➡ This text shares important lessons about investing in Bitcoin. It emphasizes the importance of understanding market cycles and investor behavior to make informed decisions. It also highlights the value of having conviction in your investments, attending events to learn from others, and thinking long-term. The text advises taking personal custody of your Bitcoin, avoiding spending it unnecessarily, and holding onto it rather than trading.

➡ Trading can be fun, but it’s important to be careful and not risk all your money. Bitcoin, a type of digital money, is seen as a solution to problems with traditional money, like the fact that it can be manipulated and printed in unlimited amounts. To understand Bitcoin better, it’s recommended to read about its history and economics. Also, remember to plan for taxes and compliance if you decide to buy, sell, or trade Bitcoin, as this is taken seriously by tax authorities.

The key to multiplying your wealth faster with Bitcoin isn’t about buying the next meme coin or trying to out trade the market. It’s about understanding a few simple lessons. The real cheat codes I had to learn the hard way. Now today I’m going to share with you 15 lessons I wish I knew sooner and how you can use them to play the game smarter. Starting with lesson number one, the paradigm shift. So the paradigm shift is that Bitcoin isn’t a stock. It’s not like another Wall Street toy. It’s a new monetary system.

Now the reason why that distinction is so big and so powerful is because when you think of it just like a stock you think in normal terms of like allocation sizes and buying low and selling high. And you completely miss out on the entire shift that’s happening and how big this is going to be. And that causes you to take small positions, sell out with little bits of profit. I’ve heard countless stories of people who bought at $1,000 and sold at $10,000 was the best trade of their life. But they missed out as it went to 30, 40, 50 and $100,000.

So you need to understand really what’s at stake here. So the action step to take here is reread the Bitcoin white paper. Understand what the Bitcoin white paper says. And list three ways that Bitcoin changes incentives versus fiat. If you can think about that you’ll start to understand how big this is. Now lesson number two I wish I would have known sooner is that the early mover advantage is real. You see Bitcoin rewards early conviction, not late perfection. So when I first heard about Bitcoin, it was like 2013. And I could have got in for a really, really, really low entry price.

But instead, I wasn’t really sure what it was. I didn’t really pay attention to it. I thought it was just some new scam coin or whatever it was going to be. And I waited until 2015 to get in. Now 2015 was still great, still great entry was around $300 at the time. But that cost me about a 20x move because I didn’t move sooner. So I understand some people are skeptical. I understand some people don’t have the conviction. But what I would say is at this point, most of the reasons why you wouldn’t have conviction to be skeptical are sort of gone.

But maybe you haven’t done the work. So the action step would be simple. Buy a starter position today for $50 or $100 because that $50 that $100 is not a lot of risk. But once you put a little bit of money into it, it’ll change your entire mindset and allow you to start seeing it differently. Now lesson number three that I wish I would have learned back then that I know now is what I called the core stack rule. And what do I mean by that? Sort of thinking back to the first one, thinking of like a stock, we want to decide how much you want to allocate it to it.

Now, if you watch my content at all, you know that I talk about buying Bitcoin and never selling your Bitcoin. Now, some people still think about it as in like, well, if I could buy it here and sell it here, if I could buy at the bottom of the cycle, sell at the top of the cycle. And so what I would do is at least define what your core stack is. So I have some Bitcoin that I’m never going to sell. And I have some that I would sell. So for example, I think that Bitcoin will hit a million dollars by 2030.

That’s a 10x from here. So what you could do is say, well, what I’d like to do is have 10 Bitcoin that never gets sold and go to my kids and my grandkids and my great game kids. But I’d also like to sell some and make a profit. So maybe I’ll buy 20 Bitcoin today, 10 of which I’ll sell at 2030. And that’ll be hit a million dollars each $10 million. And the other 10 all stay forever, or I’m going to hold these 10, I’ll trade these to know whatever you do, but define that stack and know how much you’re going to keep forever.

Lesson number four is understanding the adoption curve lens. And this is one I talk about quite often. And I think it catches most people off guard. And that is when you understand technology, specifically, technology adoption curves, they follow something called an s curve. And when you look at the s curve, it basically tells us how long it will take for a new technology to reach adoption. And my understanding how long it’s supposed to take and what the stages that it’s going to go through allows us to be more patient. You see, most people that come into Bitcoin are way too impatient, they expect way too much too soon.

