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Hey guys, it's Jack. I wrote something called the Last Honest Market. I wrote it from the middle of a pretty painful stretch, not from the other side where every lesson has been figured out and everything's been tied into a neat bow. It's a fairly vulnerable piece. It started as an essay about Bitcoin bear markets, but somewhere along the way it became an attempt to understand why bitcoin can be both so painful and so hopeful at the same time. And why it keeps kicking my ass and why I keep coming back from these seasons a better man thanks to bitcoin. So I'm going to read it in full here for anyone who prefers the audio or video. And so, with that being said, this is the last honest market, Bitcoin, bear markets, and the gifts we mistake for for punishment A note before you read I wrote the first version of this essay on the morning of Saturday, July 11, before I resigned from 21. At the time, my plan was simple. Publish it first thing that Monday morning. On Sunday night, July 12, my team told me I could not release it until after we publicly disclosed I was stepping down. So fiat, so painful. So not me. So bear Market. By the time you are reading this, I have resigned as CEO of 21 Capital. I have revised it since then, especially this note and the language around 21, but I have tried not to rewrite the questions in light of what has happened since. These pages are about all of the questions that came with this bear market. I do not want these words to read like justification. I want them to stand on their own. However, pretending my resignation is unrelated to the season I'm describing would be dishonest too. The simplest truth is that the company 21 was becoming and the company I believed I was there to build were no longer the same. So I chose to step away. That decision does not erase my responsibility for helping create expectations that were not ultimately fulfilled. People trusted me. I feel that I own it. This is not the essay where I explain in every detail. It is an essay I was already writing while life was forcing me to answer the questions underneath that decision. Questions about leadership, money, ego, conviction, purpose, what I am actually building and who I am building it for. I started trying to write a Bitcoin bear market manifesto. Somewhere along the way, it became more personal. Question why do some of the seasons that feel most like punishment become the ones we are eventually most grateful for? What punishments are not gifts? I hope that five years from now, with bitcoin further along its path toward becoming the world's money. This essay is still worth reading because I do not think it was ever really about 21. I think it was about something much bigger. Chapter one hello bear market. Hello Bear Market. My old friend, I have come to speak with you again. I take a sip of espresso on my roof. It is a sunny Saturday morning in Chicago. I check the Bitcoin price $64,350.35. Then I open X War Zone. Some of it is literal. Some of it is the bitcoin community doing what the bitcoin community does when the price is down and everyone is tired, angry, overexposed, underappreciated and convinced someone else is to blame. Bitcoin is roughly 50% below its all time high, which is mild by historical standards. I've been around long enough to see far worse yet sentiment may be as bad as I can remember. That has had me thinking about why bitcoin bear markets hurt so much. The hurt is not only financial for me. It feels personal, spiritual almost. Because to be honest with you, I am getting my ass kicked right now. I am not writing this from the peaceful other side of the storm. I am still in it, still getting humbled, still learning lessons I do not fully understand yet. People see me as the young bitcoin guy in the hoodie. Fair enough. But I found bitcoin when I was 18. I am writing this at 32. I have lived through several cycles, built companies through them, helped bring bitcoin to a country, been celebrated, criticized, right, wrong, humbled and surprised. 14 years in Bitcoin does not make the feeling disappear. A lower cost basis does not make you immune. Experience helps you recognize the weather, but it does not prevent the storm. Here is the contradiction I am trying to understand. I am a bitcoiner sitting in the depths of a bear market, getting my ass kicked and somehow feeling more motivated to build than ever. It hurts. I am hopeful. I have been here before and every time a bitcoin bear market has stripped something away, I have come back a better man. Why? Why does bitcoin feel so different than everything else? Why does it hurt so good? Why after all of the lessons and all of the pain, do I keep coming back to this Internet money? Chapter 2 the Managed World the more I sit with those questions, the more I think the answer begins with the world I was born into. Very little in modern life reaches us raw. Most of it passes through systems designed to soften it first. If a market falls too quickly, halt it. If a bank fails, rescue it. If debt becomes unbearable, refinance it. If Losses become politically inconvenient. Socialize them. If consequences