Welcome to the blog

Hello readers.  Welcome to my blog.

For me it started with this insightful Acquired podcast about Bitcoin.  I listened to the podcast (which you should too!) and made me realize I ought to play around with Bitcoin.

Fourteen years have now passed since the origins of Bitcoin in about 2009.  For many of those years, Bitcoin was a pretty much a fringe activity.  There was a vague sense that maybe the only uses for Bitcoin were for illegal things, or things that might be embarrassing.  There was a corresponding vague sense that one could never be sure how to safeguard one’s holdings in Bitcoin.  Especially in the early years, I imagine that a sort of average, everyday person would not have reason to learn a lot about Bitcoin or to go to the trouble to learn how to purchase or hold Bitcoin.

By now in 2025, bitcoin is sort of, kind of, a mainstream thing.  There are perfectly reasonable uses for bitcoin, and it is easy for an alert person to buy and hold some Bitcoin in a way that keeps it safe.

In this blog, I hope to explore what I see as some of the perfectly reasonable uses for Bitcoin for any average, everyday person.

Maybe you, dear reader, have not yet purchased or held Bitcoin.  In this blog, I hope to explain a few things that might help you put your toe into the shallow end of the swimming pool, learning how to do a few simple things with Bitcoin, and learning how to keep your Bitcoin safe.  Here are some of the topics I hope to explore for you:

• What do I see as some of the perfectly reasonable uses for Bitcoin for any average, everyday person?
• How might an average, everyday person put their toe into the shallow end of the swimming pool, learning how to do a few simple things with Bitcoin?
• How might an average, everyday person learn how to keep your Bitcoin safe?

For the average, everyday person who wants to gain a little familiarity with Bitcoin, it turns out that there are a small handful of very specific things that one must do and that one must learn.  It is just a few things but if you don’t get them right, it can be a big problem.  Here are some of this small handful of things:

• For anybody who becomes a bit familiar with the world of Bitcoin, there is something called a “wallet seed” which is a list of twenty-four words that are known only to that person.   The person might write the twenty-four words on a pocket-sized titanium card, and then hide the card in some peculiar place.  Why in the world would this be an important thing to do, and how do you avoid getting it wrong?
• It turns out that you need to purchase a “hardware wallet”.  This is a little electronic device that is, in some weird way, connected with the ownership and control of whatever Bitcoin you may own.  What exactly is a hardware wallet?  How do you pick one to purchase?

What we are all accustomed to is the idea that if we want to put our money in a safe place, the way we do it is by taking it to a bank.  The way we control that money is by logging in at the web site of the bank.  The way we protect our control over the money is to pick a bank that we think will not somehow misplace the money or mistakenly give our money to someone else.  We hope nobody could guess our login password.

Yes there are companies that have web sites where we could put our Bitcoin.  But it turns out that nearly all people who try to be smart about putting their Bitcoin in a safe place do not do that.  They “self-host” the Bitcoin in a way that does not rely on some company that has a web site.  (Yes this is the stuff I wrote above about titanium cards and hardware wallets.)

Oh, and yes, I guess there are a few things I did not even think to mention until now, but you as an alert reader would have been thinking about ever since you started to read this blog article:

• Suppose I have some Bitcoin, and I want to send some of it to somebody else?  How exactly do I do that?
• Suppose somebody has some Bitcoin, and the want to send some of it to me?  What exactly do I need to do so that the person can send the Bitcoin to me?
• Are there better or worse ways to convert ordinary money into Bitcoin?
• Are there better or worse ways to convert Bitcoin into ordinary money?