A Bullish Year for Bitcoin And The Bitcoin Way

As 2024 winds down, Bitcoin’s 16th birthday is looming just around the corner on January 3, 2025. As the rest of the world prepares for a run of the mill New Year’s Eve party, all the cool kids are planning on celebrating on Jan 3^rd.

But before 2025 kicks off, this lull between the Christmas and New Year celebrations gives us the perfect opportunity to look back and reflect on the year. 2024 has been wild to say the least. So much has happened it would be impossible to sum everything up adequately. It’s even easy to forget some of the biggest news stories. So let’s look back and remind ourselves of some of the major events that took place this year.

January started with a bang when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) finally approved Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Companies like Blackrock and Fidelity became major buyers offering traditional investors a new route to get exposure to Bitcoin. They are of course only selling worthless paper IOUs rather than Bitcoin itself, but nevertheless it was a major signal that demand for Bitcoin had become irresistible even for Wall Street.

By March 2024, this growing demand helped Bitcoin reach a new all-time high (ATH) of $73,000 and Bitcoin eclipsed a $1Tn market cap for the first time. Unlike previous cycles, Bitcoin set a new ATH   before completing its 4^th halving event in April that slowed its issuance down from 6.25BTC to just 3.125BTC per block.

And by July, the buzz around Bitcoin had reached a veritable fever pitch. The Bitcoin conference in Nashville saw two Presidential candidates signalling their support for the orange coin and a Senator proposed a bill that would allow the US Government to start accumulating Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset.

By December with a newly constrained supply and unprecedented demand from players with very deep pockets, Bitcoin soared past $100,000 for the first time. It now commands a market capitalisation that eclipses Silver and looks poised to unseat corporate giants like Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia and even Apple on its path to supplanting Gold as the most valuable asset on earth.

As usual, however, it wasn’t all good news. This year we also witnessed the U.S. Department of Justice arrest the co-founders of Samourai Wallet, Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill. These developers now find themselves accused of money laundering and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business despite never handling anyone else’s money. This shows that despite Bitcoin’s growing adoption and success this year, the state will still abuse its power to try and limit the privacy of Bitcoin users.

We are now also seeing new narratives emerge that seek to position Bitcoin as just a reliable Store of Value (SoV) but not a suitable medium of exchange (MoE). This false dichotomy risks misleading a lot of newcomers to the space causing them to miss out on the fundamental value proposition of Bitcoin; the ability to transact with one another with no financial intermediary.

This will lure a lot of people into serious mistakes like trusting third parties to custody their wealth and take on unnecessary counterparty risk. It also precludes people from any semblance of financial privacy and the ability to transact free from third party interference. These new narratives are a complete departure from what Bitcoin truly represents.

It appears the third parties we want to make irrelevant won’t be going down without a fight. A good reminder that freedom will never be given to us, it must be taken and the fight to separate money from state is far from over.

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A Bullish Year for The Bitcoin Way

The good news is that despite these new unhelpful narratives emerging, the signal within the core of the Bitcoin community remains strong. New home mining equipment became popular, decentralised communication platforms like Nostr continue to grow, and new software and hardware wallets are always being released and improved. The demand for freedom remains strong and is growing.

That’s why we spent all year beating the drum as loud as possible to persuade people to invest in learning the skills to become fully self-sovereign. The tools exist, you just need to learn how to use them.

The great news is that the message seems to be resonating, and our community is growing fast. So, let’s look back at what was a bullish year for The Bitcoin Way.

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New Services Launched

In April we expanded our services into offering Plan-B residency programs to our clients. Tony and the rest of the founders had already been quietly collecting residencies like Pokemon cards, so it was an exciting step to start offering this expertise to you directly. By the end of the year, we had taken 3 trips out to Panama and helped clients from 8 different countries secure a second residency.

In May we took another important step and began offering our clients expert 1-on-1 training to ensure your cybersecurity is robust and your devices are fully protected. Through painstaking research and testing we curated a package of open-source tools that can be easily deployed and configured to make sure your personal data and online privacy remain safe and secure.  

And by July we had introduced yet another service. We now offer expert guidance on how to ‘De-Google’ and setup your own privacy phone. We make sure you run an open-source operating system and properly configure your settings to prevent the constant tracking and surveillance of Government and ‘Big Tech’.

A lot of time and effort went into building our services and training protocols and we are proud to now have a suite of services capable of propelling any individual toward a far more sovereign lifestyle.

