Nine years a Bitcoin hodler

John Dennehy
4 min readApr 6, 2022

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Time can seem to behave differently with Bitcoin. Since I wrote Eight years a Bitcoin Holder, it seems a decade has passed.

A year ago I had no idea I would be living in El Salvador, at the forefront of educating the world’s first nation to adopt Bitcoin. I had no idea that I would embrace the lightning network to the extent that the great majority of all of my financial transactions are now priced in Satoshi’s. I had no idea I would be flying to Miami not as a tourist but with the mission of gathering support to radically change El Salvador via free, independent Bitcoin education.

To quickly recap — I stumbled upon Bitcoin early on and immediately recognized it as potentially world-changing. Later, in 2013, while living in England, I realized I could exploit arbitrage between the US & UK markets and ran a rudimentary exchange. After a year, I sold to someone who was an enemy of the state and UK major crimes and Interpol got involved, and I felt lucky to get away with my freedom intact. I remained excited about the possible world Bitcoin might herald but reluctant to push too hard, too publicly after my close brush with the law.

Enter El Salvador.

I had no idea legal tender was coming to El Salvador until I watched the announcement at the last Miami conference with everyone else. At first, I didn’t even believe it. I wasn’t thinking of moving here at first either. After a few people reached out to ask, I began to see the logic. I spend a lot of time in Latin America, evangelize Bitcoin and move to new nations on a whim regularly. It took a couple of weeks of skepticism before I submitted to the wonderfully inevitable and started pondering El Salvador.

I’ve always had the mentality of an activist — what can I do to create change? It led to lots of protests and nights in jail, and eventually, to Bitcoin. Education seemed the obvious choice. I brainstormed ideas, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, but I also expected to change plans once I was on the ground. I’m a journalist and figured I’d cover the story as well.

When I landed in August I realized two things — El Salvador was wildly unprepared for Bitcoin and there wasn’t much work happening to change that. I slowly progressed with the education proposal — the initial idea was to have paid classes in North America that would subsidize free classes here and had a few friends willing to teach there. I asked every Salvadorean I met about Bitcoin and took contact info of those most interested. I also worked as a journalist, which is more familiar ground for me — covering legal tender day (Sept 7th) for Al Jazeera and BBC.

I’ll write a separate post about MiPrimerBitcoin but since it’s really come to dominate my life since our first class on September 24th, it’s hard to avoid mentioning it for year nine.

The project has grown incredibly fast, from five students in September to 79 in October all the way to 800 per month now. Those numbers are great, but there’s also so many intangible accomplishments as well — students becoming teachers, creating a Salvadorean-first community of Bitcoiners and preparing to launch the first official, required diploma program in the world.

It’s all been because of the tremendous support we’ve received, both here and abroad. It’s given me a changed perspective from a year ago. The truth is I think I’m too close to everything now and I’m just now starting to try and zoom out a little. The past half a year feels like a blink or a decade.

There were things I was wrong about from last year — lightning is better than I thought and use it every day now. Bitcoin also seems to be moving toward adopting tech developed in other cryptos — like NFT’s or DeFi. I understand the logic of everything pegged to the most secure layer, which is Bitcoin, but I’m still not convinced that’s how it will play out.

The really big thing is geo-politics. El Salvador is at the top of the list but it’s joined by a few other new events, specifically the war in Ukraine. As the centralization of finance in the legacy world is exploited to try to influence the outcome, crypto has also proven to be an effective way to send value to a conflict zone.

Things may start to happen quickly now.

I have no idea what to expect when I celebrate a decade in Bitcoin next year — and that’s a wonderful thing.

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John Dennehy

Writing about social movements, international politics and cryptocurrency — often from South America or Asia. Author of Illegal https://amzn.to/38NQveX