arrive too quickly, delay them. None of these ideas are insane on their own. Human beings build buffers because life is hard. We build houses because storms exist, medicine because disease exists, and laws because violence exists. Civilization itself is in many ways a collection of buffers. The problem is not that we build them. The problem is when we forget they are buffers and begin mistaking them for reality. A system that never lets consequences arrive has no opportunity to teach us what must change. Take your front lawn, for example. A lawn does not naturally grow into a perfect green carpet. It grows unevenly. Weeds appear, seeds travel, weather changes it. Animals disturb it. Left alone, it becomes wild. Is mowing your lawn bad? No, of course not. But it's important we understand that a beautiful lawn is maintained. It is the product of time, labor, energy and intervention. Stop spending those things and the smoothness disappears. You get a raw lawn, and just like that, your lawn looks like shit and your wife is furious. Sometimes the smoothest looking services require the most human intervention. Processed food, photoshopped bodies, social media, lives. Modern society has become addicted to the edited version. I again, intervention is not automatically bad. The mistake is assuming the edited surface is a healthy one. A calm appearance can reflect strength, but it can also conceal a system that has lost the ability to survive movement. Suppressing volatility does not eliminate risk, it hides it. You can halt a market, but you have not erased the decisions underneath it. You can bail out a bank, but you have not repaired the hole in its balance sheet. You can refinance debt, but you have not created the productivity that would have justified it. You can socialize losses, but you have not made them disappear. You have moved them from the people who created them to the people who did not. The surface gets smoother, but the system underneath gets weaker. If you live inside that kind of world long enough, raw reality begins to feel cruel. A true price feels violent. A consequence feels unfair. A system that refuses to rescue you feels broken. Maybe that is why Bitcoin feels so different. The world I am used to keeps trying to protect me from the lesson. Bitcoin does not. When pain can teach, volatility is not fragility. Volatility is visible movement. Fragility is the inability to survive movement. A system can move violently and remain incredibly strong. Another can appear perfectly calm while becoming easier and easier to break. Volatility is simply information made visible. It tells you something has changed. Someone was wrong, someone borrowed too much, someone mispriced risk. Someone built something fragile, something Everyone believed was safe was not safe. In an honest system, that information is allowed to surface. Sometimes it hurts, but it is useful. Information allows us to correct. Correction allows us to adapt. Adaptation makes us more resilient. The pain moves. It arrives. It tells the truth and forces a response. If we listen, it can pass through and leave the system stronger than it found it. Managed systems offer the opposite trade. They suppress the signal needed to understand what is broken. The surface goes quiet while the pain grows underneath. Comfort is preserved, but so is the weakness. That is why I think a bitcoin bear market can feel painful and hopeful at the same time. The pain means the signal is still alive. Correction is still possible. The system remains free enough to teach. And as much as we enjoy a nicely mowed lawn, there are parts of life where we cannot afford to silence the teacher. Chapter 4 Money is not your front lawn. Money is not your front lawn. You might want your lawn curated. You might want your wedding curated. But some information is too important to curate. You do not want your doctor curating your blood work if a scan shows something dangerous. A compassionate doctor does not smooth the image over because the truth might upset you. The truth may scare you, it may change your life, but it is also what gives you the chance to respond. Some information is too important to manipulate. Money belongs in that category. Money is one of the most important information systems civilization has ever created. It allows strangers to cooperate, value to move through time and across space, and billions of people who will never meet to coordinate their lives. It tells us what people value, what is scarce, what is abundant, what should be built, what should stop being built, where energy should flow and where it is being wasted. Unlike a patch of grass, money is deeply personal. It is your labor, your sacrifice, your judgment, your risk, your deferred gratification, your time. It is your life abstracted into a form that can move through the world after you have spent it. Money is information. Money is dignity. When money lies, civilization begins responding to false vital signals. People build the wrong things, they chase the wrong incentives. They mistake leverage for genius, acid inflation for productivity, liquidity for wisdom, and a calm surface for a healthy system. You