Why We Bitcoin

It's Bitcoin Tuesday!—Jul. 14, 2026

Jul 14, 2026

Why We Bitcoin

Bear markets have a way of making everyone forget why they showed up.

The headlines get quieter. The excitement disappears. Capital chases the next hot thing. AI. Space. Robotics. Whatever Wall Street wants this week.

Bitcoin becomes “boring” again.

And that’s exactly when it’s worth asking a simple question.

Why are we here in the first place?

Not why we think the price will go up.

Not why institutions are buying.

Not why ETFs exist.

Why Bitcoin?

I’ve been asking myself that question for over thirteen years now. Every cycle I’ve found myself arriving at the same answer.

Bitcoin isn’t just another investment. It’s one of the most important technological breakthroughs of the internet era.

Before Bitcoin

The internet didn’t just appear one day as the open platform we know today. In its earliest days there was a real debate over who would ultimately control it.

Would it become an extension of governments and large corporations? Or would it remain a place where individuals could communicate, build, create and exchange information freely?

A small group of programmers, engineers, mathematicians and cryptographers spent decades fighting for the latter. They became known as the cypherpunks.

Long before Bitcoin existed, they understood something most people didn’t. Privacy wasn’t about having something to hide. It was about preserving individual freedom in an increasingly digital world.

People like David Chaum imagined digital cash decades before it was practical. Phil Zimmermann developed Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), technology that laid the foundation for encrypted communication still used across many of today’s most popular messaging platforms. Adam Back developed Hashcash. Wei Dai proposed b-money. Nick Szabo described Bit Gold. Hal Finney advanced cryptography for years before becoming the recipient of the first-ever Bitcoin transaction.

Each solved part of the puzzle.

None solved all of it.

The Missing Piece

The internet could move information around the globe instantly.

It couldn’t move money.

Digital money before Bitcoin always required someone in the middle.

A bank.
A payment processor.
A government.
A corporation.

Even the money sitting in your banking app isn’t actually money you possess. It’s an IOU—a promise that your financial institution owes you those dollars.

Bitcoin changed that.

For the first time in history, people could own digital money directly.

No intermediary.
No central issuer.
No permission.

No one capable of creating more units because it became politically convenient. Just verifiable ownership secured by math and an open network anyone could inspect.

Perhaps Bitcoin’s greatest technical achievement was solving the double-spend problem without relying on a trusted third party. In doing so, it created something many believed was impossible: scarce digital property.

Digital cash had finally arrived.

A Timely Beginning

Bitcoin also arrived at precisely the right moment.

The Genesis Block—the first block ever mined—contains a message that wasn’t included by accident:

“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

It wasn’t simply a timestamp.
It was a mission statement.

The global financial crisis had exposed just how fragile a debt-based monetary system could become. Banks failed. Governments intervened. Central banks expanded the money supply on an unprecedented scale.

Since Bitcoin launched in January 2009, roughly two-thirds of today’s U.S. M2 money supply has been created.

Debt has continued to build upon debt.

Inflation has become a permanent feature of modern economies rather than a temporary exception. Meanwhile, most people simply try to keep up.

They work.
They collect a paycheck.
They pay bills.
They finance cars.
They take on mortgages.

They watch groceries, housing, insurance and education become more expensive every year without ever asking the question beneath it all:

What is money?

Most of us were never taught to ask.

Bitcoin forces us to.

Bitcoin is special.

You need to protect it.

10 Rules to Not Lose Bitcoin

Why We Bitcoin

This bear market won’t last forever.

None of them do.

But bear markets serve another purpose.

They strip away the speculation.

When prices stop going up every day, you’re left with only one thing:

Conviction.

Mine has never come from predicting the next cycle top. It comes from understanding what Bitcoin actually is. Bitcoin isn’t trying to replace every financial institution overnight. It isn’t promising perfection. It doesn’t eliminate volatility.

What it offers is something much simpler—and much more profound. The ability for anyone, anywhere on Earth, to own money that is actually theirs.

Money that can be independently verified. Money that isn’t someone else’s liability. Money that cannot be inflated because a committee voted for it. Money that exists outside political borders and corporate control.

That idea was worth fighting for when the cypherpunks defended an open internet. It’s worth fighting for today. The world has changed dramatically over the past two decades, but their central idea hasn’t.

Individuals deserve sovereignty in the digital world. Bitcoin extended that principle to money. That’s why we’re still here. That’s why we’re patient in bear markets.

That’s why we continue stacking when others lose interest. And that’s why, thirteen years after buying my first bitcoin, I remain as convinced as ever.

Because Bitcoin isn’t simply an asset. It may be humanity’s first truly digital native form of money. The market hasn’t fully grasped what that means yet.

One day, it might.

That is why we Bitcoin.

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