The risk is not: owning bitcoin. The risk is: Not owning bitcoin.

I no longer worry about the US federal debt being unpayable. It’s easily payable. How? Government can manufacture financial conditions such that they guarantee themselves 28% of all capital gains. Or at least 28%. How? Alternative Minimum Tax. If you’re wealthy, meaning earn more than $86,100 dollars a year, AMT guarantees you will pay a minimum of 26% of all income over $86,100. If you make over roughly $250,000, you pay 28% on that income. And if you make over roughly $600,000, you get 28% tax on the originally exempt $86,100 and pay that extra 2% on income between $250k & $600k. When bitcoin shoots up 100x in price over the next 30 years, that’ll be roughly $100T they’ll tax at 28%. Problem solved.

Just wait until people figure out that the real tax rate in the US is 28%. How? Why? Alternative Minimum Tax. If you make more than $88,100 a year, you are a high income earner and nothing you can do will lower your tax bill to zero. You will pay the alternative minimum tax. It’s an unlawful tax in some situations but nobody cares. If you earn that much, you can’t give away enough money to avoid paying Uncle Sam. Your alternative minimum tax is 26% of income above $88,100 but below $239,100 and 28% above $239,100. Now since most people earning $88,100 pay way more in tax than the minimum, they don’t notice this. But if your income is entirely long term capital gain, you don’t get the 20% tax + the 3.8 NIIT tax. A lot of bitcoiners are probably planning on the wrong tax extortion scheme. A lot of people believe short term capital gains is taxed as regular income and long term is 0, 15, or 20%…which is true for smaller dollar amounts. So pay off the thugs! Set aside 28% of any massive bitcoin gains you run into down the road to keep them from sending men with guns in costumes to put you in a cage or unalive you if you decline caging.

Seeing the future is largely about seeing the past. People throw around terms like exponential and parabolic without giving much thought about what these really mean. But let’s look at this more closely. Here is a plot of a parabola divided by an exponential (y=x²/e^x). Initially, the parabola grows faster than the exponential. But exponential anything always grows faster than any fixed exponent as time goes to infinity… Contrary to popular belief, bitcoin price doesn’t grow exponentially in time. Bitcoin growth is “parabolic” in the sense that it is a fixed exponent of time (in fact, it is supra-parabolic with exponent closer to 6 than 5). This means if you double the time bitcoin has existed, price goes up between 2^5 and 2^6…that means price is gonna be 32-64x higher in 16 years. But because bitcoin has been volatile, the very clear power curve of bitcoin price will be hard to see. The best fit (simple) curve to bitcoin price doesn’t seek to explain the bubbles and busts but rather to run through the middle of all the noise. And the clearly best (simple) model of bitcoin price is: price = constant*time^exponent (I can give you specific numbers if you want). How big is the price noise? Well, the best fit curve through the 90th percentile of bitcoin price is roughly 4x the value of the 50th percentile and the 10th percentile curve is roughly ½ the 50th percentile. This means 20% of the time, bitcoin is trading outside this 8-fold range. This is why bitcoin often feels like it grows exponentially: transitioning from being 50% undervalued to 4x overvalued _is_ reasonably well modeled as exponential growth. But all exponential trends must die eventually. And this has happened repeatedly in bitcoin. We call them bubbles 🫧. They pop 💣. But how do things like all financial assets and government debts grow exponentially? Well, these too do fail eventually but devaluing the currency is a more subtle form of failure that keeps the mathematical pattern in tact but destroys the meaning of exponential growth (example, a billion Deutsch marks used to be a lot of money but there came a day shortly thereafter when 100 billion marks was worthless). Human population growth has been exponential as far back as we can measure. A long time ago, human population grew at 0.4% per year. 75 years ago it was 1.6% per year. It’s less now. But even this too will change. Earth can probably only hold another 10-100x more humans. Maybe 1000x more…who knows. But there is a limit. Exponential growth of human population does prolong the duration that financial assets can grow in value exponentially…and with population growth slowing, expect exponential systems like stocks and bonds to collapse more frequently. Instead of corporations taking 100 years to go bankrupt on average, maybe it takes 80 years on average. Something like that. But this does mean that if bitcoin doesn’t change the world, the exponential rise in price of conventional assets like stocks or gold will someday grow in value _faster_ than bitcoin. In 10-20 years, at least one of the best stocks on the market will probably grow faster than bitcoin. And in 100 years the stock market on average will compete with bitcoin. But I suppose bitcoin price will change to slow exponential growth in 100 years…I don’t think I shall live to see the answer.