Let me tell you what happened to my crypto.
I bought Bitcoin around 2017. Also IOTA. TRON. XRP. I got a hardware wallet — a Ledger — to store it safely. Very responsible.
I have no idea where that Ledger is.
Somewhere in my apartment, probably. The coins are still on it. I haven't checked.
That's my crypto story.
I also ran a trading bot for two years.
A friend had built a system. Automated. Based on chart patterns. It bought and sold automatically. Every day: gains.
It needed daily maintenance though. Monitoring. Adjustments. When the market turned, it didn't adapt.
I didn't maintain it. Too busy running my agency.
It blew up. I sold everything and closed it.
What I learned: I am not a trader. I don't want to watch charts. I don't want to optimize systems daily. That's not where my attention should go.
The same friend who built the bot? He has a wider crypto history.
He knows someone who mined Bitcoin early. Classic setup: computer farm, tapping the neighbor's electricity grid. His colleague took the coins and disappeared with the hard drive.
My friend didn't quit. He kept going. Put everything he had into Bitcoin. Every single thing.
He's now a privatier in Portugal. Runs a German fry shop by the beach.
That's also a crypto story.
Michael Saylor I find fascinating — but not for the reasons you might think.
Before Bitcoin, he ran MicroStrategy. Business intelligence software. Founded 1989. Went public in 1998. Then the SEC charged him with accounting fraud in 2000. Stock dropped 91%.
He spent the next 20 years rebuilding a mid-tier software company.
Then in 2020: all-in on Bitcoin. The company became a Bitcoin holding vehicle. He went from a relatively obscure CEO to a global Bitcoin evangelist.
Net worth: billionaire.
Was that genius? Conviction? A calculated last move when his software business had nowhere to go?
The man has an SEC fraud settlement on his record and is now a global moral authority on hard money. You have to at least respect the arc.
The Saylor move is a master class in personal wealth asymmetry. If it works: billionaire. If it fails: the company fails, not him personally. The downside was already priced in. The upside was unlimited.
That's not a Bitcoin argument. That's a power law argument.
Here's my honest take on Bitcoin itself:
I don't understand where the value comes from. Neither does anyone else — they just believe harder.
Nobody knows who built it. Satoshi Nakamoto is a mystery. Maybe a person. Maybe a group. Maybe something stranger.
I see a massive FOMO playground. Speculation dressed as revolution.
The use cases people cite: store of value, digital gold, machine-to-machine payments. Maybe. But I've never seen it actually work at scale. ETF approval helps. But approval isn't adoption.
Will states really let a currency they don't control become dominant? I doubt it.
Will AI agents in the future pay each other in Bitcoin? Maybe. But the biggest companies are already building their own tokens. Meta tried it years ago with Libra — it failed then, but the instinct was right. They'll try again. When they do, the Bitcoin-as-settlement-layer argument has a problem.
Could it all be nothing?
Not a deliberate scam. More like: something that started as a technical experiment between a few nerds. And then it escaped the lab. And then it became a mass phenomenon. And now it has its own momentum.
FTX was one of the biggest crypto exchanges in the world. It was fraud. It collapsed overnight.
Wirecard. Enron. OneCoin. Things that looked real until they didn't.
I'm not saying Bitcoin is that.
I'm saying: I can't rule it out.
And yet.
Bitcoin sits in my portfolio. As a hedge. 3–5%.
I know that's contradictory. I just told you I don't understand it, don't trust the use cases, and lost my Ledger.
Honestly? I'm considering selling it. Concentrating fully on my AI conviction instead. Simplify the system. No hedge that I don't fully believe in.
There it is again. My sell move. The same pattern as Tesla, Netflix, Palantir.
Maybe that's exactly why I should hold it.
Or maybe I'm just not immune to the same FOMO I just described.
I'm not a financial advisor. This isn't advice. These are the honest thoughts of someone with a lost Ledger and no regrets.