blink and an official looking institution is telling you lucky charms are healthier than steak. The signal broke somewhere. You want to manipulate the patch of grass in front of your house? Fine. But when you manipulate money, you manipulate the information human beings use to organize their lives. That cuts into human dignity itself. I think that is why Bitcoin grabbed me when I was 18. At the time, I thought my dad had found a Weird but interesting investment. I had not gone deep enough. What I had actually found, and what we are all still building, is a monetary system that refuses to give the world a more convenient answer. No government, no central bank, no bailout committee, no politician, no CEO, no board of directors. No one standing between reality and the ledger. No one deciding today's truth had become too uncomfortable. Bitcoin propagates. Bitcoin validates. Bitcoin settles no matter what. TikTok next block. Bitcoin does not create truth. It exposes the truth, regardless of who wants it. Hidden freedom, I am beginning to realize, is not the absence of pain. It is the absence of an editor. So what happens when money, the information system that coordinates society, is free enough to tell the truth? Chapter 5 the raw feed in my experience, honest money makes the world feel bigger, more colorful, more alive. The upside becomes larger than anyone imagined. So does the downside. For most of our lives, we experience a version of reality that has already been processed. The rough edges are sanded down, the sharp corners rounded off, the consequences delayed. Bitcoin hands you the raw feed. Sometimes it is breathtaking. Sometimes it is horrifying. Usually it is both. I know because I have lived both. After 14 years, this feels as close to science as anything that I know. However good you think a bitcoin bull market can get, it can and will get better. However bad you think a bitcoin market can get, it can and will get worse. No one gets to stand in the way. I thought bitcoin could change lives. I thought it could build companies, create financial infrastructure and give people a better way to save. I never imagined I would help introduce it as legal tender in El Salvador. Can you believe that happened? In open source money with no headquarters, no CEO, no board and no central planner became legal tender in a country. Nobody ordered that future into existence. No committee had to approve it. People recognized something valuable and moved toward it. Hope does not ask permission. That is the breathtaking side of a free and honest system. Hope, love. Connection. Ambition. When an idea's time has come, possibility can travel farther than anyone imagined. The horrifying side works the same way. Take the 2022 bear market. I thought it would be painful. I expected prices to fall, companies to struggle and easy money to disappear. I did not expect one of the largest exchanges in FTX to turn into a multi billion dollar fraud. Looking back, I probably should have. I knew SAM was full of shit. But the point is bigger than sam. Honest systems eventually reveal what was hidden. They reveal leverage, weak balance sheets, fake business models, confidence borrowed instead of earned, and stories that worked only while prices were rising. People often say bear markets destroy things. I do not think that is quite right. Bear markets reveal things. The destruction happened earlier. The bear market removes everyone's ability to pretend otherwise. Bitcoin did not create the fraud. It eventually refused to keep lying about it. It did not create the leverage. It stopped subsidizing it. It did not create the weak business. It stopped allowing easy money to disguise it. The truth was always there. The filter disappeared. Bear markets do not just mark down portfolios. They mark down stories. Stories about who they thought they were, how smart they thought they were, what they thought would always work, what success was supposed to look like. Bull markets tell us stories we would like to believe. Bear markets ask which of those stories are true, and eventually Bitcoin turns that question toward you. Chapter six the market introduced me to myself. I know all of this because I have lived it many times. In 2022, at the Bitcoin conference, I announced products that never made it to market. At the time, I believed I was doing what founders are supposed to do. Paint the future, inspire people, show conviction. There is truth in that. Founders need conviction. They should see around the corners and build things customers do not yet realize they need. But there were other truths hiding underneath that one. Truths I could not see. While everyone was clapping. I had started confusing. Momentum for competence, attention for proof of work, vision for execution. I had become more interested in announcing than shipping. That sentence still hurts to write. Good it should. It was true. The market did not humiliate me. It introduced me to myself. The bull market convinced me I was right. The bear market forced me to become useful. That is still the most honest sentence I know how to write about my life in Bitcoin. And now here I am again. This week I stepped