A First Year With Bitcoin

James was a 34-year-old secondary school teacher when he first heard about Bitcoin properly. Not the headlines. Not the noise. A friend sat him down and explained the money system the way Phase 1 explained it here.

He put in £50. Not because he was convinced. Because £50 was an amount he could afford to be wrong about.

The first experience was confusion. The exchange interface was unfamiliar. The verification took three days. When the Bitcoin finally showed up in his account — a few thousand sats for £50 — he stared at it for a while and felt nothing dramatic. Just a small number on a screen.

A few weeks later he moved it to a mobile wallet. Following instructions he’d found online, he wrote down his seed phrase on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, and felt vaguely ridiculous. It felt like a lot of ceremony for £50.

Then the price dropped 25%. His £50 was now worth £37. He checked it every day for a week, felt vaguely anxious, then decided to stop checking. He had other things to do.

Six months later he looked again. The price had recovered and then some. His £50 was now worth £80.

He didn’t do anything remarkable. He bought a small amount, learned the mechanics, moved it somewhere he controlled, and left it alone.

That first year didn’t make James wealthy. But it made Bitcoin real to him in a way that reading never had.

Tomorrow: what comes next — the long game.

— The Daily Bit