But if you understand the s curve, then you know how long you’re waiting for. Now, the way an s curve works is that a time it takes to go from zero to 10% adoption is the same time it takes to go from 10% to 90% adoption. And we’re in the up part of the s curve right now, things are taking off, but we’re still early. But if you can understand these historical adoption curves, and you can understand the process of these curves, then you’ll be able to wait longer. What I like to say is that it’s much easier to wait when you know how long you have to wait for.

And if you can wait just five more years, you’ll be rewarded. Now, lesson number five is the halving cycle playbook. Now, most of you probably know at this point, Bitcoin has these four year halving cycles. Every four years, the new supply, the inflation of Bitcoin gets cut in half. Now, elementary 101 is that if the demand stays the same and the supply cuts in half, the price goes up. What happens is the supply gets cut in half and the demand goes up, it goes up even faster. And it creates these supply shocks, if you will, and it creates this boom and bust markets.

And so you can see over the last couple of halving cycles that we have, Bitcoin goes up, makes a new all time high and crashes back down. Now, without understanding these halving cycles properly and understanding where they work in terms of sequence, it’s easy to get caught off guard. Myself, I’ve gotten caught off guard many times. I saw like I started buying in 2015 at 300 bucks. By the end of 2017, by December 2017, it was $20,000. Then it dropped all the way down. And I remember back then, the first one I’ve gone through thinking, why didn’t I sell? What did I do wrong? This will never come back.

I missed my chance. And then it came back again. And then the halving cycle happened and it crashed again. And I thought, man, will it ever come back this time? And because I didn’t understand that, and because I didn’t have conviction of it coming back, I didn’t benefit as much as I could have. I could have been adding aggressively to those bottom parts of the cycle when it was at its lows, but I didn’t. Lesson number six is liquidity principle. Now, liquidity principle is what I talk about quite often on this channel, which is what drives all asset prices, the global liquidity.

Liquidity is what drives asset prices, including Bitcoin. And we can take a look at it. And we can see that it typically happens at about a nine times sensitivity ratio. And it happens on about a 10 to 12 week lag. So what that means is that if we watch liquidity, not the news, not the tariffs, not the trade wars, not whatever the Fed is going to do, but we just watch liquidity, we have a head start on what’s going to happen in asset prices. So for example, I just made a video, maybe we’ll link to it right here or put it in the show notes down below, about how liquidity has been acting in the markets for the last two quarters, and why prices are doing what they’re doing and why Bitcoin is taking off again right now.

And if you understand liquidity principle, then you can get ahead. How do you do that? Well, there’s three people that I follow that make a global liquidity chart that I think is pretty good. Number one, Michael Howell. Number two, the Bitcoin layer. Number three, Real Vision are all pretty good. Or you could just watch the Fed balance sheet. You could watch global M2. And there are low fidelity ways to do it, blunt ways to do it, but they still work pretty good. Lesson number seven is called the psychology framework. Now the psychology framework is more about market sentiment than it is fundamentals.

You might have seen the Wall Street trader psychology, where it kind of goes up and crashes down and then there’s like the despair and people think we’ll never come back to disbelief and then it takes off again. And it’s all about sentiment. And when you understand that you can start to understand where sentiment’s at and where we might be in the market cycle. So at the bottom, you have something called capitulation, where everybody’s done, they’re tired, they’re mad, they just, I’m out and they sell. When you see these things in the market, like peak fear, that might be time to start buying.

I know it’s really hard. And when you seek peak euphoria, it might be time to what I do is don’t buy as much. I don’t sell at the top. So what you want to do is you want to study behavioral finance, you want to understand herd mentality, you want to understand what FOMO is, and you want to start to monitor the markets for this. So you know when you might want to add less to your stack, or you want to add more aggressively. Now lesson number eight is the community conviction rule. Now, the conviction rule is probably the number one thing that I wish I would have had sooner.

I wish it would have had more conviction, because you hear, Oh, man, you bought Bitcoin in 2015 was 300 bucks, you’re so lucky, you must have made so much money. Well, not really, because back in 2015, it was so risky, we didn’t even know what it was to put like $1,000 into it back then seemed so risky. Whereas today, you could move millions or billions into it. But you couldn’t do it back then. We didn’t have the conviction. Now, all of these lessons that I’m giving you now and the ones that I’m going to continue to give you will help you build the conviction, but you can’t borrow conviction, you can only earn it, you can only live it.

