The Luckiest Man in Bitcoin

Hodl your Bitcoin long enough and eventually people will start calling you “lucky.” When your wealth skyrockets and you outperform every single financial advisor on the planet, those around you will tend to put it down to pure “dumb luck.”

But what these people fail to recognize is that holding Bitcoin for the long term requires more than just luck. It requires countless hours of study, critical thinking, and unshakable conviction.

Every true Bitcoiner knows that you don’t get lucky by being passive. You can’t just sit back and expect good things to come to you. Bitcoiners understand that if you want to get lucky, you have to play an active role.

So, this week’s newsletter is going to be a little different…

Instead of commentating on what’s going on in the industry, I want to share something a little more personal. I’d like to share with you the ups and downs of my own Bitcoin journey so we can explore what it really takes to get “lucky” with Bitcoin.

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Getting Lucky with Bitcoin

This is me and my dad Colin, and boy did we get lucky when we discovered Bitcoin.

So lucky, in fact, that we first discovered it way back in 2013, when you could still get your hands on a whole coin for less than $100! We got the chance to front-run the likes of Michael Saylor, Larry Fink, and the rest of Wall Street as Bitcoin began its incredible climb to over $100,000.

There’s no denying that discovering Bitcoin this early, when it was still so cheap, is incredibly lucky. But just buying Bitcoin isn’t enough. To get “lucky,” you also need to be able to hold onto it for the long term. Something that’s only possible if you truly understand what you’re holding.

In short, if you want to get “lucky” with Bitcoin, you have to study it properly, and you have to play an active role.

And that’s exactly what we did. We dove headfirst down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and spent thousands of hours studying what it is, how it works, and what it truly represents.

By playing an active role, we were able to continue to get “lucky” and managed to hold onto our stack for more than a decade as the price went parabolic.

Getting Lucky with Self-Custody

We were “lucky” that we never lost our Bitcoin when countless exchanges either got hacked or blew up over the decade that followed. We never became victims of the Mt. Gox hack, the BlockFi blow-up, the FTX farce, or any of the other disasters that befell countless custodians over the years.

But this had nothing to do with “luck.” We avoided getting caught up in these calamities precisely because we studied Bitcoin enough to understand that “Not your keys” means “Not your coins.”

Bitcoin is peer-to-peer electronic cash designed specifically so that you no longer need to put your wealth in the hands of trusted third parties. It’s designed for you to become your own bank and reduce your counterparty risk to zero.

Studying Bitcoin carefully meant we understood this, took full self-custody, and avoided losing our Bitcoin when these trusted third parties inevitably became untrustworthy.

Getting Lucky with Bitcoin-Only

We also got “lucky” that we never fell prey to the plethora of shitcoin scams that emerged in Bitcoin’s wake. We never gambled our stack away on meme coins, swerved the ICO craze (despite it being legitimized by “reputable” fraudsters like Deloitte), and we weren’t foolish enough to spend our money on any worthless NFTs.

We were only “lucky” to avoid all this nonsense because we studied Bitcoin carefully, and this meant we could immediately recognize these centralized affinity scams for the hot garbage they are. By putting the time in to understand Bitcoin properly, it became obvious that none of these “Web3” grifts are remotely comparable to the perfect decentralized money that Satoshi created.

Again, we were “lucky” because we played an active role.

Getting Lucky with Conviction

We were also “lucky” that we never got shaken out by multiple savage bear markets that saw Bitcoin’s price drop by up to 87%. We never panicked and never lost faith.

But this wasn’t “dumb luck” either. We had studied Bitcoin carefully enough to understand exactly what we were holding, allowing us to develop true conviction. Not once were we tempted to exchange our precious Bitcoin back into worthless government-printed coupons.

Diamond hands aren’t something you’re born with, and they’re not a symptom of blind faith. They’re something you only develop through true understanding.

The end result of all this “good luck”?

