An expensive steak lunch
I could have bought Bitcoin.
Happy New Year!
I’m going to try and worry less about the perfect post, and instead try and maybe try to develop a habit of posting at all. We’ll see. In any case, today’s post is short, but has an important message: What you spend your money on today could instead be spent on Bitcoin.
Once upon a time, I bought two steaks for $12.96 at Uwajimaya in Seattle. I cooked them for lunch for me and my date, and they were delicious! But were they worth buying instead of Bitcoin? Let’s take a look.
Ordinarily, I try not to post too much about Bitcoin prices because the story is always the same: The earlier you bought, the higher your return on investment could have been (in dollars). I also don’t want to encourage people to think about dollars as their unit of account, but that will have to be a post for another day.
What is a unit of account?
I am 5’11” tall, in today’s inches. With inflation—and without growing any taller—I can expect to measure 6’2” next year.
Bitcoin Pizza Day, May 22 each year, celebrates one of the earliest transactions involving Bitcoin in which a guy paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas. 10,000 Bitcoin, as is now obvious, makes for pretty expensive pizza. Most people who hear the story for the first time conclude that the guy must feel pretty dumb now. I won’t go into detail on why I think that is the wrong conclusion (because I have a deadline on this post), but those details are beside the point.
For anybody who knows the future of Bitcoin—it’s going up forever—the point is that we all should feel dumb whenever we’re not buying Bitcoin right now. Because in ten years, you’ll wish you’d bought Bitcoin today.
On 4/11/2015, the price of Bitcoin was $237.73, meaning that the $12.96 on two New York strip steaks (prepared with argentinian steak rub, of course) could have instead been a purchase of 0.054515626972 BTC, which would be worth ~$4,823.38 today.
In ten years, Bitcoin’s USD price will be over $1,000,000, so if you choose to buy yourself a steak today, make sure it is not at the expense of buying yourself some nice, juicy, satoshis.
I knew enough in 2015 to know that maybe I should have bought Bitcoin. If my unit of account had been Bitcoin at the time, I might’ve instead achieved a 2,000% return on investment by foregoing a delicious steak lunch.
Who says you can’t eat Bitcoin?