Seth Michael Steele

Seeing large holders reduce their Bitcoin balances doesn’t scare me, one person not being able to fill their shoes doesn’t either. Their time has come and everyday the new normal is a few less sats, there’s no magic number, just a reliable act to stack sats and stay humble. You can go with the flow when you die, healthy fish swim upstream. Self custody and hodl.

Do you know what the last thing a face does before bitcoin melts it? It gets flushed. I get that feeling in my gut it excites and saddens me; I’ll miss these cheap sats when they are gone. I’ll sure enjoy them while they last though!

Up or down, I stack. Each sat is faith made literal while others surrender to fear. The chart is noise; conviction is signal. Every sat I hold is a quiet truth: I stayed when it mattered.

FUDsters beware: don’t tease me with cheap sats. You could sell your entire stack and preach doom through every speaker on the globe, I’m still going to stack every week and be glad to do it.

Bitcoin isn’t a bet anymore. It’s becoming the standard. The volatility, the crashes, the boredom: those are just the old speculators getting washed out. If you’d keep stacking even faced with slow, steady growth, then you’ve already crossed the line: you’re not chasing a top, you’re watching money get fixed. The real win isn’t timing anything. It’s realizing you don’t need to. Expect less. Appreciate more. Every day Bitcoin still runs is another day the world shifts, and that’s how you win forever.

Price isn’t the heartbeat…the network is. We’re not late; we’re early. Bitcoin’s maturity isn’t a top; it’s the world quietly switching over. Price is noise. Hope is the signal. Every collapse, every doubt, every late cycle is just another reminder that Bitcoin keeps running while everything else decays. The danger isn’t volatility. It’s that Bitcoin rewards patience and exposes every lie built on soft money. This is the prologue. The real story is just beginning.

Sometimes you’ve gotta pause and ask yourself: where does max pain really sit? Higher or lower? I keep coming back to the same conclusion: it’s almost always higher. Bitcoin rising hurts far more people than it helps, because most only feel the sting when they’re on the outside looking in. A real bitcoiner doesn’t suffer on the dips; they sharpen their conviction on them. Drawdowns don’t wound you when your mindset is accumulation; they provoke you to act, to build, to stack with intention. Panic isn’t truly painful in the moment. The real pain shows up later: when price recovers, when the candles go vertical, when regret finally settles in. Max pain isn’t the dip. Max pain is watching the recovery without a seat at the table.

How do you feel about borrowing against your bitcoin? I’ve avoided it, not out of ignorance, but out of respect for the one thing I refuse to lose: my stack. The idea of watching it evaporate in a liquidation or getting rugged has always felt like the darkest timeline. The more I study it, the more the logic shifts. As a bitcoiner, a bitcoin backed loan makes more philosophical and financial sense than chasing some fiat lender’s approval. Still, if I can’t responsibly borrow against my stack to buy whatever I’ve got my eyes on, that might be the signal, not to overreach, but to stack harder and lower my time preference until I can. That discipline is probably better for my character than the purchase itself. The truth is: the longer I wait, the better the terms will likely become. Bitcoin hardens, markets mature, and the rates offered to strong hands will dwarf what a bank would give me today. There’s risk, of course. I’d never use a loan as leverage to stack more corn: that’s how people get chewed up…but as a tool? Used sparingly? For the rare opportunity that would be lost without it, or to bridge a gap in living standards without cannibalizing my stack? That starts to feel realistic. I don’t ever want to sell my corn when I could borrow against it at a cheaper cost than any fiat loan. In the right hands, bitcoin lets you stack your sats and, slowly, carefully, eat from the tree you planted without chopping it down.

Newsflash: Bitcoin whales unload in tidal waves, but those same waves feed entire reefs of minnow wallets. One creature’s purge becomes another creature’s feast. A sell off to one is a stacking season to another. Major sellers still outweigh the swarm of small buyers…for now. Every time a whale empties itself, it becomes a little lighter, a little less dominant, and with every dump, the minnows grow: quiet, persistent, accumulating sats into something sturdier. Eventually the math flips: the whales no longer have enough weight left to shake the ocean, and the sea fills with stronger, midsized fish instead of a handful of giants churning the waters. That’s what healthy distribution looks like: less topheavy, more antifragile. The shoes left behind are enormous, sure, but someone will fill them. Many someones, actually, and they’ll run farther than the giants ever could. As for me? I’ll take the pinky toe position. It’s small, humble, but it’s what keeps the whole foot balanced.