down as the CEO of 21, a company that I helped start. The path the company was taking and the one I believed in had diverged. So I chose to step away. That is my side of the decision, not the whole story. People believed in what I said we were going to build. The outcome was not what I told them it would be. There were decisions I could have made better, and I own that. This is not where I explain in every detail. But pretending the resignation is separate from the bear market I am describing would be dishonest. It is part of the weather. It is one of the ways reality is asking me whether I am who I say I am. When the easier, more lucrative path was placed in front of me, I felt myself Say no before I could fully reason it out. Not in a heroic way. Rather, I had spent years saying that some things are simply not for sale. This was a rare time where I had to find out whether I meant it. Different circumstances, different mistakes, different lessons. Somehow a similar feeling. I am getting my ass kicked right now. I do not know exactly where this season is trying to take me and what it is trying to teach me. I have some ideas, but I have learned not to rush toward a clean answer simply because uncertainty is uncomfortable. I know it is asking me questions I cannot yet answer. I know it is stripping away another layer of ego. I know I will not leave it exactly as I entered it. Hopefully, I will leave better. That is what keeps surprising me. The pain has never been for nothing. Every time I have let Bitcoin finish the lesson, I have come back more useful, more discerning, and harder to break. And so has what I build. Chapter 7 what punishments are Not Gifts As I reflect on all of this, on living inside a system honest enough to deliver pain lessons and truth, I keep returning to a strange question. If I could make bitcoin easier, would I? If I could remove the bear markets, smooth away the volatility, and mute the pain, would I? A younger version of me would have said yes in a heartbeat Today, I honestly do not think I would. It's not that I've learned to love pain. In fact, pain does not automatically improve anyone. Hard times reveal what is weak. Whether those revelations become strengths depend on what we do next. I would not make bitcoin easier because to do that, I would have to give someone the power to interrupt the lesson whenever the answer became too painful. I would have to let the world change. Bitcoin When? Whenever Bitcoin's answer became too painful, and then bitcoin would become just like everything else. I would have to erase the moments that embarrassed me, the moments that humbled me, the moments that forced me to listen instead of perform the moments that made me useful. I would have to erase the parts of my life that shaped me into someone I respect more today than I did yesterday. I would never have chosen those punishments, but I would never give back the gifts. Now I understand why this hurts so good. Bitcoin refuses to bend to our comfort. It forces us to bend toward reality. We cannot force it to rescue our leverage, protect our ego, preserve a false business, or validate the story we told ourselves while prices were rising. Bitcoin can change the world because the world cannot change Bitcoin. We are not the authors of reality we, we are participants in it. Children of nature, not its masters. Bitcoin is money built on that humility. Maybe that is why the pain feels strangely hopeful. The pain is real, but so is that freedom. There is no one editing the answer. There is still something here capable of correcting us. Think about the people you respect most. A coach, a parent, a spouse, a friend, a mentor. Did they earn your respect by protecting you from reality? Or by caring enough to tell you the truth? Truth is not always comfortable, but truth is respectful. It says, I believe you are strong enough to handle the world as it is. Bitcoin does not promise to be nice to us. It respects us enough to tell us the truth and gives us the chance to become better. True. Chapter eight Back to work. I finish my espresso as my fiance walks onto the roof to show me the florals she wants for our wedding. I say no, we do not want a managed wedding. A smoothed over wedding. We should not mow the lawn. We should let it grow and allow the wedding to express its natural truth. She looks at me. What are you talking about? I chuckle. Good question. I checked the price one more time. Bitcoin is still down. The Internet is still screaming. Nothing out there has changed. Only me. The pain is still real. So is the hope. I close X. The market is still speaking. Reality is still getting through. Good. The signal is still alive. I do not understand everything this bear market is trying to give me. There is no guarantee I ever will. But bitcoin has taught me not to interrupt the lesson before it has finished its work. My job is to listen, look in the mirror and do the work. That is why I am hopeful. While I hurt, we still have money free enough to tell us the truth and truth powerful enough to change us for the better. TikTok Next block. Back to work. The end. Thank you guys for listening. I'll catch you on the Internet.