And we have plenty more plans for 2025…

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Spreading Self-Custody at Bitcoin Conferences

We also had a lot of fun attending Bitcoin conferences this year. We had an awesome time in Prague in June meeting old friends and new and a particular highlight for us was Tony and Rick getting the opportunity to talk on stage to preach the gospel of taking full self-custody of your Bitcoin.

The reception to our stand and the talks was amazing. Having so many people connect with our mission fills us with even more energy to help others take full control of their wealth.

And not to be outdone, our charismatic podcast host Michael Jordan made appearances at The Bitcoin Conference in Nashville in July to meet with clients and was invited to speak at an event hosted by Natalie Brunell in St Louis in September this year.

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Tony Yazbeck– All Over the Airwaves  

This year also saw our founder Tony go into overdrive to make sure that as many people as possible understand the importance of holding their Bitcoin in true self-custody.

By leveraging his own powerful story of losing everything to the banking collapse in Lebanon, Tony has a unique way of making people realise just how serious counterparty risk can be. He makes it crystal clear that avoiding it can quite literally make the difference between financial security and financial ruin.

Armed with his powerful story Tony was able to break through all the noise of a Bitcoin bull market and drive home his message on major platforms like Natalie Brunell’s Coin Stories podcast, and The Bitcoin Standard podcast with Saifedean Ammous.

Tony’s story even managed to break through into the mainstream media when he was asked to contribute to an article for Forbes.

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A Growing Self-Sovereign Community

This year also saw us seriously ramp up our content game. If new narratives are emerging trying to dissuade people from taking self-custody you best believe we want to be there to counter them with some common sense.

And the great news is that all the noise we have been making about the importance of self-custody hasn’t been a futile exercise. We are pleased to report that we haven’t just been screaming into the abyss. It turns out we aren’t the only ones passionate about reclaiming their freedoms and pursuing a self-sovereign lifestyle.

The numbers speak for themselves. We have managed to more than double our followers on twitter to just shy of 10k, our YouTube channel this year has grown over 400% to more than 2000 subscribers, and our Newsletter subscribers have grown even faster! Not only that, but this year we also started running exclusive webinars for our newsletter subscribers and we were blown away by the number of attendees.

It looks a lot like we’re building a self-sovereign army!

So, to all of you who read this newsletter, engage with us on Twitter, and watch our podcasts and weekly ‘Bitcoin Banters’ on YouTube, we want to say a big thankyou for coming with us on our journey. We can’t tell you how much it means to us to connect with like-minded individuals who we know are serious about personal freedoms. Every like and comment we receive gives us that bit more energy to keep working hard to help protect and set free as many people as possible.

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A Growing Team

And as if all that wasn’t exciting enough, we’ve also grown our team and added a whole host of new faces to The Bitcoin Way family this year.

In June Michael Jordan joined us permanently as our new Chief Growth Officer (CGO) and Rick Messitt came on board as our new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). You might have come across them chatting with Tony regularly on our weekly Bitcoin Banter show and there’s a good chance you might bump into one of them at Bitcoin events either in the UK, EU or US. One thing you can be sure of is that if you’re consuming some of our content, at least one of them will have had something to do with it.

And slightly later in the year we found that our efforts meant we needed to expand the team even further. More and more people want to follow The Bitcoin Way and become self-sovereign, so we needed more hands on deck. Brad Long joined us recently as a Sales Consultant, Bart Gnirk has joined us a Technical Consultant and Anna Dolan has joined us as our new Client Relationship manager.

These new hires mean The Bitcoin Way team is now more than 10 people strong. We have team members in over 6 different countries all committed to helping you secure your future.

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Make 2025 a Bullish Year for You

Overall, 2024 has been a great year to be a Bitcoiner. In fact, if you had become a Bitcoiner at any point during the past 15 years it’s probably safe to say that your purchasing power, along with your outlook on life, is likely to have improved significantly.

But it’s important that we don’t become complacent. A lot of people may be patting themselves on the back for having bought some Bitcoin and increasing their wealth, but if that’s all you’ve done then you really shouldn’t be running victory laps just yet.

The best way to ensure your prospects remain bullish in 2025 and beyond is to continue the path toward self-sovereignty. If your Bitcoin is on the exchange, it’s essential you learn how to take full self-custody ASAP! If your Bitcoin is secure but your devices aren’t, then you should be taking steps to improve your cyber security. And if you have already mastered all the above, then it might be time to broaden your horizons and explore Plan-Bresidency options to make sure you can always maintain your newfound freedom.

Wherever you are on your journey toward a more successful, more free and more rewarding life, we are here to help you learn how to use the tools needed to take the next step. Get in touch with one of our experts to push your own journey forwards and let’s make 2025 a bullish year for you!