It’s not that I’m doing anything dramatic, just showing up every week stacking sats without letting fear rearrange my plans. I don’t wait for perfect timing; I just use time itself as the engine. I take opportunities by the collar, not because they look glamorous, but because they show up. If the dip lingers, I’ll build around it. If it dives deeper, I’ll dig deeper too. Cycles don’t intimidate you when you understand they’re just terrain, not prophecy. And if you need perpetual NGU as emotional support, you might never make it to seven figure bitcoin. Multicoiners aren’t minted by comfort; they’re forged in the parts of the chart that make everyone else flinch.

If push ever came to shove, I know I could walk through another bear market barefoot: cold winds, empty sentiment, and all. Stacking is just second nature now. The question is…can you say the same? Bears are a strange mercy. They strip the noise, peel away the sensitive, the shaky, the ones who mistook volatility for a personality trait. In the quiet that remains, you see who actually believes. The scarcity isn’t just in Bitcoin; it’s in conviction. I don’t pretend to know the next chapter. I only know the constants: uncertainty, volatility, and my shadow showing up with more sats each time the market gives me an opening. I’ll buy higher, I’ll buy lower. Price is just the toll for passage. As long as people keep trading tomorrow’s sovereignty for today’s dollars, I’ll be right there, taking the other side.

What’s an OG who sold all his bitcoin? A cautionary tale with a long shadow, but what’s a person who starts stacking today and refuses to break the ritual for the rest of their life? That’s a newborn OG: a creature forged not by timing, but by conviction. One inherited a moment. The other is building an era. Which one took more grit? Only time knows, and time never lies. People act like fewer 10x’s and fewer -80% drawdowns somehow rewrite the nature of Bitcoin. Does a calmer ocean make the voyage easier, or does it just expose who was only addicted to the storm? Volatility was never the teacher; conviction was. Maturity is boring, immaturity is exhausting, and markets don’t care about your emotional preferences. There’s no winning with unrealistic expectations: only delusion, disappointment, and déjà vu…but the ones who show up day after day, cycle after cycle, without theatrics or fantasies; they’re the ones who quietly become legends while everyone else is waiting for a miracle.

TradFi adopting Bitcoin is bullish, sure, but it’s also a reminder. You don’t need gatekeepers to validate something that was built to erase them. You can Bitcoin without paying fiat’s tolls, without renting conviction from institutions that only show up when the upside is obvious. Sentiment flips like a weathervane in a storm, but I’m not trading the temperature. I’m stacking for a future that isn’t priced in yet. My thesis doesn’t hinge on applause or ETF flows. It runs deeper: belief in a system that can outlast the noise. I don’t track the mood. I don’t chase the narrative. I stay bullish because Bitcoin doesn’t change…only people do.

Saudi Aramco planting the first quantum computer dedicated to industrial use feels like a subtle shift in the global narrative; a quiet signal that the frontier is no longer theoretical but operational. When the world’s largest energy producer starts tinkering with qubits, you have to wonder: is this the first flicker of an industrial quantum revolution, or just the opening note of a much longer overture? Quantum capability isn’t just about faster calculations; it’s about collapsing uncertainty, modeling the unmodellable, squeezing inefficiencies out of systems that have resisted optimization for decades. If industry adopts quantum at scale, the entire idea of bottleneck might become archaic. Businesses chase edge, and quantum is the sharpest potential edge ever conceived. It can compress timelines, illuminate decision trees we’ve never been able to see, and rewire entire supply chains around deeper computational truths. That kind of power ripples outward, and one of the first domains it inevitably touches is Bitcoin. Quantum is a paradox for Bitcoin: a tool that could improve everything around it while simultaneously representing its most exotic existential threat. It could transform mining, forecasting, risk modeling, and energy grid balancing, ut with enough breakthroughs, and enough qubits, it could also peel open cryptographic systems that we take for granted today. No one knows when that threshold arrives; that’s part of the tension. Progress in quantum physics follows a rhythm that feels alien to our intuition, quiet for years, then suddenly decades ahead overnight. Still, we’re comfortably far from any break in Bitcoin’s cryptography. Comfortably far for now, but anyone with a long time preference knows that for now evaporates quicker than you expect. Q day feels like science fiction until the day it isn’t. People throw around fears about quantum cracking Bitcoin, but the math doesn’t lie: it would take millions of stable, error corrected qubits to even threaten it. The current record: Caltech’s stunning 6,100 qubit array built from cesium atoms held in optical tweezers generated by splitting a single laser into ~12,000 focused beams…is mind bendingly impressive, stranger than fiction… and still thousands of times too small. Not an indictment of quantum progress…if anything, it highlights just how well architected Satoshi’s system really is. Bitcoin wasn’t built fragile; it was built antifragile. Here’s the twist of all twists: the best quantum defense available right now is the same advice cypherpunks have preached since Genesis Block: don’t reuse addresses. The fact that a practice so mundane, so old, and so Bitcoin native is still robust enough to carry us safely through the dawn of quantum computing is almost poetic. More can and will be done, but it’s hardly time to bar the doors. Bitcoin exists in that strange place where ancient cryptographic wisdom still shields it from the bleeding edge of physics. That alone should make anyone pause, because it speaks not just to Bitcoin’s design, but to the foresight embedded within it. Quantum may be coming fast, but Satoshi was already thinking in decades.

