Does Bitcoin buy happiness?

Does Bitcoin buy happiness? In this video, I want to go into this in depth. Let's get started.

I think that in general, Bitcoin doesn't buy happiness, but what Bitcoin will do is it'll contribute to your finances. It'll help you build wealth so that at some point you can pay for the things that you need without having to struggle, without having to worry, without having to feel stressed about your day-to-day life.

I want to start with going through what exactly wealth is. So wealth is a broad concept referring to an abundance of valuable resources including money, financial assets and physical possessions which can be quantified by subtracting debt from assets. So that's your net worth. So your net worth is the assets that you have minus the debts that you have.

However, the definition of wealth can be more comprehensive, encompassing tangible assets like real estate and intangible aspects such as health, quality time, and strong social connections, highlighting its subjective nature for different individuals and societies. So, what this basically says is that wealth is more than just money. It's the people around you. It's the support system that you've built, the people who love you, who care about you. And I think that it's really important to consider that health is also wealth.

So from the economic and financial perspective, wealth is a stock of valuable economic resources that have been accumulated at a specific point in time as opposed to income which is a flow that happens over a period. So your income isn't wealth. Your income is just a way for you to accumulate wealth. If you have a good income, you can accelerate the process of getting to a positive net worth. But there are a lot of people out there who have a great income, but they don't have any wealth because they spend all of their income on things that they want to buy in the short term. So they want to spend it on their wants over their needs.

So your net worth is the market value of all of your assets owned minus the debts and liabilities that you owe. So if you own a house and you have a mortgage on it, the value of the house minus the mortgage. And then the broader and personal definitions, intangible assets. So we can consider things like health, strong relationships, memories, knowledge, and even time. So if you have time, let's say for example, you have a certain business that can create revenue for you while you're sleeping, that's wealth. I would say that that's definitely wealth because it gives you time. It gives you time to build on everything else. It gives you time to build relationships. It gives you time to, let's say, go on vacations with your family and build memories. It gives you time to listen to audiobooks, podcasts, to let you read. It gives you all of that. It gives you the time to work on your health, to go to the gym. If you don't have time, let's say you're working four jobs, how are you going to go to the gym? You're going to be exhausted all the time. And that may be because your job puts you in these high pressure situations where it drains all of your energy.

If you want to build wealth over time, you have to buy things that are scarce. You have to buy resources that can increase in value over time. Meaning that the supply is limited relative to the demand. And I think in recent times this has become a problem because today we use houses to show wealth to build wealth. People buy as many houses as they can to build wealth. So while one person's wealth is based on owning these scarce assets and now we've grouped houses which is just shelter into the category of scarce assets. We have a group of people who has wealth and then we have another group of people that's a lot bigger than that group that does have wealth. We have another group of people that can't pay for their basic necessities.

So if we take a look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we can see here the basic physiological needs are air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing, and reproduction. So think about how many of these things are completely reliant on shelter. Think about how if you wanted to build a family, you probably need a place to live. You're not going to want to build a family living in the streets. You're not going to want to build a family without stability. You're going to want stability. You're going to want to have employment. You're going to want to have the resources to support your family. And if you don't have the physiological needs, like shelter, then how are you going to get everything else? A job requires that you have shelter. They ask you for your address. They ask you for a fixed address so that they know that you're not just going to leave. You're not just going to quit your job. There are a lot of reasons for why they want a fixed address and I I guess one of those reasons is that they they want to make sure that you're going to be in it for the long term.

So houses which represents shelter have now been bought by venture capitalists. They've been bought by BlackRock. They've been bought by all these institutions that just want to make a profit out of them. They don't care about the people who are living in them. They rent those houses to those people and their only goal is to make a profit. That's all they want. They don't care about housing you. They don't care about giving you security. They don't care about if you lose your job or not. If you can't pay your rent, they don't care about any of that. All they care about is making your rent payments. If you're not making your rent payments, you're out. They don't care about you. They have no stake in your life.

So, because we've combined shelter with wealth, because we've made houses scarce, even though we have so much land, we have so much land out there, but we've made houses scarce so people can't have houses. And more recently, I've seen that more and more people are homeless and they don't have a house. They're living in tents on the side of the street. They don't have security. They could get robbed at any point. Somebody could come in and take all of their stuff. They don't have employment. They don't have a steady stream of income to pay for their physiological needs. If you're constantly stressed out about security, about getting jumped, about getting shot, killed, whatever, how are you going to sleep properly? Where are you going to keep your clothing? How are you going to reproduce? If you don't have shelter, you probably won't feel safe. If you don't have shelter, you probably won't be able to build the same kinds of friendship and family that you would if you did have a house.

So, all of this, including esteem, which is respect, self-esteem, status, recognition, strength, and freedom. All of this is built on top of people having shelter, people feeling secure, people feeling safe. If you don't have all this, how can you have self-actualization? How can you have the desire to be the best that you can be? If you don't want to be the best that you can be, then you're probably going to be a drag on society. And if people can't have shelter, then how are we going to have a society that's actually working towards moving ahead and making the world a better place for future generations?