My dad and I managed to hold onto a sizeable stack of 25 Bitcoin, which today is worth over $2,500,000!

That’s pretty damn “lucky” by anybody’s standards.

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A Spot of Bad Luck

But don’t stop reading just yet…

I promise I’m not writing this week’s newsletter to perform some sort of victory lap and brag about how my dad and I became fabulously wealthy.

Because that would be weird.

You see, I couldn’t write a newsletter talking all about luck if I didn’t also intimately understand the nature of bad luck. And I’m sorry to report that my dad and I no longer have that stack of 25 Bitcoin.

(And not because we spent it on Lambos and cocaine.)

In November 2023, after 10 patient years of holding, my dad and I decided to take the trip of a lifetime to El Salvador, the home of Bitcoin itself, where we had an amazing time visiting Bitcoin Beach, using Bitcoin as money, and attending the Adopting Bitcoin conference.

As you might expect, we were having a whale of a time.

Unfortunately, that’s where our trip of a lifetime became every Bitcoiner’s worst nightmare. On the last night of the conference, fired up and motivated by all the great speakers and projects we had seen, we rushed back to our Airbnb excited to continue work on our own little Bitcoin project we had been developing.

And it was in that moment, thousands of miles from home, in El Salvador, no less, that we discovered the horrible truth. We had been hacked. The 25 Bitcoin we had been holding for ten long years had been stolen, never to be seen again.

It was a truly brutal experience and one that’s quite hard to describe. Imagine 10 years of delayed gratification, 10 years of hard work, and all your plans for the future being destroyed in an instant.

The best analogy I can come up with is that it felt like someone had stolen ten years of our lives.

I won’t go into all the gory details in this week’s newsletter, but if you want to hear them, you can watch the talk I gave at Bitcoin Prague or check out this episode of The Bitcoin Way podcast.

(It might be worth checking out so you can learn from our mistakes, but the TL;DR is this: we stopped playing an active role, and as better tools for self-custody became available, we didn’t take action to upgrade to them – we became victims of our own complacency.)

Needless to say, this was quite a severe episode of “bad luck.”

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The Luckiest Man in Bitcoin

Despite this rather savage experience happening less than two years ago, it might surprise you that I still consider myself to be the luckiest man in Bitcoin. And I’d love to explain why.

First of all, when we discovered we had been hacked, I was only a couple of months away from getting married. And despite nuking my entire net worth, she was still crazy enough to say yes. (Gentlemen, some free advice: finding the right woman will improve your life significantly more than a large stack of Bitcoin.)

Second, when the Bitcoin community heard what had happened, the response was overwhelming. We were inundated with messages of support and countless people trying to help get us back on our feet. We had never experienced kindness from strangers like this before, and it had a profound effect on us and our outlook.

I feel exceptionally lucky to be part of this community and that so many amazing people rallied around us. It helped us keep our heads in the game and get right back on the horse instead of curling up in a ball and feeling sorry for ourselves. Thank God they did. Especially given Bitcoin went on to 5x in price in the two years since the hack.

I also feel exceptionally lucky to have had the opportunity to share my story on stage at Bitcoin Prague. The silver lining to losing our stack is that hundreds of people have been in touch since to let us know that hearing our story inspired them to improve their own Bitcoin security.

And of course, I feel incredibly lucky to have been given the opportunity to work with the team at The Bitcoin Way. I might be biased, but I can tell you that you won’t find a more credible, committed, and hard-working team. It is a real honor to work with such exceptional people on a mission to make sure others don’t suffer the same fate we did.

And last, but certainly not least, I feel incredibly lucky that in just a couple of months, my wife and I will be welcoming a brand new little hodler into the world.

What can I say? I am an extremely lucky man. Perhaps the luckiest man in Bitcoin.

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Let’s Make Some More Luck

As you can imagine, we’ve been on quite a journey. But we’re nowhere near done getting “lucky” just yet, and our crazy story is about to come full circle.

