The Financial Advisor

David had been a financial advisor for twenty-two years when a client asked him a question he couldn’t answer.

For years his position on Bitcoin had been consistent: too volatile, regulatory risk is real, he didn’t recommend it. He’d given this advice dozens of times. He believed it.

The client — a woman in her mid-fifties — had held Bitcoin through the FTX collapse and the 2022 crash. Her coins were in self-custody on a hardware wallet. She’d lost nothing when FTX went under. She watched her Bitcoin drop 70% and then recover to new highs.

“You’ve been telling me Bitcoin is risky for years,” she said. “But the companies collapsed and the Bitcoin didn’t. My self-custodied Bitcoin was completely unaffected by any of the things you warned me about. I don’t understand what risk you were actually describing.”

He didn’t have a good answer. So he did what he’d always done when he found himself without one: he read.

Three months of reading. The monetary history. The technical architecture. The on-chain data. The institutional case. The counterarguments. Saylor’s interviews. The whitepaper.

In 2023 he started discussing Bitcoin with clients — not pushing it, just explaining the case and the risks honestly and letting them decide. About 40% added some exposure. Most kept it small — 1 to 3% of the portfolio.

“The mistake I’m most uncomfortable with,” he said, “is that I let dismissal substitute for analysis. I made a confident recommendation based on a reaction, not research. I shouldn’t have done that.”

David’s story is the human version of what happens when serious, careful people actually do the analysis.

Tomorrow: institutional adoption complete — the full picture.

— The Daily Bit