So now, what is happiness? Happiness is a complex emotional state of well-being, joy, or contentment encompassing both positive feelings and a sense of meaning and purpose in life. If you're not happy, you probably don't have a purpose. You probably don't feel like you're headed towards something positive. It is a subjective experience influenced by a mix of genetic factors, life circumstances, relationships, achievements, and personal thought patterns.

So, if you don't have shelter, how are you going to have positive relationships? How are you going to achieve anything? If you don't have shelter, you have a very difficult life. You're going to constantly be thinking about how to get your next meal rather than trying to improve the world. True happiness is not about constant positive emotions, but a balanced state of being often associated with meaningful connections, personal growth, and engagement with life. How can you have a balanced state of being if you don't have shelter? If your basic physiological needs aren't met, how can you feel balance in your life if you don't have food? How can you feel balance in your life if you don't have security? If you don't have employment, if you don't have a business or something that's giving you the income to pay for the resources that you need, how can you have a balanced state of being? If you don't have clothing, right? That that's that's the the main issue here. How can you feel happy if you're not able to pay for your basic human needs?

And of course, I get it. Happiness is not about the things that we have. It's not about the material things that we have. It's about the relationships we build. It's about the knowledge that we have. And even then, I don't think it's possible for somebody to be happy. Even if they don't think about the material things, if they don't have the basics, if they don't have shelter, if they can't sleep properly every night, how stressed are they going to be all the time? If they don't have food, how are they going to live day-to-day? If they don't have fresh water, how are they going to live day-to-day?

So, today, the wealthy are buying as many houses as they can. And venture capitalist firms are buying as many houses as they can, leaving the majority of people stressed out because they can't meet their basic needs.

So what does Bitcoin do? It takes the focus of investors away from housing into Bitcoin because Bitcoin is the best performing asset that we have. Nothing else performs as well as Bitcoin and especially real estate. Real estate has been crashing in terms of Bitcoin. And I'll show you exactly what that looks like. We can see here that in the last few years since 2011, the price of houses in terms of Bitcoin has been falling. So if you saved in Bitcoin over the last few years, you didn't have to buy Bitcoin since 2011. You didn't have to buy it since 2015, not even since 2020. You could have bought Bitcoin in 2024. You could be buying Bitcoin right now. The cost of living is falling for anybody who's saving in Bitcoin. Meaning that those people, the ones who save in Bitcoin, can actually move up this pyramid.

So you can see here if they have Bitcoin, they can pay for shelter. Meaning they can build into something like safety needs. They can build into security, employment, resources, health, property. Then they can build relationships with the people around them. Think about it. If somebody doesn't smell the greatest, if they have dirty clothes, do you think that you'd want to go up to them and talk to them? If you have clean clothes, you smell good, you have a haircut, I think it becomes easier to build love and belonging. And again, I'm not trying to discriminate against anybody. If you have a certain smell and you like it, that's perfectly fine. But I'm just saying in general, humans act a certain way. And just because you don't have the means to pay for shelter, it doesn't mean that people are just going to be nicer to you because they understand your situation. Most people don't care.

So if you have shelter, all of that builds into everything else. It'll build into love and belonging. It'll build into safety needs. It'll build into your esteem. It'll build into your self-actualization. So I truly believe that if somebody saves in Bitcoin, they're going to see their cost of living fall just like this chart here. If you save in fiat, you're going to see that your cost of living is increasing. If you feel more stressed day-to-day, then how are you going to be happy? If you feel like you have no stability in your life, how can you get to a point where you're happy?

And I'm not saying that just because people are wealthy, they're happy. I'm saying that money fixes money problems. If you have problems with money, if you're in debt, if you owe a lot of money, if you can't pay for your basic needs, you have credit card debt, your credit cards are all maxed out, you can't pay for food, you're having a difficult time paying for your rent, you're not going to be happy. It's very difficult to be happy in that situation. You might believe that if you're not materialistic, then you'll be happy. But the reality is that that's not true. You're going to be extremely stressed out. I've gone through that myself. I've gone through the situations where I don't have enough money to pay for gas and I hate it. I hate having to go to the gas station multiple times a week because I only have small amounts of money.

So, while the general advice would be that money doesn't buy happiness, I think that the people who are saying that are looking at it from the perspective of the US dollar. They're living on a US dollar standard. Meaning that having more US dollars doesn't truly help them in the long term. I've personally noticed that when I started saving in Bitcoin instead of let's say index funds or REITs or all of the legacy financial investments, I feel less stressed out because I know that at some point the Bitcoin that I'm accumulating is going to pay for the things that I need and I won't have to work forever.

