Controversial take:

We need to step back from the emotional framing of the “housing affordability crisis” and look at it through a longer-term, structural lens.

Homeownership played an outsized role in wealth creation for prior generations, but it did so under a very specific set of conditions that no longer exist in the same way.

When the environment changes, it is a mistake to assume the same strategies must remain optimal.

Much of what people perceive as housing “outperformance” is actually the result of leverage and forced savings, not superior returns.

Over decades, homeowners inject large amounts of additional capital, accept illiquidity, and take on concentrated risk.

When compared honestly, housing succeeded less because it was a great asset and more because it bundled leverage, inflation protection, and lifestyle consumption into a single, default savings vehicle.

The decline in housing affordability does not automatically mean future generations are doomed to be poorer. The opportunity set has shifted.

Work is more flexible, capital requirements to build businesses are lower, and wealth creation is no longer as tightly coupled to owning physical property.

Homeownership still has real personal and lifestyle value, and for many people it will continue to make sense. The mistake is treating it as a financial inevitability or a moral benchmark.

The broader point is about adaptation: the rules have changed, and building wealth today requires clearer thinking, flexibility, and a willingness to move beyond models optimized for a different era.

I dive deeper into this topic and run the numbers in the most recent issue of FIRE BTC.

You can check it out here:
https://firebtc.substack.com/p/homeward-bound

Don’t forget to subscribe if you found this interesting. I hit your inbox each week with takes on personal finance and bitcoin.

IKR 😅

2025 broke a lot of models.

Bitcoin made new ATHs… yet finished the year lower.

Stocks ripped. Gold surged. Bitcoin chopped.

A frustrating year for price—but an important one for thinking clearly about FIRE, risk, and assumptions.

The FIRE BTC year-end review is live.

🧵👇

https://firebtc.substack.com/p/2025-fire-btc-year-in-review

Your brain runs on less power than a dim light bulb—about 20 watts.

Yet that tiny energy budget supports a level of cognition that megawatt-scale AI clusters still struggle to match.

This contrast reveals a fundamental design principle: The most capable systems are not the ones with the most resources. They are the ones with the best constraints.

We see this same divide in the monetary world:

🔸 Fiat Money behaves like a massive AI cluster. It relies on complexity, constant intervention, and brute force scale. It is expansion-driven, mirroring bureaucracy.

🔸 Bitcoin behaves like the human brain. It operates within hard limits, simple rules, and decentralized validation. It is constraint-driven, mirroring biology.

One design leads to noise and fragility. The other leads to signal and stability.

In my latest piece for FIRE BTC, I explore why nature’s most efficient systems reveal Bitcoin’s deepest strength—and why architecture matters more than energy consumption.

Read the full article here: https://firebtc.substack.com/p/brains-bitcoin-and-the-power-of-constraints

Cutting $800/month erases $240,000 from your FIRE number and can add millions to your future stack when redirected into assets. Most people never see the leverage hiding in their expenses.

https://firebtc.substack.com/p/trim-and-turbocharge

@nprofile1q... I assume you know I can’t give you tax advice, but I can point you to the resources for you to DYOR and understand our position and how we approach it:

https://help.unchained.com/what-is-loan-collateral-and-what-does-unchained-do-with-it

https://www.unchained.com/blog/ultimate-guide-bitcoin-loans?_gl=1*c3ao0f*_gcl_au*MTYwODcyMDQwMi4xNzYwNDc2MTQ2*_ga*NDkyNDgxNjkyLjE3NjA0NzYxNDY.*_ga_N2E2DZCQWE*czE3NjQzNDA4NTUkbzIxJGcxJHQxNzY0MzQwODY0JGo1MSRsMCRoNDU2MDc0NjQx

Bitcoin is having its Covid moment.

The gain of function mutation in Core v30 that removes the default OP_RETURN relay policy size limit has resulted in an environment in bitcoin culture that closely mirrors the Covid era.

The threat of the spam virus has turned normally level-headed, sane bitcoiners into hysterical hypochondriacs with a touch of authoritarianism.

One side advocates for mask mandates and quarantines, while the other side hosts superspreader parties in brazen mockery.

I’ve seen public shaming, baseless virtue signaling, shameless moral superiority, and even appeals to law enforcement to arrest offending opponents.

Each side parrots the party line, taking cues from their respective authority figures, and using language they just learned a week ago as if they’ve been experts all along.

I’ve spent countless hours sifting through the noise, doing my best to fairly consider each argument. My perspective is this: Filters are like wearing a mask when you walk through a restaurant, only to take it off when you sit down. Masks don’t stop the virus, but if it makes you feel better, then go for it.

However, there’s a wave of mass hysteria spreading, where reason and thoughtfulness has been overcome by a fever of existential crisis. And as it was during Covid, this lockdown-style reaction is way worse than the disease you’re fighting.

Bitcoin will be just fine. It is healthy, fit, strong, and has a great immune system. The best thing you can do is get some fresh air and some exercise. This is not an existential threat in any way, and we shouldn’t treat it that way.

🧵 How to make smarter money (and life) decisions using a poker player’s mindset:

Most people chase certainty. But in the real world, especially on the road to financial independence, you’ll never have it.

That’s where Expected Value Thinking comes in.

Let’s break it down: 👇

🎲 Life is a series of bets.

Every decision (buy or rent, save or splurge, hold or sell) is a bet on an uncertain future.

Expected Value Analysis (EVA) gives you a framework to make the best bets, even when outcomes are unpredictable.

🃏 The poker analogy:

Say you’re holding a 20% chance of winning a $600 pot, and you need to call a $100 bet.