The Fed can nudge bitcoin’s fiat price like a gust pushing a ship’s mast, but it can’t touch the part of me committed to accumulating more. That disconnect between surface volatility and inner conviction; that’s where opportunity hides. Smart money stays prepared, and prepared money doesn’t flinch. When you understand the plumbing of the system, rate decisions stop feeling like omens and start looking like noise. I don’t even know if I qualify as smart money. Maybe I’m just relentless money: stubborn, steady, unbothered by the line between front running the future and riding the wake of every pump. If digging in like a tick and going down with the ship is what the path demands, so be it. Conviction isn’t fragile. Fear of what, exactly? A little volatility? A narrative shift? Not me. I like when the story gets dark and the stakes rise; it means something real is happening. Bitcoin isn’t dead or dying: it’s a reminder that we are alive, that risk is the heartbeat of reward, and that the pulse only quickens when the world tries to shake you loose.

My bitcoin enthusiasm doesn’t wane; it compounds. 1 BTC = 1 BTC. The market can thrash around all it wants, but truth doesn’t change its weight just because the crowd gets dizzy. Dips like these feel almost sweet. Unwinds don’t rattle me; I stack spot for a reason. Watching leverage get wiped clean is like watching the fog lift; the signal survives, the noise gets incinerated. I don’t chase euphoria and I don’t bail under pressure. I stack, I hold, and I let time reveal what panic always hides: better days are earned by those who refuse to flinch.

I don’t care if support holds, if buyers show up, or if I end up the last one still moving when the music cuts out. I’ve learned to transmute fear into fuel; to flip panic into conviction so quickly it feels like alchemy. Bitcoin isn’t where I find confidence. It’s where I forge it.

I keep buying the dip and the dip keeps offering itself up, like a dream that refuses to end. Maybe that’s the blessing and the curse of conviction: you know the dream won’t last forever, so you savor every second before reality wakes you. Fear is the cheapest seller there is, so I buy it and stay busy. Maybe there’s more room to fall, but what does lower even mean to someone building for decades? Don’t hand me your sats out of panic; I won’t apologize when the same fear you sold becomes the fortune you regret. That’s a burden for the suits; they have the capital to bleed. If they want out in a crisis, fine; plebs like us only buy at pleb prices. I’m just curious how far down the elevator goes before the real climbers show up. Maybe a slow, grinding recovery would teach more truth than a neat V ever could. Everyone wants a rebound; nobody wants to meet max pain, but max pain is a train, and I’ve learned to stand on the tracks without flinching. Bitcoin won’t rug you; only your own impulses can. Getting rekt is avoidable if you choose patience over performance. I’m no oracle, no trader who snipes bottoms or calls tops. I just refuse to watch from the sidelines while everyone else flails in sentiment. I stack, quietly, consistently. My grandkids can judge the wisdom of it, but they’ll have to do it from higher ground.

Thoughtful Thursday: Nobody gets rewarded for the fantasies that never left their heads. Potential is a warm room with no windows: comfortable, flattering, and dangerously quiet. Results live outside, where the weather is unpredictable and the ground is uneven. Proof of work, not proof of potential, is the only language reality respects. Turning potential into proof is the oldest alchemy humanity knows: the moment a person trades the safety of imagination for the risk of effort, something real is born. Hard work is just the cover charge. Everyone with genuine ambition is already paying it. The difference is direction. You can sprint in circles and still end up nowhere. The real edge is knowing where to aim your energy, when to move, and how to move with the least wasted motion. It’s not about working harder than everyone; it’s about working on the right things, at the right moment, with a level of clarity that makes your execution feel inevitable.

Imagine hinging your conviction on the Fed’s hazy gestures instead of your own clarity; letting ambiguity steer your sentiment. That’s a different kind of risk entirely. I’d rather take unfiltered volatility over the numb drift of a slow motion unwind; at least chaos is honest about what it is. Nothing has ever quieted my hunger for Bitcoin. The experiment keeps unfolding: value created, value preserved, value reclaimed from systems that forgot what value even meant. It’s a cycle too consistent, too hard earned, to abandon on a passing whim. One man’s panic is another man’s asymmetric advantage. If this is a dip, then it’s a blessing wrapped in discomfort. I’m not resisting it; I’m harvesting it.