Oddbean

Retirement is not a matter of "I hope that...", it's about an high confidence that things will happen, so that I can safely consider myself out of the rat race without being forced to enter it back again because of some unfortunate event. I'm quite sure bitcoin will establish a crucial role as a freedom protocol and possibly as an alternative monetary asset (we're already at that point). What I'm not quite sure about is the price at which the asset will be exchanged 1day, 1week, 1 year, 10 years from now. Bitcoin can still lose its primacy, can still suffer by some undiscovered consensus bugs, can even perish from the technological pov and became a 100% financial asset, in which case I wouldn't consider it as a win. Therefore, I'm not sure that sitting on 100'000'000 sats will free you from the rat race anytime soon. If you want to believe it you can, but that's not a good financial decision. Moreover, retirement it's a matter of stream of income too, which bitcoin does not garantee because it's not an income asset. Thus, you would have to sell it gradually to pay the rent and stuff, or maybe use it as collateral, but that's a very high risk move considering the asymmetric loss you would suffer by losing the sats due to hacks or bankrupcies. BUT, on the other hand, collateral is a good option as long as the gains extracted from the appreciation of the asset outperform the compounded intra-year gains obtained by investing the cash (from the colateralization) into other markets (or an entrepreneurial activity). I expect this to happen in the medium term (5-10 years), not certainly in the long term (10-50 years). The result of this is that you have high incentive in collateralizing your sats now but now you risk way more due to political, economical and technological uncertainty. You would like to collateralize them in the future, when finally retired, but if you're young enough you could run into a situation where the gains from the price appreciation will be lower and you would need an active stream of income to cover the loan you got from collateralization. Again, do your own math. 100'000'000sats are probably good to live in a very very very poor country, but: - I dubt that into 30 years the country will be still as poor as now, thus the cost of life will increase - if you have children or want any, don't you want them to benefit from your financial intuition with bitcoin? If so, why stopping working early and leave potentially some relatively cheap sats on the table? - I doubt that in the very very poor country you'll be able to spend sats safely or/and will not be robbed - anything could happen...even if 100'000'000 sats will be worth half a mil dollars into 8 years (which is a reasonable estimate for that time span), still that's not so much to retire and never work again. Sorry for the extremely long reasoning.