And the fastest way to accelerate that conviction, and your belief and resilience is to be around other people that you can learn from and share from and spar back and forth with. And one of the best ways to do that is by going to an event. So you see me speaking at conferences all the time. And the greatest ROI for me speaking at these conferences is to be around these other people and share these ideas, relationships that I’ve built, friendships that I’ve developed, business opportunities that have popped up. And so I would recommend attend a Bitcoin meetup or a conference, you can find Bitcoin meetups all over the country, I’m sure they’re happening in your local area, you can come to the conference.

As a matter of fact, the biggest one is the Bitcoin conference has happened in May in Las Vegas, I’ll be speaking there. So if you’re not already coming, you should come. And if you want to save a little bit of money, I’ll put a link to my code down below. And I’m going to have a meetup for my followers. So if you’re there, I’d love to meet you. I’ll have a link down below for a little signup sheet. Let me know if you’re going to be there. We’ll put something together for you.

Now lesson number nine is the time preference shift. Now time preference is something that we talk about all the time in Bitcoin. And it takes you from a high time preference to a low time preference. Basically it’s delayed gratification, instant gratification, or delayed gratification. And Bitcoin lowers your time preference. And what that does is it improves your decision making, because unfortunately, nothing good in life comes in short term thinking. If you I used to have this friend, and always like a month before summer, he’s like, all right, I got 30 days to get in shape.

It’s like 30 days to get in shape. Like you should have started that a year ago, right? We need that time, we have to think about that. And that’s what Bitcoin does for us. It helps us to realize that the short term gains, or short term movements aren’t what’s important, we start to think longer, and we start to think longer about our money, we start to think longer about our businesses, and our health decisions, and our relationship decisions. And so the lesson is to shift your time preference, start to think of things of five year cycles.

I still get asked all the time, Mark, what will Bitcoin be next month? It’s like, who cares about next month? Someone asked me last night, you know, where will it be over the next six months? I’m like, who cares about six months? Where will it be in five years? That’s what I care about. And so shift your time preference. So an action step, easy to apply this is basically to journal monthly, on how Bitcoin is changing your thinking, how you’re starting to realize your health, the relationships starting to be affected by this, so you can start to build it out in your life.

Lesson number 10 is the self custody rule. Now in the Bitcoin community, we have a saying that says that not your keys, not your coins. And I wish I would have learned this one sooner. And the reason why is because I’ve lost a lot of Bitcoin by not custody on my own. Well, I’ve actually lost it from not custody on my own and from custody on my own. So let me break that down. Number one, not custody on your own means that you’re leaving it in someone else’s custody. So for example, you’re leaving it on an exchange.

And that happened to me, I left it on an exchange, I left it on an exchange called bit tricks. I’m just going to call them out right here. I’ve talked about it before. And somebody hacked the exchange and my Bitcoin got taken. And we went to court over it and found out that they weren’t liable, even though they recognized in discovery that they had a problem, they didn’t have the proper security measures in place. But because I had checked the box that says I hold them, I don’t hold them liable for anything that happens to my Bitcoin, I was responsible.

So I trusted them, they made certain promises of the security, they didn’t follow through, they got hacked, I lost my Bitcoin. The other step was I was using it, I had a wallet on my phone. And I was putting some Bitcoin on my phone, and I was staying at Airbnb in Mexico. And one day I had the Bitcoin in my wallet, the next day the Bitcoin wasn’t in my wallet. So the action steps are here. Number one, take custody of it yourself. But number two, do it in a hardware wallet, get it off the exchanges and don’t put it into a software wallet that you have on your phone or on your computer, put it into a hardware wallet.

Don’t make the same mistake that I’ve made. Lesson number 11 is what I call the spend regret rule. Now, that means if you spend your Bitcoin, you’ll probably regret it later. Early on in the Bitcoin days, like I said, it was 300 bucks, it was 500 bucks, it was 1000 bucks and 2000 bucks. And I was kind of just throwing these things around like chiclets, man, we were just spending them all over the place. You know, somebody would want to get paid in Bitcoin, sure, why not? Some of my friends, I’d want to get into Bitcoin.

