In the last essay, we pulled back the curtain on the banking system.
When your paycheck lands in your account, there isn’t a pile of bills sitting at your bank with your name on it. The bank has already lent most of that money out. What shows up in your account is an entry on their ledger — a promise that if you need it, they’ll find a way to make the numbers line up.
That illusion is comforting. You imagine something there, even though there isn’t.
Bitcoin strips away even that illusion.
The hardest part isn’t learning the code. It’s accepting value with no object
Facing Nothing: My First Bitcoin Reckoning
When I first encountered Bitcoin in 2016, that was the hardest part for me to accept.
The price had just crossed $15–16k, and two of my closest friends — one in finance, the other in tech — were already cashing out. They had been in early. They were done.
I wasn’t chasing the trade. I was curious — and a little unsettled. Why were people I respected treating this ghost money like real value? What did they see that I didn’t?
I kept researching, asking questions, and then decided to take it one step further — I offered to accept Bitcoin as payment at my agency. Not because I expected anyone to say yes, but because I needed to feel what it meant to transact in it, to move it from theory to the real world.
I wasn’t holding anything. But suddenly, it felt like something was holding me.
How does something with no form start to feel real?
I spent nights with the Bitcoin white paper open on my laptop, highlighting lines, Googling terms, and peppering my friends with questions.
And yet, even after all the research, I kept stumbling on the same sticking point:
If nothing is really “there,” what am I actually holding?
With dollars, I could at least imagine something — numbers moving between banks, bills stacked in vaults, coins jingling in a drawer. With gold, I could picture the weight of a bar in my hand.
But Bitcoin? Nothing. No object, no vault, no weight. Just code, just keys, just a record.
That intangibility was disorienting. And it made me wonder: How can something with no physical form hold any real value?
Value Has Always Been a Story
The deeper I looked, the more I realized: Bitcoin isn’t the first time money has seemed strange.
Across history, value has been stored in objects that made sense only within their culture.