Dear nieces and nephews,

You are all adults now. Aunt Lauren and I have been giving you gifts your entire lives. Some of you benefited for 30 years, some of you for 18 years. This year will be the final year, we are all adults now. But I am going to give you the most precious gifts I ever gave you, two very scarce things; my time and some bitcoin.

Over the last three years, I’ve probably been a little excessive with my group texts talking about the economy, the government and money/Bitcoin. I do not apologize. I feel that the economy is a sham, that our government is inept and that our money is being debased by both.

I feel that what gave me my opportunities in life was an early start and saving what I earned. I spent tons of time in my 20’s learning about stocks, options, bonds and other investments.

I realized that inflation was real and that I needed to educate myself or trust someone else to safeguard, grow and protect my hard earned savings.

I’ve seen the government offer loans to people who shouldn’t get them in an attempt to stimulate financial activity, and it has always ended in a collective bailout.

The housing crisis of 2008 robbed your generation of cheap housing. In lieu of the banks and the borrowers taking the hit they should have, the government bailed them out with printed money and housing prices just kept rising. This has also happened in relation to college education. The government gives loans to kids to go to school to get lectured at and party, which increases the price of college because the colleges are competing for money that has not been earned yet. These kids will get bailed out, but THEY are not bailing out anyone. Because your government doesn’t produce anything, they don’t add to the economic production. They only produce debts and liabilities in excess of the taxes we give them. WE are bailing them out. Our government politicians will continue down this road until they can’t persuade the central bank to buy our bonds/debt.

We need to separate money and state, to remove the option to function on debt (our future production) from the decision makers.

3 years ago, I learned about a software project called Bitcoin (upper case B).

It’s basically a distributed accounting system that has and emits its own native currency called bitcoin (lower case b). It has a monetary policy that is written in software code that can’t be changed unless the majority (consensus) of the users run new software. Basically it’s opt-in, money you can’t fuck with.

Hard Money!!!

Right now bitcoin is a nascent speculative asset with a total market capitalization of less than 425 billion. That’s 1/5 of an Apple computer. It’s competing globally as a store of value for anyone with a smartphone. Anyone can hold bitcoin, you don’t need a bank or a third party and you can spend your bitcoins on anything you want 24/7.

Learning about Bitcoin and interacting with it is easy.

It’s fun to imagine what will be built on top of this protocol. They call it a truth machine because it’s an immutable ledger that synchronizes with millions of computers globally every 10 minutes. Everyone’s software reviews and validates all transactions. Checking balances and keeping the score. The Bitcoin network survives on free market incentives. The government can’t, nor can anyone else, force you to use it or interact. Learning about it is like peeling an onion, it has many layers.

If anything I have said above resonates with you, call me or text me and I’d love to discuss. If you are interested in owning some bitcoin to store, protect and save for your future self, I’ve enclosed a fresh Opendime.

An Opendime is a bitcoin wallet, it allows you to generate a public address and a private key to later sweep the funds. The device is activated when you plug it into a USB and then load some data on, like pictures. The data is used to produce a random public key/private key pair. The public key is like your bank account. Your private key is what allows you to sweep the funds from the account to somewhere else (friend, store, exchange). This device is not intended to be your wallet, because you will eventually need to sweep all the funds somewhere else, but you can store bitcoin on it. Here is a link to their site to learn more about it.

If you want your final gift, activate the Opendime and send me your public key. I will prorate the amount I send you based on your age; the youngest getting the most and the oldest getting the least.

If you don’t want to partake, that’s ok also—just send me back the Opendime and case I made and I will Venmo you $100.

Love, 

Your uncle Pete and Aunt Lauren