It’s the year 2050.
You step out of your flying taxi and check the Bitcoin price on your cyber phone:$49,002,391.78
Nice … your net worth went up by $750,000 overnight. But you barely care, because you’ve been financially set for 15 years already.
Suddenly, you stumble over a beggar sitting at the side of the street. Next to him lies a piece of cardboard. Written on it are the words: “Please zap 1 sat for food” and below that, a QR code and a Lightning address … noerms@rizful.com
You stop dead in your tracks. “noerms” … that name sounds familiar. Noerms was an npub you followed on Nostr once, wasn’t he?
What happened to noerms?
You scan the QR code and send the beggar 21 sats. His beat-up phone lights up. He sees the 21 sats and can hardly believe his luck. With tears in his eyes, he looks up at you and thanks you way too enthusiastically for your generous zap.
“Is it possible that I followed you on Nostr about 25 years ago?” you ask him. He nods. “Could be,” he says, embarrassed.
“What happened? You were super early! Why are you living on the street instead of on some South Sea island?”
Ashamed, noerms looks at the ground. “I made mistakes,” he says quietly. “A lot of mistakes … cost me all my sats.”
“Oh man, I’m sorry,” you mutter. You feel a bit of pity for the poor guy. “Hey, are you hungry? There’s a Steak ’n Shake around the corner. I can eat there for free for life because I spent over a million sats there back in my 20s. Come on, it’s on me.”
You help the skinny guy to his feet and guide him into the restaurant.
While eating, noerms tells you about the mistakes that cost him everything:
Mistake #1: Greed …
“‘Not your keys, not your coins’ — every second Nostrich was yelling that back then. Of course I had my own hardware wallet, but I got greedy …
Remember the exchanges that paid interest on your coins? Because of that, I kept a large part of my Bitcoin on an exchange.
It felt amazing, watching your sats grow every single day without doing anything. And since I also had a savings plan, several million sats piled up on the exchange over the years. I could be living the high life today. As it turned out later, the exchange had sold more Bitcoin than it actually owned. The classic paper Bitcoin game that hundreds of exchanges played in the 2020s. After the insolvency filing, I never saw a single sat again …”
“Yeah, but you must’ve still had some on your hardware wallet, right?”
“Yes, but that thing eventually died …”
“It died? What about your seed phrase?”
Mistake #2: Negligence …
“Well, I only wrote the seed phrase down on the little paper card that came with the wallet. I knew I should get something more durable, like steel. I always planned to do it, but kept procrastinating. One day, there was a fire in our building — and my backup wasn’t good enough.”
“The seed burned up?”
“No. The fire was in the apartment above us. Battery fire. But all the water from the firefighters flooded our apartment below completely. I had hidden the seed behind a baseboard. I could only read 2 of the 24 words afterward. I didn’t have a copy.”
“Dude … that’s brutal.”
“Yep …”
“But that must’ve been years ago. Didn’t you manage to start over?”
Mistake #3: Chasing losses …
“Sure, I tried. But because I had lost so much, I desperately wanted to make it back as fast as possible. How do you get more Bitcoin for your money?
Market timing: sell the top, buy the bottom …
So I sold almost everything I owned and put the money into Bitcoin. For months I lived on instant noodles. I managed to stack a decent amount of sats again. At the top in 2033, I sold everything to buy back in cheaper at the bottom. Problem was — there was no bottom. Just a short correction, then new all-time highs. One after another. Every time I thought, ‘This has to be it, now it will finally crash.’ Nope. When I finally admitted to myself that I would never be able to buy back in as cheap as I sold, I had already missed more than 100% in gains.”
“But at least you got back in eventually, right?”
“Not the way I should have …”
Mistake #4: Overconfidence …
“I became more and more desperate. I had lost everything — and now I had blown my second chance too. I swore I would make it all back.
‘And how?’”
“By trading …
I took all my money, plus a loan, and started speculating with leverage on rising and falling prices. It actually worked pretty well for a while. Then came the legendary Banana Zone of 2035. Everything looked like a classic bull trap. All indicators pointed to it — RSI, volume, loss of the bull market support band. Even TradeGPT predicted with a 99.9% probability that the market would fall. Of course, it didn’t. Bitcoin ripped upward and I got liquidated. I hadn’t just lost everything twice — now I was in debt too …”
“Okay, but that was 2035! You had 15 years to learn from your mistakes.”
“Unfortunately, that’s when I made the bitterest mistake of all …”
Mistake #5: Resignation …
“In 2035, Bitcoin was at $5 million. I knew that in my entire lifetime I’d never manage to accumulate even 0.1 BTC again. I thought the train had already left.
The classic beginner’s mistake: ‘Bitcoin is too expensive.’
After all the loss and sacrifice, I spent my money on everything except Bitcoin. Pokémon cards had a huge renaissance again in 2035 … I bought this golden Charizard back then for €2,000. Today it’s not even worth a single sat.”
Don’t make the same mistakes as noerms!
Yes, the story you just read is set in the future. But the mistakes future-noerms made are very real — and over the next 25 years, they will make the difference between wealth and poverty for many people.
So here’s the summary one more time:
- Bitcoin is not too expensive. You are early … extremely early.
- Trading Bitcoin is a sign of lesser intellect ~ Michael Saylor
- Stay cool. Time in the market beats timing the market.
- Make a durable backup of your keys! And test it for emergencies!
- Don’t let greed tempt you …
… be generous instead, and zap beggar-noerms a few sats. He can use them ⚡👇
(Funfact: The QR-Code in this image actually works ;-)
#Bitcoin #2050