Your EV: (0.2 × $600) + (0.8 × -$100) = + $40

You’ll probably lose the hand… but if you keep making this bet, you come out ahead over time.

🚀 Bitcoin is the most asymmetric trade on the planet.

If you think there’s even a 25% chance BTC hits $1M from $100k today, then a $1k investment has an EV of $2,500.

In poker terms: you’re buying $2.50 for every $1.

That’s a bet worth repeating.

⚖️ FIRE (and life) is all about tradeoffs, and EVA helps you weigh them.

Rent vs. buy? Take a sabbatical? Start a business?

Running the EV forces you to factor in risk, reward, and flexibility, giving you clarity in uncertain decisions.

🔁 Process > outcome.

Don’t judge decisions by whether they worked out.

Judge them by whether they were smart bets.

EVA helps you make consistently high-EV choices.

Over time, those add up to financial freedom.

📈 Want to level up your decision-making?

I wrote about using Expected Value Thinking to strengthen your FIRE + bitcoin plan.

Check out the full post here, and subscribe if you dig it:

https://firebtc.substack.com/p/expected-value-thinking

Bitcoin passphrase vs. multisig: Which is right for you?

Two approaches people often consider to gain additional bitcoin security are a passphrase (a one-word secret) and multisig (secures your bitcoin with multiple keys). Let’s see how these two approaches compare. 👇

Singlesig + passphrase
By adding a passphrase to your singlesig wallet, you add a 13th or 25th word of your choosing to your seed phrase, which generates a wholly separate and unique wallet from the default wallet generated without a passphrase. You can create an infinite number of passphrase wallets associated with a single seed phrase backup and hardware wallet.

A passphrase adds some protection in that it distributes your risk across three critical items (your device, seed phrase backup, and your passphrase), but it still has a major single point of failure. If your passphrase is ever lost or forgotten, your bitcoin are gone forever because you no longer have the key to the bitcoin wallet.

Multisig
Multisig is a bitcoin custody model where you construct a wallet using multiple bitcoin keys instead of just one. Multisig is very flexible, allowing wallet developers and even users to set the total number of keys used to construct the wallet (n) and the number of those keys required to spend (m). This creates what’s called an m-of-n quorum. There are practically infinite ways to approach multisig, but the most popular approaches are 2-of-3 (three keys total, with any two keys required to spend) and 3-of-5 (five keys total, with any three needed to spend).

Comparing passphrase with multisig: 7 points to consider

1⃣ Convenience - SS + passphrase is more convenient than DIY multisig but similar to collaborative custody multisig

2⃣ Ease of backup - It’s easier to back up a single hardware wallet, a seed phrase, and a passphrase than back up all the keys and seed phrases necessary to properly store your bitcoin in a standard multisig wallet.

3⃣ Availability - To understand the differences between passphrase and multisig for availability of access, you have to consider multiple possible scenarios: singlesig with and without properly secured passphrases, standard multisig, and collaborative custody multisig. Each of these has different availability of access profiles.

4⃣ Transaction costs - Mining fees in periods of low demand for block space are very cheap, leaving this category often irrelevant. However, it remains true that multisig transactions are more expensive than singlesig transactions. Using a passphrase with singlesig doesn’t add anything additional to the mining fee above standard singlesig; the mining fees are directly correlated with the number of keys involved in the transaction.

5⃣ Fault tolerance - Multisig shines against singlesig with a passphrase and singlesig in general when it comes to fault tolerance. That’s because the nature of multisig (and, again, proper key storage and seed phrase backups!) makes it very difficult to lose enough keys (and the necessary wallet configuration information) to lose access to your funds.

6⃣ Resisting attacks - Altogether, multisig has the slight upper hand for attack resistance. In 2-of-3, an attacker would have to physically compromise at least two physical locations without your knowledge and have specific knowledge that the discovered keys are used in multisig and compromise your multisig configuration information.

7⃣ Financial services - Collaborative custody multisig opens the door to financial services done in a trust-minimized way, such as collateralized loans (where three parties can share custody of funds so that all parties have transparency as to the state of the funds on the blockchain). It also uniquely solves for the problem of bitcoin inheritance.

Can you add a passphrase to multisig?
Yes, you can add passphrases to one or more of the keys used in your multisig m-of-n scheme. But should you? Most bitcoin users set up multisig wallets without passphrases because multisig already eliminates a given hardware wallet or seed phrase as a single point of failure. Adding passphrases can add unnecessary complexity, and unnecessary complexity diminishes security rather than improves it.

=====================

Every decision you make regarding bitcoin custody involves trade-offs. Perhaps multisig helps you sleep better at night, but you might have to drive several hours to get to that second key if you want to benefit from geographically-distributed keys. Or maybe you have to wait for your collaborative custody partner to verify your identity to sign with their key.

Choosing between singlesig (with or without a passphrase) and multisig isn’t an A or B choice; the answer for you might even be both! Maybe you want to secure the more significant portion of your net worth in a multisig collaborative context for peace of mind while keeping smaller amounts for easy access available in a software wallet on your phone.

It’s all about looking at your situation and finding a balance of trade-offs that work best for you and your family or organization.


Check out the full post on the Unchained blog 👇

https://unchained.com/blog/bitcoin-singlesig-passphrase-vs-multisig/

If you're not growing your assets by the rate of monetary expansion, you're getting poorer.

The spirit of the next bitcoin bull market

The beautiful thing about multisig is that there is no single point of failure, and that includes the hardware you use.

Right now we support Trezor, Ledger, and Coldcard. The market reality is those three manufacturers have a supermajority of market share.

We likely won't be discontinuing support for any of those in the near future, but we are evaluating adding support for additional manufacturers/devices.

Key point: multisig fixes this.