How to Join the 1.3%

Everyone’s doing it. Are you?

If you’re a long-time Field Notes reader, you’re probably doing it, even if just a little bit.

If not, you probably should start doing it.

And if you’ve decided you’re never going to do it… well, all I can say is that I tried to bring the horse to water, but the horse was belligerent and ran away.

Personally, I’ve been doing it for about eight years now. My life is better for it—a provable fact. Though I will say that early on, I wasn’t sure anyone would ever do it, at least not in large numbers, because all my friends at the time thought I was an absolute mental midget for doing it in the first place.

But now…

Goldman Sachs is doing it. Charles Schwab is eager to do it. Pittsburgh’s PNC Bank started doing it this summer.

The Czech government is talking about doing it. Some government folks in Texas are trying to do it, as are some in Arizona and New Hampshire. And way over in Bhutan, high up in the Himalayas, the Bhutanese have been doing it in secret.

And what is everyone doing, or trying to do?

Stack away sacks of bitcoin and other crypto.

Which is important because those who aren’t stacking sacks of crypto are going to find themselves on the wrong side of the financial markets at exactly the wrong moment.

Until a few years ago, no entity of any importance cared about crypto. To 98% of the world, bitcoin was a digital lark. Cryptocurrencies more broadly were weapons of wealth destruction.

But today?

Well, let’s look around…

The US government, as I’ve noted too many times to remember, is building a bitcoin reserve… which has pushed numerous countries to talk about doing the same. State legislatures all over America, as well as regional governments in countries around the world, are all pushing legislation (or have already passed legislation), aimed at building a crypto reserve too.

At least 24 US banks now hold bitcoin directly, or indirectly through ETFs. Names include Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, US Bancorp, Wells Fargo, and others. PNC Financial owns millions of dollars of bitcoin and partnered with Coinbase over the summer to begin offering services that will allow mom-and-pop retail banking customers to buy and hold bitcoin in their bank account.

Globally, nearly 150 public companies have officially announced they own bitcoin directly. More than 1,300 own bitcoin through ETFs.

Over on Wall Street, large financial institutions like Blackrock, VanEck, and others are building crypto-specific exchange-traded funds that are so popular that they’re amassing assets-under-management at the fastest rate ever in the ETF industry. A good bit of that money is coming from institutional investors including pension funds and insurance companies… not the kind of investors who are out here gunslinging for their dinner.

Yet globally, just 106 million people own bitcoin.

I mean, 106 million sounds like a bunch of people. But it’s just 1.3% of the global population.

Cleave off just the so-called developed countries, and then less than 8% of the Western world owns bitcoin.

Point being: Anyone who’s buying bitcoin today, even at $120,000 per token… you’re still very early to the game. You’re still going to see huge profits as bitcoin flies ever higher over the remainder of this decade and into the 2030s.

I’ve been pushing people toward bitcoin since it was about $10,000 per token. We’re up about 12x from there. But we’re still in first gear.

When you have national, regional, and state governments buying bitcoin or building bitcoin reserves… when you have hundreds of banks and public companies globally buying bitcoin… when you have Wall Street firms building crypto-based investment products… when you have brokerage firms such as Charles Schwab announcing that they’re moving into the crypto exchange business to take on market juggernauts like Coinbase and Binance…

Well, it’s all a big ol’ message screaming: PAY ATTENTION!!!

A lot of what happens in government, banking, and in corporate finance is opaque.

This trend is transparent.

Bitcoin buyers are telling you they’re buying bitcoin. And they’re telling you why they’re buying:

1. Crypto and the blockchain are the future of finance.

2. Bitcoin in particular is an asset that’s going to protect against a fiat-currency rejiggering that must happen to save the financial world.

They’re the same reasons I’ve been buying bitcoin for years, and why I buy every single week, literally like clockwork.

I’ve arranged for my Coinbase account to automatically buy bitcoin once a week, regardless of price. Sort of a dollar-cost-average plan on autopilot so that I don’t have to remember to buy, or debate with myself whether the price is good.

I put my purchase on autopilot because I want to continually accumulate bitcoin, unemotionally and without thinking about it so that one day, when I retire, I will have a stash of bitcoin that will be worth a boatload of dinero.

So like I said, I’m doing it.

Banks are doing it.

Governments are doing it.

Public companies are doing it.

Are you doing it too?