June 2010. I handed over cash for my first 10 oz silver bar at $20.09 per ounce. I felt smart. Prepared. Like I’d figured out something most people were too blind to see.
Today, that same bar is worth about $78 per ounce—a 290% gain over 15 years. That’s about a 9.0% CAGR. My silver is doing what it was designed to do: keep up with inflation, maybe slightly beat it depending on how you define inflation.
This is how it started. The financial crash of 2008–2009 really scared me. Not financially—mentally.
Watching the financial system collapse, seeing Bear Stearns evaporate, watching the government bail out the banks that caused it all… something snapped.
My wife and I started an investment group with friends. We watched Peter Schiff videos like they were scripture. This guy called the housing crash. He understood that our paper dollars were trash, that the Fed was destroying our savings, that we needed sound money.
We got it. We really did. The dollar was a slow-motion robbery. Inflation was theft. The system was rigged to transfer wealth from savers to the connected elite. We were RIGHT about the problem. We were CATASTROPHICALLY WRONG about the solution.
In 2010, I made my first serious move. I bought silver.
Why not gold? Because gold seemed “too expensive” at $1,500/oz. Silver was only $20–30. I could stack more ounces. I could feel wealthy watching the bars pile up. Over the next decade, I kept buying silver. My last purchase was March 2020—$20.29 per ounce.
Notice something?
For TEN YEARS, the price barely moved. I now own about 900 ounces of silver. At today’s price of $78, that’s roughly $70,200. I invested around $18,000 over those years.
On paper, I won. But here’s what keeps me up at night:
My silver just outpaced inflation, which is great. That was the very thing I was trying to escape—monetary debasement. So overall, silver did its job of maintaining purchasing power. So why am I not happy with it?
If I’d taken that same $18,000 and bought Bitcoin in 2011, when I bought my first silver, Bitcoin was trading around $1–10. That $18,000 could have bought somewhere between 3,600 BTC, assuming an average price of $5 per coin.
At today’s price of ~$78,000 per BTC…I’m talking about a total value of roughly $280 million.
Just writing those numbers makes me sick. Even if I didn’t get in during 2011 but scaled in over those early years, the returns would be amazing—life-changing money. But Bitcoin wasn’t on my radar at that point. At least, I don’t remember hearing about it.
This is silver priced in Bitcoin. The downward movement shows that Bitcoin’s value is growing faster than silver’s.
But there’s another side to this story beyond me missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in profit.
Peter Schiff taught me to recognize sound money. He explained how fiat currency was a scam. He showed me that governments would always debase, always inflate, always steal through monetary expansion. He gave me the framework to understand Bitcoin. Yet when Bitcoin arrived—mathematically scarce, globally accessible, unseizable, uncensorable, perfectly designed sound money—he couldn’t see it.
It took me years to go from discovering Bitcoin to really understanding it. But I’m not a professional, so I guess that’s my excuse. But what about Peter? How can someone who understands the problem so clearly be so blind to the solution?
Here’s the truth: I’m still holding my 900 ounces of silver. I seriously thought about dumping it when silver hit $100 and moving it into Bitcoin. But I didn’t. Not because I think silver is the better play—I don’t. The math is clear.
I’m holding it because letting go is hard. Even when you know you’re wrong. Fifteen years of buying. Fifteen years of believing. Fifteen years of being “the silver guy” in my investment group.
That’s a lot of identity wrapped up in a stack of metal that’s barely moved. Ego is expensive. Every time I look at that silver stack, I see the cost of being early to the wrong asset.
Here’s what I tell myself: Silver is currently in a strong up move, and maybe I can get more performance out of it. Selling it is a hassle—I have to take it to a dealer and get cash. Maybe I’ll keep it for diversification. And if that apocalypse does come and the electricity goes out, maybe the world will be bartering in silver. Yeah, sure.
If you’re reading this and you own physical precious metals, I need you to hear something: You’re not wrong about the problem. You’re just using the wrong solution. Bitcoin isn’t competing with gold and silver anymore. Bitcoin already won.
Not because some crypto bro said so, but because the math is undeniable:
• Bitcoin is more scarce (21 million vs. infinitely mineable silver)
• Bitcoin is more portable (cross-border in minutes vs. physical shipping)
• Bitcoin is more divisible (sats vs. ounces)
• Bitcoin is more verifiable (public ledger vs. assay tests)
The only advantage precious metals have? They’ve been around longer. People are familiar with physical metals and understand them better. Bitcoin is new, digital, and still evolving. That’s it. That’s the whole case.
The cost of doing nothing is too high. The sound money revolution is happening. I wasn’t wrong to seek it. I was just early to the wrong asset.
If you’re holding precious metals—or if you’re just starting to understand that fiat is broken—don’t make my mistake. Don’t spend 15 years on the wrong solution. Learn about Bitcoin. Really learn it. Don’t dismiss what you don’t understand. And don’t trust all the doom in the mainstream media.
Do your own research.
Study bitcoin.