technology that might, just might, change how we think about money.

What Value Really Means

The price of Bitcoin changes every second. The value changes lives.

Price is what traders obsess over—charts, patterns, predictions. In 2024, Bitcoin swung from $45,200 to $134,700, a 198% increase in a single year. Wild. Exhilarating. Terrifying. The volatility scares away institutions that need stability. It attracts speculators who chase momentum.

But value is different. Value is what Bitcoin enables: financial sovereignty in authoritarian regimes, a hedge against inflation in countries with collapsing currencies, a savings technology for people without access to stable banking. Value is the knowledge that no government can print more Bitcoin, no CEO can dilute your holdings, no bank can freeze your account.

I don’t believe in Bitcoin because it’s flawless. I believe in it because it exposes how flawed everything else is.

Fiat currencies are backed by governments that print money whenever it’s politically convenient, devaluing savings and punishing savers. The dollar, the euro, every national currency—they’re all controlled by central banks that answer to political pressures, not economic logic. The U.S. government pays over $1 trillion annually just in interest on its debt. That’s not sustainable. That’s a slow-motion crisis.

Gold is a better store of value than fiat, but it’s heavy, hard to transport, impossible to divide for small transactions. Bitcoin solves those problems. It’s digital, divisible to 100 million satoshis, and can be sent anywhere in the world in minutes.

Fidelity Digital Assets calls Bitcoin an “aspirational store of value”—it has the properties of a store of value even if it hasn’t been widely accepted as one yet. Wellington Management research shows Bitcoin is “one of the only assets that has outperformed the G4 central bank balance sheets since 2008”. That’s not speculation. That’s data.

But here’s the tension: if most people treat Bitcoin as a speculative investment rather than a savings technology, does it fulfill its philosophical mission? If institutions control the majority of supply through ETFs, does decentralization still matter?

I think the answer is: yes, but differently than we imagined. Bitcoin’s philosophy was always about individual choice. If someone chooses convenience over self-custody, that’s their right. The option for sovereignty remains. The protocol doesn’t force you to be free—it gives you the tools to be free if you want them.

The Philosophy I Carry

If I had to write a manifesto—three bullet points on why I believe—it would be this:

I don’t trust fiat money. Central banks have a monopoly on currency issuance, and they’ve abused it repeatedly throughout history. Inflation is a hidden tax on savings. Bitcoin’s 21 million cap is a promise that can’t be broken by politics.

I dislike banks and their monopoly. They profit from gatekeeping access to financial services. They charge fees for holding your money, impose arbitrary limits, and can freeze your funds without explanation. Bitcoin eliminates the middleman.

I believe in global, permissionless money. Bitcoin doesn’t care about borders, passports, or credit scores. It’s a store of value you can hold and transfer anywhere, anytime, forever.

That’s the philosophy. The price is secondary. Bitcoin could be worth $10,000 or $1,000,000—the fundamentals don’t change. Scarcity. Decentralization. Security. Sovereignty.

Am I a Bitcoin maximalist? Slowly, yes. Over the years, my conviction has only strengthened. I’ve watched altcoins rise and fall. I’ve seen projects promise the world and deliver nothing. Bitcoin remains. It’s boring. It’s slow to change. And that’s exactly why it works.

I think about the next generation—those who will grow up with Bitcoin as a given, not a novelty. For them, asking “why would you use Bitcoin?” will sound as strange as asking why you’d use the internet. It will just be infrastructure. A tool. A choice.

When the system embraced the anti-system coin, we entered Phase 2. I don’t know where it goes from here. But I know this: the option to opt out—to self-custody, to save in sound money, to escape the debasement cycle—is worth preserving.

That’s the value. That’s what changes lives. The price is just noise.