Good Faith

Yeah, I don’t know what’s compelling me to confide in you but if it helps, I’ll tell you what I think.

I started buying bitcoin in Feb/March of 2015 via Coinbase but only after following it for while and reading a lot, watching a shitload of YouTube and consulting with a good friend of mine from college, call him ‘ Dr Z ‘, who is an experienced software engineer. I asked him for an opinion on the Nakomoto white paper and its realization via the bitcoin protocol. He said he thought the algorithm was sound, had even purchased some bitcoin himself but, ‘it’s very risky’, which goes without saying... I just wanted someone whose opinion I trust to tell me the system works as it should... He did. So, I began buying in via Coinbase (like a lot of people)...

My formal educational background is in economics , math and statistics. My main work experience is in restaurants (13 years) which got me through college and a few years after graduation (I was a manager) until I became a licensed financial advisor, which is the work I’ve been doing for the last 18 years, with stretches of 7 and 7 1/2 years in two different banks and the last 3 1/2 on my own.

My customers are individuals (what the institutional types derisively call ‘retail customers’) and their families- 99.99% of them self made, hard working people...

You might say it was the work I was meant to do. One of the very first serious questions I remember asking my father when I was a child was, “Why do people work?”

(I was lucky that my father was a serious person where work was concerned. He worked for the phone company (Ohio Bell). He loved getting up early to get ready. He would start the van to let it warm up around 6:30am, which was my alarm clock. When I would hear him get in and start backing out of the driveway, I would pull back the blinds and look out the window to watch him leave. Most of the time, he would look over at me, smile, wave and then go off to face the day... )

Having a deep appreciation for what it means to earn money, to find out why people do it and how they feel about their resources- I always had that from an early age. Learning about all the variations- the different perspectives on the subject by interviewing thousands of people - has been a humbling experience but one that I believe has given me insight that could be helpful to you and others who might read these entries.

Call me ‘Steven Mullins’ - a pen name that I am taking. ( I enjoy anonymity but will try my best to be as accurate and truthful as I can be with what I write about - the events, memories, things and people ...)

Why now? Why should anyone care about what I have to say? Great questions.

I don’t see myself as anyone special, per se... but like a lot of my clients - persons who worked for 40-50 years, who will describe to me how they raised a family, paid their bills and taxes on time, dealt with the world in ‘good faith’, have vast life experience and managed to save some money while maintaining their dignity and integrity, and then will say to me, with the greatest degree of humility, “I don’t understand what I’m doing with my money. Can you help me?” They always know more than they give themselves credit for. I’d like to think I’m the same....

Now, I’m saying, “ How can I help?” By providing honest testimony to you, trying my best... Maybe...

Tax time is coming. When I started buying BTC, it was in the range of $200-250 per token. I accumulated almost 60 by the late summer of 2015, which when I stopped buying... Then, it started going up. A lot people thought I was crazy (and I am🤔) but I was and am convinced the cryptospace is the avenue I must take to have a fighting chance at maintaining wealth in the future. The fiat monetary system I was born into is (and perhaps has always been) compromised. I figured that I would be a fool not to channel a portion of my savings that way....

So, what now? My crypto appreciated by an incredible degree last year. I did the math and came to the conclusion that I had to buy some dollars, just in case there’s a major pullback against fiat. The portfolio grew a lot.

Coinbase allows me to sell $15k per week. So, I’ve been pulling out the max for several weeks now.... Accounting for the moves I’ve made... Shouldn’t be a problem - in theory.

But I suspect the IRS is waiting to unleash the auditors on anyone who fills out form 8949...

Why would they do that? To rob people of their privacy.

Maybe I asked for it by selling portions for dollars. I have only myself to blame. But then, if the US government and the Fed hadn’t been so out of control, would I have even gone down this road?

Enough for now...