How Bitcoin Helped Me Find The Courage To Write This Article

For years, I lived a life of self-imposed limits. But the Bitcoin community has given me the confidence to share my perspective.

This is an opinion editorial by Mickey Koss, a West Point graduate with a degree in economics. He spent four years in the infantry before transitioning to the Finance Corps.

This one is for the plebs.

I'm not sure who needs to hear this, but I was not invited to write for Bitcoin Magazine. How could the team there have even known that I existed? In actuality, I found its article submission link by accident while looking for a customer service email address. Then, an idea hit me for an article, I shot off a quick email and they liked the idea.

Suddenly, I actually had to write a draft. When it eventually went live, I was hooked. Completely obsessed. I could not get enough of writing and then, the second article submission I sent received an unceremonious “no.” When I asked why, I received a scathing review from the editor.

I realized though, just because they thought the article sucked, that didn't mean that I did too. The critique was for the content, not for me. It was a great learning point that allowed me to adjust my strategy and change my frame of mind. Heck, this article is an adoption of a draft that got rejected for one of the print editions of Bitcoin Magazine. The editor who rejected me is now the producer for a fairly large, Bitcoin-focused YouTube channel. He actually just hired me to write behind the scenes for him. How’s that for full circle?

I didn’t even post my first article through social media. It took nearly 10 articles of mine being published for me to publicly allude to the fact that I wrote them by posting the articles to LinkedIn. I was scared. I was scared about what my friends would think, what people would say, how they would react. I didn’t have the confidence to promote my own content. But the community was welcoming and supportive. They continue to be. Along with the support of my wife, the Bitcoin community is what gave me the courage to keep going. If nothing else, the friendships I’ve made along the way have been more than worth it

Who am I? I’m nobody. I probably have no business being here. But you’re reading my article. It could have just as easily been yours. It can still be yours. Bitcoin has a hard cap, yes, but the Bitcoin community is not a zero-sum game.

Until I found Bitcoin, I had lived a life of invisible and self-imposed limits. I had resigned myself to the fact that I needed to invest early and often, and that I would need to pursue a low-risk, average and prudent career in order to be able to retire at 60 and live just long enough to die as my grandchildren started graduating from college.

But I became restless. Bitcoin allowed me to see things that I had previously been blind to. It made me brave. It gave me the courage to seize responsibility for my life and forge my own path. Bitcoin unlocked my potential. Storing your life force in an non-dilutive, permissionless, peer-to-peer monetary network is incredibly powerful.

Every single person who tells me that Bitcoin is stupid, a Ponzi or a scam makes me all the more bullish. They’re simple reminders that we are still so unfathomably early in this decentralized revolution. These NPCs have rarely put more than a few minutes or a few hours into oppositional-minded research to confirm their own existing biases. They are in prisons of their own making, opting out of a once-in-a-millennia opportunity to build something new.

The truth is, the biggest impediment in your life may very well be the self-imposed limitations in your own mind.

Eliminate your doubts with Bitcoin and become limitless.

This is a guest post by Mickey Koss. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.