What are the must attend bitcoin events in 2025? Making plans to attend 2-3 events.

In 2025, I’m going Pro. I want to help 1 million people start saving bitcoin in self custody, and create 10,000 sovereign wholecoiners. I’ve started a media company and assembling a team. I’ve hired the key players and put the foundation in place in the last quarter. We’re ready to roll Q1 2025. I love what Saylor is doing for Bitcoin, but we need to work harder than ever to espouse the values of self-custody. I’ve put my money where my mouth is over the last epoch and deployed a lot of funds to bitcoiners building tools for self-custody Bitcoining. Now it’s time to put my mouth where my money is 💪

When I was young, we lived in poverty. I remember the joy of receiving donated toys & food from kind strangers around the holidays. One time a neighbor brought over a whole box of food for us to make turkey dinner. One time the dairy where my grandfather worked as a milk man let us take a whole crate of dairy products home (and a toy). I try to give as often as I can, especially around Christmas. What makes me even more happy than giving, is to let the kids in the family experience the joy of giving. This year I got the fam together and gave everyone a $500 budget. The rule was they had to buy 2 of each item for someone their age group, something they’d appreciate for Christmas. Then we took one of each item to the local women’s shelter, and I took the rest home to drop off at the “youth center.” What I actually did was wrap the 2nd item for them and they will each get it on Christmas morning. I hired an executive assistant this month and she’s been awesome. I have a lot of ideas and I’ve learned how to delegate to buy back my time & level up my influence & impact. She helped me execute on this by organizing the family. So glad I did this because the kids were really touched and enjoyed shopping for people who are less fortunate. If you have the means, you could try this with your family.

Are we at the point where it’s safe to setup a fedimint to onboard friends and family to Bitcoin? I love giving away sats but I really don’t like “wasting” sats. At least with a fedi instance you can recover people’s coins easily and when they’re ready they can withdraw them into their own custody without your help. The problem with uncle Jim mode is it doesn’t scale with the amount of time and energy you need to spend with everyone when they have questions. I want to be able to onboard thousands of people in a way that I know they are not going to lose their keys or their seed phrase. It seems like with a fedi instance you can give like Santa and save like Scrooge.

It’s been a very good year for Bitcoiners. As the rich bitcoin uncle (or aunt) what are you doing for your nieces and nephews this Christmas? Looking for suggestions on how to make their Christmas special without setting a precedent of expectation or entitlement.

What’s the simplest and safest way for Frankie MacDonald to store his BTC? 1) He only responds when he’s interested 2) He is using an old Well Wallet (formerly Rise Wallet) that’s been depreciated and I haven’t been able to convince him to move to a new wallet yet. 3) I tried to get him on lightning & nostr and he didn’t engage. Maybe too complicated. 4) He knows not to give anyone his seed phrase nor tell anyone how much BTC he has.

I’m going pro. I just secured a starter citadel which I’m financing with a BTC backed loan (not selling any BTC to make it happen.) I’m building a media company, POW Media. Cameras will be following me around. I’ve been living with middle class camouflage on for the last 7-8 years. I’ve been able to avoid the uncomfortable feelings and fears of having people around me know my relative net worth. (I told Peter McCormack privately how much BTC I had in ~2020, but I gave him a fake number to see if he would repeat it 😅) I’ve been very cautious about this, but in fact I think it’s held me back. I want to get a million people to start a bitcoin savings plan and mint10,000 wholecoiners. Bitcoin education and increasing financial literacy is what helped me escape poverty, and I want to do the same for others. However, I’m not as smart with thinkythoughts as @HODL and people follow confident voices who they trust can give them a blueprint to repeat the path they took. My paranoia about people knowing how wealthy I am has provided me some ground cover so far, but it also made me less credible (why would you take a former child magician’s financial advice when he can’t even afford a razor, and lives in a normal house like yours because he can’t get a mortgage.) For the people around me, there will be signs. There have been signs (the real estate purchases for family members, the trips, the RV, donations and investments). A few years ago they started speculating … “brad can pay, he’s a millionaire.” “Don’t worry dear, you’re a millionaire.” I never confirmed nor denied, never told anyone in my family the number. I just dealt with it awkwardly, and felt weird. They will start to get a picture of the level of wealth I have soon, and I’m going to have to face more awkward conversations. I’ve been dealing this year with my negative beliefs and limiting beliefs around this. Why do the words “rich” and “millionaire” trigger negative feelings? I discovered that your reaction is a reflection. What do I believe about rich people? Is it true? How can you fix that? Doing the work to create Citadel Mind has been helpful this year. I also run into the opposite problem where people assume I’m way wealthier than I am because I got into bitcoin in 2011. I’ve been very public about all of my hacks, losses, bad sells & other lessons learned to advocate buy & hold. IE I sold half my coins at $30, I tell that story a lot to illustrate the value of “saving” not “investing” or “trading” … but I also tell that to temper people’s curiosity if I’m one of those made-every-right-move early billionaire bitcoiners 😅 My coach Dan Martell told me the other day that my secrecy around my success is the only thing holding me back from helping more people, and if that truly is my goal, I have to face it or give up on it. Lots of folks are public with their wealth like Michael Saylor, Jason Williams, American HODL, etc. On the flip side, people like @ODELL, @Adam Back, @nat brunell, @Lyn Alden, @preston and others are very influential and I do not believe they ever talk about their net worth. I’m trying to figure out if there’s a way to thread the needle of having obvious signs of wealth, influencing regular ppl towards bitcoin effectively at mass scale, while not disclosing how much BTC you have or what your rough net worth is. It seems kind of like once you live a certain lifestyle, it becomes obvious that you have a high net worth, and there might be some mystery brand value around not disclosing it…makes ppl want to lean in to try to figure it out. These are questions we’re all gonna to have to deal with on the way to $1 million per coin and beyond. I think I will probably just start being more public about my upgraded lifestyle, talk confidently, and not give specifics. Once you disclose, there’s no undoing that (especially on Nostr.)