1 + 1 = 3
Move Your Time and Energy over to Bitcoin for Outsized Results
I came across the X post below earlier this week. It made me sad and bothered me.
It made me sad because the sentiment feels about right, as most people I speak with feel quite burnt out and fearful right now.
It bothered me because these sorts of statements can serve as a kind of contagion — they get other people thinking along the same lines, creating a scenario where more and more people feel hopeless.
According to the study, 48% say that there lives are lacking in fun, with 57% saying that budget constraints are the barrier to fun.
I’m sure most of these people feel that they’re in the situation in which they find themselves due to some sort of personal failing, which can exacerbate the negative feeling.
While some of the people in this study may have a habit of spending money unwisely, all of them are struggling not just because of financial or economic problems, but because of a broader monetary problem: the U.S. dollar has been losing value at an astounding rate over the past 55 years, and we’re now in a scenario where practically everyone in the U.S. is feeling the pain.
In short, it’s difficult to stay solvent in an insolvent system.
And so, I’m humbly recommending that you not dedicate too much time and effort to a broken system that you consider moving more of your time and energy over into the Bitcoin and freedom tech space.
When you not only hold or use Bitcoin but begin to build in the Bitcoin space with integrity, incredible things can happen.
You tend to not only end up in a better financial situation, but you become more optimistic, and in some cases, defy all odds and achieve things that many around you — and maybe even you yourself — never thought possible. (You know, like going from writing a Substack newsletter to becoming a White House correspondent.)
One of my favorite examples of this is the story of Lorraine Marcel and Bitcoin Dada, a institution and educational platform that builds financial, technical, and leadership capability for women in Africa.
Bitcoin Dada recently celebrated its fourth year as an organization and Lorraine published a beautiful piece entitled “From the Margins to the Infrastructure: The Bitcoin Dada Story” on all that the institution has accomplished for those it serves and for her personally.
Here’s a segment from it:
“I grew up inside a system designed to limit me.
Not in an abstract, structural sense — in the lived, daily, suffocating sense. By the time I was ten years old, I was already questioning the story I had been handed: that my highest aspiration was marriage, that my role in the economy was peripheral, that the world of wealth, power, and ideas was simply not mine to inhabit. That early defiance became a quiet compass. For years, I was drawn — almost unconsciously — toward anything that built women up. I didn’t have the language for it then. I just knew that financial dependence was one of the most effective tools of control ever devised, and that breaking it open was the work worth doing.
2018: A Lesson in What Not to Do
My first introduction to crypto came in 2018, during the ICO frenzy. The promise was seductive: financial freedom, decentralisation, money that moved at the speed of ideas. FOMO is a powerful force, and I gave in to it completely — diving in without a mentor, without a framework, with nothing but hunger and hope. What I found was a casino dressed up in the language of revolution. Projects collapsed. Tokens evaporated. People made fortunes and people lost everything. By 2021, I had stepped back, bruised but curious.
That period of observation led me to Bitcoin. Initially, the decision was simple. Bitcoin was the foundation, the origin point. If I was going to understand this space, I needed to start at the base layer. But the deeper I went, the clearer it became that Bitcoin was not just another asset class—it was a fundamentally different system. A decentralized, permissionless, open monetary network that did not rely on trust in institutions, but on verifiable code and global consensus. For someone who grew up watching institutions be used as instruments of exclusion, Bitcoin read like a different kind of promise entirely.
2022: The Moment Everything Shifted
In 2022, shortly after the COVID-19 period, I organised a small meet up with Paco de la India, who was traveling across the world connecting Bitcoin communities. It was an intimate room, mostly filled with what many would describe as “Bitcoin bros.” I stayed out of curiosity. But what I witnessed in that room was not hype, it was conviction. The kind that comes from understanding something deeply.
I thought about Africa — a continent where 57% of adults remain unbanked, where cross-border remittances are taxed at some of the highest rates in the world, where currency devaluation quietly destroys the savings of working people, and where women face compounded barriers: restricted land rights, limited credit access, social norms that discourage financial autonomy. And I thought: this technology was built for exactly this.
Then I thought about us – African women specifically. And I went looking. Across an entire continent of over 700 million women, I found two actively participating in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Two!!!!
That number became a call to action…
Please take the time to read the rest of the piece.
I share Lorraine’s story because
I think we can all use a dose of inspiration right now
She didn’t just buy some bitcoin and hope that its price went up — she actively built a community with an inclusive and permissionless monetary technology at the center of it
Had Lorraine spent her time fighting against the system that was oppressing her and other African women instead of building in a completely new system, she likely wouldn’t have made the exponential progress she’s made in her own life and in the lives of others.
The Bitcoin Dada story is a story of 1 + 1 = 3.
It’s the story of what likely seemed to some like an impossible vision come to life, a story of what it means to capitalize on community and global synergies to do something much bigger than one would have been able to do on one’s own, and a story of faith and dedication as opposed to one of logic and rationalization.
One last thing: Lorraine’s latest endeavor is an extension of Bitcoin Dada called Dada Devs, which I wrote about for Forbes. It’s a program for female African developers, and Lorraine and her team recently even built a hub — Dada Hub: Africa’s first physical Bitcoin developer space.
If you’d like to financially contribute to Dada Hub, you can do so via their Geyser Fund campaign.
Bitcoin Adoption in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
If Lorraine’s story wasn’t enough to snap you out of your “I’ll never have fun again” pity party, then the story of Gloire Kambale Wanzavalere might do the trick.
Wanzavalere is an entrepreneurial polymath based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
He has a “utopian” vision for how Bitcoin will help Africa, and he isn’t waiting around for that vision to bring itself to life.
Instead, he’s building as if their were no tomorrow.
So, please enjoy my latest Spotlight piece for Fedi:
PARTNERSHIP
Oh, you’re pumped up after reading all that?
But you still haven’t taken your bitcoin out of the hands of the exchange you bought it on?
My goodness.
Take some of that energy you’re feeling and get started on your self-custody journey with a Trezor Safe 3 today.
Markets
Bitcoin dipped a bit further than I predicted — we’re back down at $73k.
Where we’re headed from here in the short term is hard to say.
RSI is quite low. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a bounce tomorrow or this week.
The bigger question in my mind right now is whether the $77-78k area becomes resistance or support.
In the meantime, these are decent levels for DCAing. (That’s not financial advice, nor is anything I share in this newsletter.)
However, I know money is tight right now for many, so if you live in the U.S. and you’re looking to stack some sats without spending your hard-earned fiat, I highly recommend using the Fold app and the Gemini credit card to do so.
You can use the Fold app to get free sats every day and to get sats back on gift card purchases. You can use my referral link to sign up.
And you can use the Gemini credit card to get up to 4% back in sats on everyday purchases. Again, you can use my referral link to sign up.
Also, if you are buying bitcoin as these levels, please stop using Coinbase (more on why here).
Use Bitcoin-only exchanges like Strike, Fold, River, or Bitcoin Well, instead.
Thank you for reading!
Please keep your head up.
I believe wholeheartedly that brighter days are coming, and that they’re coming sooner if you move more of your time and energy over to Bitcoin. (Little by little, step by step — it doesn’t have to be all at once.)
Here’s to a fantastic week ahead.
Big love and big hugs.
Best,
Frank
