Financial independence has a way of making you crave certainty.

You want to know the exact savings rate, exact retirement number, exact bitcoin allocation, exact year you can walk away. I get it, because the whole point of FIRE is to turn a vague life problem into something you can plan around.

But a lot of the important choices aren't clean yes-or-no decisions. They're bets with probabilities, payoffs, and downside. Expected value thinking is useful because it moves the question from "will this work?" to "is this a good decision if I repeat this kind of decision over time?"

That matters for bitcoin, but it also matters for housing, career moves, liquidity, taxes, and how much optionality you protect along the way. A good outcome can come from a bad decision, and a bad outcome can come from a good one. The process is what compounds.

If you think bitcoin has a meaningful chance of becoming much larger money over the next decade, then the asymmetry changes the whole FIRE calculation. You still have to manage risk, but you don't need certainty to act. You need odds, payoff, and position size to line up.

I wrote about expected value thinking and how it applies to FIRE, bitcoin, and life decisions: https://firebtc.io/p/expected-value-thinking