And I want to go through the math of this. This is my compound interest calculator. You can access it in the link in the description below. Just go and download it. If you think that Bitcoin is going to grow at 25% per year, you want to buy a $450,000 house today. house appreciates at 5% per year. And let's say you can buy $100 worth of Bitcoin every single month. You're going to notice that today the amount of Bitcoin that you're buying doesn't seem like much, but over time it will compound and it'll grow to a point where you can buy a house with your Bitcoin. And I think if you're saving for a house, $100 per month is kind of extreme. I don't think most people can do that. If you expect to be able to buy a house for $100 per month, then I think you're going to be in a very difficult situation, especially if you're saving in fiat. But if you're saving in Bitcoin, you can see here you need to save for 25 years and you can pay for the house outright. So in 2050 you would have 5.3 million Satoshi's worth $1.582 million. And the house at that time if it's growing at 5% per year would be worth $1.523 million. So you'd have slightly more in Bitcoin than the house would be worth. So at this point 5 million Satoshi's will buy you a house which is amazing. Of course, you have to consider taxes. So maybe you'll want to go a little bit longer, but in 25 years, you would have invested $30,000 and your $30,000 would be worth $1.582 million. Think about how much easier your life would be if you had this amount of money. Of course, I know that your expenses are going to keep rising. It's going to keep rising. But if you hold on, let's say you keep buying, you keep accumulating over time, by 2065, you'd have $45 million.

And this actually aligns with the power law. I saw from the guy who created the power law, Giovanni. He said that Bitcoin should be at about $10 million by 2045 based on the power law. By 2045, you can see here that's a 25% growth per year. This is going to be slightly less than his prediction. So if you can buy even a small amount of Bitcoin over time, I think it's a great path to make yourself happier because like I said before, it helps you to achieve your physiological needs, which will build on everything else. It'll build on your safety needs. It'll build on love and belonging, esteem, self-actualization. It'll actually make you want to be the best that you can be.

On the other hand, with fiat currencies like the dollar, the pound, the yen, the won, whatever currencies there are, they disincentivize you saving. they stop you from saving because if you save in dollars, you're going to see that your expenses are going to rise over time and you're not going to be able to pay for the things that you want. Meaning that you're probably not going to be as happy. If you're stressed out about just paying for the basic needs, if you're stressed out about paying for shelter, then how can you truly be happy? How can you truly be happy living on the streets, not knowing when your next meal is coming in, not knowing if you're going to make it to the end of the month, if you'll even be able to keep the things that you have accumulated because somebody might rob you.

So, I don't think that Bitcoin necessarily buys happiness, but it does allow you to buy the things that you need in order to build everything else, in order to build a family, in order to have kids, in order to feel secure and safe. If you started buying Bitcoin at, let's say, $124,000, of course, in the short term, you don't feel very happy because the value of your Bitcoin has fallen. But over the long term, you're going to see over the next 5, 10, 15 years, keep stacking. Keep buying as much as you can because at some point, Bitcoin is going to be the world reserve currency. It's going to be the asset that the wealthy prefer. They're not going to want real estate. So I would say that at some point maybe the real estate market actually starts falling because of Bitcoin because people want to own Bitcoin instead of rental properties.

So there are two ways here that Bitcoin could potentially buy happiness in the short term and then in the long term it makes it so that everything is abundant. So number one, if you buy Bitcoin, you're going to see that your savings are increasing in value and the cost of everything around you, everything that you need is falling. And number two, it leads to housing being abundant. It leads to more people being able to own houses because investors aren't buying all of the houses on the market.

Here's a really great example of somebody who sold his mansion for Bitcoin. So, he sold his Miami mansion worth $42 million for Bitcoin. People think that Bitcoin is worthless, but today you can buy a mansion for your Bitcoin. You can exchange your Bitcoin directly for a mansion. So, Bitcoin is going to not only make it so that people don't want to invest in real estate, it's also going to make it so that the people who actually own Bitcoin, who buy as much Bitcoin as they can, will become wealthy, they'll be able to build wealth, and they'll be able to pay for all of the things that they need to pay for.

So, as usual, the best thing that you can do here is accumulate Bitcoin. Ignore the noise. Ignore everybody telling you to buy index funds. Ignore everybody telling you to buy real estate because you need cash flow. Buy Bitcoin and relax. Over time, if you keep buying Bitcoin, the market is going to come to you. If you're ahead of the market, eventually the market will catch up and people around you are going to want your Bitcoin. If more people want Bitcoin, it means that the price goes up and now you can pay for all of the things that you need to with your Bitcoin.

So, you can see here that at some point a house is going to cost 5 million Satoshi's. You see that here, Bitcoin per house, 0.05. But before that, if you can increase your income and you can keep stacking, you would be able to find a way to get to your goal of 5 million Satoshi's much sooner, you may be able to buy the house before 2050, 2049 if you're able to save more and you're able to increase your income to a point where your investments are higher every single month. I've spoken to people who are saving for a house and they're willing to put away, let's say, $1,500 per month. So, if you can save $1,500 per month and the house that you want is worth $450,000 today, you're going to see that your stack is worth 200% of the price of the house. And maybe at that point, you no longer even want to buy a house. Maybe at that point, you're okay with renting.

I think the main key here is that money solves money problems. If you have financial issues, you're probably going to be stressed out. If you can get rid of those financial issues, then you have more options. You don't have to work a job that you hate. Maybe that contributes to happiness in your case. But I think the key here is buy Bitcoin and over time you're going to see that your life gets easier. You're able to pay for the things that you need and you do actually become happier and you become the best that you can be.