You see, out of sheer principle and commitment to the honey badger lifestyle, my dad and I never gave up on that Bitcoin project we’d been building when we discovered we’d been hacked, and we finally completed it!

So it gives me immense pleasure to share with you all that we developed and recently launched the world’s first provably fair Bitcoin lottery, powered by the Lightning Network!

What Is a “Provably Fair Bitcoin Lottery”?

Your first question is likely to be, “What on earth is a ‘provably fair Bitcoin lottery’?”

Let me explain…

The problem with traditional lotteries is all the trust required to make them work. They claim to select winners randomly, but there is no way for you to verify whether this is genuinely true or not. You have to trust that the ball machines they use haven’t been tampered with, that the balls haven’t been weighted, or that the “live” feed you’re watching isn’t actually pre-recorded.

Even in the case of online lotteries that rely on random number generators (RNGs), you have to trust that the number produced was truly random. It may well be, but there is no way for you to verify that after the fact.

In traditional lotteries, everything relies on trust. But we’re Bitcoiners, we don’t like to trust; we prefer to verify!

That’s why our Bitcoin lottery doesn’t rely on ball machines or RNGs to generate the randomness we need to select a winner. We use something much better. We use Bitcoin’s blockchain!

Why?

Because nobody can predict the hash of a future Bitcoin block, but once it has been mined and added to the chain, everyone can verify its authenticity. Using the hash of a future block gives us the randomness we need to select a winner in such a way that everyone can verify the draw was completely random and 100% provably fair.

How Does the Provably Fair Bitcoin Lottery Work?

So, how does it work?

Well, like any good software, it’s actually quite simple. I’ll walk you through it step by step.

Step 1 – Entering the Lottery

To enter the Bitcoin lottery, you don’t need to provide any personal information. All you have to do is provide us with an on-chain Bitcoin address. This is the address your winnings will be paid to if you’re lucky enough to be selected.

Step 2 – Purchasing Your Entries

Next, you purchase your entry to the lottery via Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, and the on-chain Bitcoin address you provided is added to the list of entries.

If you buy one entry, your Bitcoin address is included once. If you buy two entries, it’s included twice, and if you buy three entries, it’s included three times, and so on...

Step 3 – Timestamping the List of Entries

Once the lottery closes and we stop accepting new entries, we timestamp the entry list and share it publicly on our website and broadcast it on a public Telegram channel.

(By timestamping the list of entrants, you know it can’t be tampered with later.)

Step 4 – Announcing the “Winning Block”

Once the timestamped list of entries has been shared publicly, we announce the very next Bitcoin block as our “winning block.”

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Step 5 – Bitcoin Chooses a Winner

Once the winning block arrives, we use the hash of the block to randomly select a winner from the list of entries.

We do this by converting the block hash into decimal format and dividing it by the number of entrants. The remainder of this calculation tells us which line in the list of entrants is the lucky winner.

The example below shows what this would look like in a lottery with 100 entrants. The remainder is 42, which means the payout address on line 42 of our list of entries is the winner.

Step 6 – Paying Out Prizes

Prizes are paid out automatically to the winner because you provided your payout address as part of your entry. Your prize will be paid out on-chain, and the transaction ID of the payout will be shared publicly.

You don’t have to worry about losing your ticket or going through an arduous claims process; you can just sit back, relax, and receive your winnings.

Step 7 – Don’t Trust, Verify

Once the lottery has concluded, anybody can prove that the draw was 100% fair.

By taking the timestamped list of entries and the hash of the winning block, you can verify for yourself that the correct winner was chosen and check the TXID of the winner’s payout to verify they received their prize.

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Why Build a Bitcoin Lottery?

You might be wondering why we built this, so I’d love to share a few of the reasons this project got us so excited.

