Win Underground Design's BTC
I can Bitcoin, and so can you!
This is a meandering post of how I discovered Bitcoin, and how you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. The intent is to get you, the reader, to reflect on how you can do the right thing for the right reasons, or maybe the right thing for the wrong reasons. You might even ponder the difficulty inherent in getting anyone to do anything for any reason.
The year was 2012. I was dating a series of deranged young women in Northern Nevada and was traveling frequently for a sales gig. I was also doing open mic standup to improve my public speaking skills. Short of being asked on the gallows: “Any last words?” standup comedy is the next worst case scenario for a public speaker.
Another uncomfortable scenario: trying to procure illicit substances out-of-network. It was spring. A friend of mine, and fellow psychedelic enthusiast, had asked me to try and find some LSD ahead of our upcoming trip across the Iberian Peninsula. I found great appeal in the idea: “Rick Steves here at the magnificent Alhambra. It’s melting!” Due my friend’s peculiar circumstances, the burden fell on me to buy the party favors.
Was it a bad idea to bring a schedule 1 drug into a foreign country? This didn’t factor into my thinking at the time. After all, an odorless dose of acid comes on a 25 mm² scrap of blotter paper. TSA are looking for smelly drugs, guns, explosives, and the deadly compound known as H₂O.
A brief digression on the history of Lysergic acid diethylamide: it is derived from the ergot fungus that grows on rye. It was first synthesized by a Swiss scientist in 1938. This Swiss science guy passed a huge supply to a Nazi science guy. The Third Reich documented its effects as part of their mind control research, and then Uncle Sam scooped up their secret sauce when Germany fell in 1945. In 1953, the CIA’s MK Ultra Program began in earnest. Acid eventually got a bad rap, but I was immunized from DEA propaganda with an incantation that I’d read back in 2007: Saying Yes.
Many of the hippie-ish people surrounding the Reno area are also psychonauts. Some are the inheritors of the spirit of the Summer of Love, but their Burning Man festival was cast out from its origins in San Francisco to a godforsaken part of the Black Rock Desert, 2 hours east of Reno. So there I was, right in the heart of the Golden West, at the crossroads between the world’s foremost psychedelic festival and the world’s seat of Hippie Power, striking out.
My Burner roommate burned so brightly that he burned out and went sober. So he was no use. His Burner friends didn’t seem to know anyone cool. The clientele at the Feisty Goat Pub were no help, and neither was anyone I talked to at a downtown rave. I’ve frequently been told that I give off cop vibes. But if I was a cop, I’d be dirty; dirty as hell, but with a heart of gold. Sell me the drugs! I won't narc, unless you cross me.
I cursed the D.A.R.E. trope that people would just randomly and openly offer you drugs all the time. Just look at this abusive false advertisement.
So, in a fit of desperation and with the trip to Europe looming, I did what any earnest 20-something would do at the time. I opened my laptop and asked the arbiter of all human knowledge: Google. Here’s how stupid my query was: “how to buy LSD online.” A number of blog posts showed up, some of which directed me to a magical place called the Silk Road. Could it be real? Could I bypass the snooty hippie cartels of Highway 80 that were holding out on me?
The Silk Road, as it turns out, was real. It could only be accessed via an encrypted browser: Tor. Transactions on the Silk Road could only be made through an encrypted currency called Bitcoin (BTC).
“What the hell is Bitcoin?” I thundered thunderously. Learning is hard, but I was determined. Picture a young man with no background or interest in computer science feverishly trying to crack the enigma of this completely foreign concept known as cryptocurrency, only taking breaks to smoke Marlboro 27s on his balcony overlooking the Walmart in Carson City.
I stumbled on a Japanese exchange known as Mt. Gox (now defunct). I exchanged some USD for BTC. Back on the Silk Road in 2012, 100 tabs of acid were going for $100 USD, or about 20 BTC at the time. In today’s dollars, that’s roughly $2,000,000 worth of LSD. Talk about inflation!
The trip (and the trips) were a grand success, but I learned thereafter that BTC is not just a simple money laundering tool. It’s a way for you to circumvent systemic fraud in money and take radical personal ownership over the means of exchange.
I still periodically shake my head at the many missed opportunities I’ve had to get into, and stay in, BTC earlier. At one point in 2018, I said that BTC was tulip mania. I have since changed my mind and started stacking modestly, but in earnest, in 2020. I am feeling OK about my BTC versus fiat currency hedge. Dollar cost averaging over 4 years, I am up about 400%. Had I been smarter with dollar cost averaging, I would have been up 5x.
Still, there’s still no better time than the present to get into BTC. Will there be volatility? For sure. If the price suddenly crashes in 2025, don’t blame me. Also, don’t sell and lock in your losses. Be patient, it will almost certainly go back up. I am asking you to do something subversive and anti-modern: maintain a monastic time preference and sovereignty over your currency.
Let’s put this prediction in a time capsule: 2-3 years from now, you conservatively stand to double your investment. I’m not saying to scrap your tax-advantaged 401K or Roth IRA or whatever, but insofar as we are forced into a retirement casino because of inflation, you might as well have some fun at the tables. For context, from 1957 to 2024, the S&P 500 has had an average annual return of about 10%, but when adjusted for inflation, the real return drops to around 6.4%. Compound interest is great, but do you really want to invest in companies that you know nothing about, some of which actively hate you and everything you stand for?
If you want to see a chart, this is the one. There are definitely some fat years in there (RIP 1994-2008). Since 1970, this is a log scale chart of the Median Home Price (Red) vs. S&P (black) vs. M2 money supply (Blue).
This analysis is not as good as
’s but you get the gist.If you aren’t doing this already, here’s an easy opportunity to set up a recurring buy.
Here are the first 10 reader’s immediate incentives:
“Like” this article (that’s it, just click the “Like” button): $10 in BTC
“Like” any other past UG article: $10 in BTC
Here are some of our faves:
Ensure a friend subscribes to this Substack: $20 in BTC
No excuses, if you have a Paypal account, you have a Bitcoin address.
I encourage you to get your coins off the exchanges ASAP and into your hardware wallet. You don’t want to get caught in a FTX-like scheme. I recommend the Arculus wallet.
I suppose this is my Luck-of-the-Irish story. Rudderlessly, I went through some discomfort and regret and came out slightly wiser. This is my epistle to you, my beloved readers, to take a modicum of sound advice, see how it plays out, and spread the Good Word.
Stand by. In the process of creating 400 sock accounts and liking all articles.
I can haz Bits coin?