Crowdstrike helped me understand bitcoin

I’ve never been a “crypto” guy. Sure I have a portfolio of the basics: Bitcoin, Eth, Solana, Doge (there’s a good story here for a future post), but I’ve never been a big believer. Back in 2014, I tried to become one. I remember buying a Christmas tree for 1 bitcoin ($120 at the time). I tried to use it as a currency (Fred Wilson paid me back for a night out with 7 bitcoin), but that’s about it. It just didn’t seem like a user-friendly experience, clunky, slow, more expensive than a credit card transaction... and the answers I would get about it didn’t make sense. Oh, you need to go to Level 2! Huh?

Crypto has felt like a solution looking for a problem, and I never understood the digital gold analogy. Gold is a natural resource, used for making things, so the comparison didn’t make sense. Then there’s the “it’s a store of value” concept, which I didn’t really grasp, because there are plenty of different stores of value. I did understand that blockchain could provide value in a world where trust went to 0, but I always felt we’d have way bigger problems then.

Then Crowdstrike hit, bringing down XX. Giving us a glimmer of just how vulnerable we are and how dependent we are on a bunch of centralized systems.

While very different, Crowstrike reminded me of Stuxnet, and while I had known most of the general Stuxnet story I realized I had never watched the documentary, Zero Days.

Then it hit me, it’s not about the value of the Bitcoins themselves, it’s about having an alternative to the primary path, and not just a similar but different one, but a radically different alternative. A distributed alternative to our existing financial system, which could be crippled in a terrible way with the next Stuxnet or worse. We are vulnerable. This was an outage, but imagine a worse attack that left us unable to reconcile our balances and forced a systematic halt for days, weeks… It could get bad.

While there are plenty of vulnerabilities that can come up to pro

It also has me thinking about where I store my bitcoin. In this view of the world, storing it on Coinbase in the centralized infrastructure also becomes risky in this Stuxnet scenario.

Like stuffing money under your mattress, I’m going to finally keep some bitcoin in cold storage, hoping I never need to use it.

I won’t make as much money as I could have if I was an early adopter, and I’m not going “all in” by any means, I just have some more faith then before that it’s not all gamblers and charlatans over there in crypto land, at least not in the bluechips.

Steve