I called Bitcoin a scam for five years.

The book that started all of this wasn't about Bitcoin. It was Rich Dad Poor Dad, and yes, I know. But it was the first thing in years that made me stop and ask how money actually works, and once you pull that thread it does not stop unravelling.

Ray Dalio took me through how the economic machine really runs. Mike Maloney walked me through the hidden history of money.

Somewhere in the middle of all that reading, the penny dropped. The financial system isn't broken at all. It works exactly as designed. Just not for people like me.

Bitcoin, though? Still obviously a scam.

I'd thrown a bit of money at it in 2017, mostly because I only ever properly investigate something once I have skin in the game. Then 2018 arrived, the price fell off a cliff, and I managed to lose a chunk more to one of those twenty-percent-a-month schemes that disappear in the night.

That was all the evidence I needed. I told anyone who would listen it was going to zero, and I said it loudly for years.

I spent five years certain it was a scam. This is the video where I walk through that whole stretch — what I believed, why, and what finally cracked it.

The expensive detour

So I did the sensible thing instead. I bought a house.

A teaching job in Qatar meant that, for the first time in my life, I was actually saving real money. So in 2018 I put it into a rental up in the Midlands. Buy, refurb, rent, refinance. On the spreadsheet it was perfect.

The spreadsheet lied.

Solicitor fees, surprise repairs, empty months, difficult tenants, valuers who didn't understand their own market, all of it grinding away at a 3.2% return. Property felt like buying an expensive shovel to dig for gold, except the shovel kept costing more than the gold I dug up.

And the whole time, in the corner of my eye, this weird internet money just would not die. India tried to ban it. So did Algeria, Indonesia and Egypt. China declared mining a scam industry and eventually banned that too.

The network didn't so much as flinch. It just kept producing a block every ten minutes while I sat on hold to another solicitor.

2020: finding the rabbit hole

Then the world locked down, and for the first time in my adult life I had time on my hands.

That is when I went down the rabbit hole properly. The thing that made me start digging wasn't a chart or a price prediction. It was the slow, slightly embarrassing realisation that there was a rabbit hole at all. Five years of noise I had waved away, and I had never once actually looked down it.

The dodgy crypto-bro books made everything worse before it got better.

Then I found The Bullish Case for Bitcoin, the first explanation that neither talked down to me nor tried to sell me a Lambo. That one sent me to the next, and the next.

When I finally plotted the price history myself, I saw the thing most people miss. Every crash bottomed out higher than the previous cycle's peak. Stair steps climbing, not a slide to zero.

The bit that actually clicked

The real click came from somewhere I never expected. The history of the internet.

I was listening to Jeff Booth describe Bitcoin as an open, decentralised, secure protocol bounded by energy. Then he said the line that flipped it for me. We had never had a global free market protocol before. Not once.

Protocol. That was the word that broke it open for me.

Think about the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell didn't just invent a handset, he invented the rules for how a voice travels down a wire. The handset was useless until someone laid the cables and built the exchanges around it.

The internet went the same way. In 1995 everyone called it slow and clunky and pointless, because they were staring at the screen instead of the fibre being laid under the oceans.

Bitcoin is a protocol like those, and protocols don't share a market. There aren't five competing internets or three rival email systems. The world settles on one, the infrastructure gets built around it, and that is that.

I had spent years asking which coin would win. Wrong question.

There is only ever room for one money protocol, and the miners and machines wiring themselves around Bitcoin are its cables under the ocean. The day that idea clicked is the day I stopped seeing a gamble and started seeing infrastructure.

That click is almost impossible to land in a paragraph, so I gave it a whole video. If one thing on this page is worth nine minutes, it's this.

The quiet breakthrough underneath it

Underneath all of it sits one breakthrough I had completely walked past.

For decades, serious computer scientists agreed that digital money was impossible without a middleman. Anything digital can be copied, and money you can copy is money you can spend twice. Someone trustworthy had to sit in the middle keeping the score.

In 2008 an anonymous developer solved that problem with nobody in charge of the ledger at all. Nobody had ever done it. That is the zero to one, the single move that makes everything else on this site possible.

If you want to actually understand that one move, the double-spend problem and the fix, start here. No maths, no jargon.

Why this channel exists

By late 2022 I had seen enough. The market had crashed again, the headlines had written the obituary again, and to me that looked like exactly the right moment.

I sold the rental. I haven't looked back.

I'm not here to sell you Bitcoin like a lottery ticket. I'm here to walk you through the research I did when I was genuinely trying to prove the whole thing was nonsense, and couldn't. If you're as skeptical as I was, good.

Bring it with you.

I spent five years trying to bury this thing and it calmly buried my objections instead.

How I keep it honest

One rule runs the whole thing. If it isn't on my own desk, it isn't on this site.

I only point you at tools I actually use.

I've turned down sponsorship money from companies whose kit I wouldn't trust with my own savings. I run my own node and I hold my own keys. When I get something wrong, and I do, I say so on camera rather than quietly deleting it.

Nothing here is financial advice, and you will never get a price target out of me. Bitcoin is volatile and the next ugly crash is always coming. None of that is really the point.

The point is understanding the thing well enough to make your own call, because that is the only call worth making.