So I owed them some money, a couple thousand bucks, hey, here, take a Bitcoin and things like that. But what I wasn’t doing is I wasn’t going in replenishing those bitcoins. So I regret that now, if I can go back and get all of that Bitcoin that I was just throwing around, instead of just using fiat, like I could have, and I had that Bitcoin today, it would be a massive amount, but I don’t, and I can’t go back and change that. But what I could do is not make the same mistake.

So use fiat for your expenses, and save in your Bitcoin. The rule is Gresham’s law, that good money drives out bad. So we want to save in the good money, spend the bad money, don’t spend your Bitcoin for things that you can spend fiat on. Lesson number 12 is the hold over trade rule. And what this means is that holding, or as we say in Bitcoin space, hodling, it beats trading for pretty much everyone, 95% of people. I know this because for a period of time, I wrote a cryptocurrency research newsletter, we ran a trading service, one of the biggest in the space, and most people just lost their money.

I’ve been around this long enough to know that most people lose their money. And so while you think you’re trading mean coins, or whatever it is, and these DeFi protocols, so you can get more Bitcoin eventually, what you’ll find out is that just holding the Bitcoin for the long run would have done better. If I can go back and get a do over back to 2015, back to 2016, or, you know, 2016, before 2017, I started trading, if I could just get all that Bitcoin back, and I could have just had that today, my life would be way different.

But I can’t, and I traded most of it away. So the action step is hold, if you want to trade, it’s fun, maybe it’s fun to speculate, fun to gamble. You don’t gamble all your money, put 95% into your core stack and lock it away forever. And then if you want, take 5%, speculate with it, trade with it. Lesson 13 is what I call the sound money principle. Now sound money principle thinking is what makes Bitcoin inevitable. It’s what underlies all of this, because you see, solutions are supposed to come to problems.

That’s the way the world works, we have a problem, we come up with a solution. So when you start thinking about it, well, what is the biggest problem in the world, the bigger the problem that we solve, the more value that’s created. Well, the biggest problem in the world is money and the problems with money. For example, central banks around the world continue to print more money. For example, what we’re seeing today with Trump and tariffs and China is manipulation of currency. And so what we need is a money that can’t be manipulated and can’t be printed.

A money that nobody can control, nobody can conflate. And when you start to think of things and that terms and realize that this is actually solving the biggest problem in the world. And you also realize why Bitcoin is different than all of cryptocurrency, because of the sound money principle. Now, the greatest action step that you can take in this would be read the Bitcoin standard, learn Austrian economics, learn the history of money. And I say the Bitcoin standard because it actually takes you from the history of money from feathers, rocks and seashells all the way through the gold standard and all the way through today.

It’s a really great place to start your journey. All right. Now, lesson number 14 is the compliance playbook. And this one is one that you really need to be careful for. This is planning your taxes, planning compliance, and it’s way and do it way before it’s too late. The IRS doesn’t want to be messed around with. They’re pretty serious about this. And so a lot of people think that they can buy and sell Bitcoin, trade Bitcoin, and they don’t have to report it, but they’re catching on to you. So don’t get caught in that.

A couple of things that you can do about this. Number one, the easiest thing is don’t sell your Bitcoin and don’t trade your Bitcoin. That’s just the easiest part. I talk about it all the time. I don’t plan on selling my Bitcoin. If I want some of the equity out of it, I can take a loan against it. By borrowing against the Bitcoin, that is not a taxable event. I don’t owe the taxes on that. I still own the Bitcoin, but I can unlock the equity tax-free. That’s what I plan on doing.

Otherwise, if you do sell it or you do trade it, make sure that you use an exchange that allows you to get your reports or use some type of a software that can do that and make sure you get those reports and give it to a CPA, an accountant that understands Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies so they can get your compliance done properly. You have to understand, Bitcoin doesn’t just change your portfolio. It changes who you have to become to keep it. A lot of times you hear people like, man, you bought it at 10 cents, but they probably wouldn’t have it today because you have to change who you are in order to keep it.

Now, these lessons, they cost me years of time to get here, missed opportunities, expensive mistakes, but now you have them. Bitcoin is the cheat code for building real wealth and real freedom. If you’re wondering where Bitcoin could be by, say, 2030, 2040 and 2050, that’s exactly what we’re diving into next in this video right here. Now, make sure you’re subscribed. Hit like if you got value. Comment below which lesson hit you the hardest and I’ll see you over the next video. [tr:trw].

See more of Mark Moss on their Public Channel and the MPN Mark Moss channel.