I lost $1.6m of bitcoin. But I'm going to keep buying more of it. Here's why… What happened to me was a failure of a hardware company. Not Bitcoin. It operated exactly how it was supposed to, and we can even go look up my exact transaction to see the 18 BTC stolen. So why am I still going to buy more? Well first, the US national debt just crossed $40 trillion (yes with a T). It added $2.88 trillion in the last year alone, which works out to about $91,000 every second. On the other hand, there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. You can’t print more bitcoin like the Fed can print USD. Lastly, bitcoin is an asymmetric bet. If it wins globally, that means that my small allocation can win big too. Which is why I never put my entire wealth into it, and still won't. This isn’t financial advice. And you probably shouldn’t take it from someone who just lost so much money, but it’s how I’m thinking about my next investment steps.

$1.6 million dollars in Bitcoin was drained from my account on July 29th in the Cold Card wallet hack. My Bitcoin was in cold storage. My keys were on a ColdCard device kept in a safety deposit box that had never been connected to the internet. This part's nerdy, but here's what happened: Hackers discovered a vulnerability in the part of the hardware wallet code used to create seed phrases. This allowed them to use AI to brute force guessing seed phrases. I was at our cottage and heard about the hack today. "No way this affects me." I thought. I logged into Wasabi––software that lets me view my bitcoin wallets online. Right away I saw lines of red transaction–withdrawals–and I knew. From 9:36pm - 9:43pm on July 29th, every wallet I had had been emptied. 18.25245043 btc gone. That's just over $1.6 million dollars CAD. Perhaps the hardest part about this is that I did everything right. I never shared my seed phrase with anybody. My devices never touched the internet. Everything was kept in multiple safes and safety deposit boxes. None of it mattered. All because the hardware that created the seed phrase originally had one line in their code from 2021 that had a vulnerability. I'm filing a police report and a report with the Ontario Securities Commission. But I don't expect to recoup anything. A part of me is trying to make sense of what just happened. Or try to figure out a lesson in it. I'm struggling. $1.6 million is a staggering amount of money to have stolen. I guess all that I can think about right now is that I'm so damn happy that I'm an entrepreneur and that my earning potential is under my control. Mark my damn words. I'll recover.