Bitcoin had the kind of year that makes a lot of smart people look a little silly. Coming into 2025, I expected a much stronger finish. Instead, bitcoin made new highs, chopped around, gave a lot of them back, and ended the year with almost no enthusiasm. The strange part is that fundamentals improved while price refused to reward anyone for noticing. Regulation, access, and infrastructure got better, and the market absorbed a huge amount of supply without a historical bitcoin drawdown. That gap between progress and price is useful if you're building toward financial independence. It forces you to separate your plan from the scoreboard. A good FIRE plan can't depend on a straight line up. It has to survive bad timing, wrong assumptions, ugly sentiment, and the years where stocks and gold run while bitcoin goes nowhere. Your expenses, liquidity, withdrawal order, taxes, custody, and time horizon have to do more work than a simple price target. 2025 was frustrating, but it also made the framework better. If your plan still made sense when bitcoin disappointed everyone, it probably got stronger. I wrote about the year that broke a lot of models and what it taught FIRE practitioners building on a bitcoin standard:

🗓️ 2025 FIRE BTC Year in Review

FIRE BTC Issue 60 - Broken models, better frameworks