Traditional Lotteries Suck

One reason we wanted to build a provably fair Bitcoin lottery is because traditional lotteries suck. They are often promoted as a way to raise money for good causes, but once you buy your ticket, your money ends up in a nebulous black hole.

The VC-backed operators pay themselves handsomely for picking balls out of a machine, and the infrastructure required to run them is expensive and archaic, relying on paper tickets and dedicated POS terminals. They are extremely wasteful.

By comparison, we are only a few more features away from being able to run an entirely transparent global Bitcoin lottery that can operate entirely on an automated Telegram bot!

Proving Bitcoin Is Money

One of the big reasons we wanted to build this project is that it perfectly demonstrates that Bitcoin is money.

How many times have you heard that Bitcoin can’t support small payments?

Selling Bitcoin lottery tickets for less than $1 clearly demonstrates this is total nonsense. Bitcoin is money and can be used for both small and large payments.

If we want to live in a world on a Bitcoin standard, we need to demonstrate that we can build things that don’t need to interact with the fiat system at all.

(Important note – You can’t play the Bitcoin lottery with ETF shares or treasury company stocks, sorry.)

Orange Pilling Opportunities

How many times have you tried to orange pill someone only to hear the excuse, “It’s too late, Bitcoin is too expensive, I missed the boat”

We all know, of course, that you can’t be late to adopting Bitcoin in the same way you can’t be late to adopting fire or the wheel. But sometimes these arguments aren’t enough to do the trick.

Perhaps a Bitcoin lottery could be a useful orange-pilling tool. Your response to this objection could be, “Yes, Bitcoin is expensive, so instead of buying some, why not try and win some in the Bitcoin lottery?”

The catch? To enter, they will need to have an on-chain address, a Lightning wallet, and will need to send transactions and interact directly with the network!

Bitcoin Fixes This

As Bitcoiners, we talk a lot about Bitcoin “fixing this,” but this is often a theoretical statement about how a sound monetary standard will fix a lot of society’s problems decades from now.

We get excited about the prospect of using Bitcoin lotteries to take more direct action. See a problem in society that needs fixing? Point a Bitcoin lottery to raise funds for it, and we could take direct action to fix things now!

To demonstrate this, we ran our very first pilot at the Bitcoin Bulgaria Conference in Sofia just last weekend to raise money to support the Bulgarian Bitcoin Circular Economy Initiative, an organization working to onboard merchants to accept Bitcoin as payment all across the Balkans.

Despite not advertising online and keeping the draw small and local, it was really popular. We managed to sell 472 entries for a total prize pot of 368,000 sats, with half going to the winner and half going to support the Bulgarian Bitcoin community!

And how much did we take as operators?

Nothing.

We didn’t do it for the money; we did it for the culture.

You can learn more about this draw and check out the verifiable results here:
👉 https://www.btcbalkansprizedraw.com/

If you think this idea is cool and want to get involved in the next prize draw, we’ll be running another one in November to raise money for free speech organizations in the UK. (You might have noticed we have a bit of a problem with that currently.) Follow me on Twitter @RMessitt to receive updates and help us stick it to Keir Starmer.

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Get Lucky – The Bitcoin Way

I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to write to you each week in The Bitcoin Way newsletter. It’s a genuine honor.

If I could share just one thing I’ve learned on this crazy journey, it’s that Bitcoin lets you make your own luck. The more you lean into it, the luckier you’ll get. The more you embrace it, the better your life will become.

But here’s the kicker: you’ll only get lucky if you put the work in and play an active role. So do something I wish I’d done. Don’t just invest in Bitcoin; invest in yourself. Learn the skills you need to protect your Bitcoin indefinitely, and keep improving your knowledge to become as competent and capable as you can. Your future depends on it.

Within just a few sessions the experts at The Bitcoin Way will ensure you learn everything you need to know to guarantee that 20 years from now, you will still have your Bitcoin and everyone around you is calling you "lucky."

Make your own luck and book a free 30-minute consultation today.