I am fundamentally certain that the blockchain revolution is here to stay and that we are currently seeing a homologue to the 1995 era beginnings of the internet.

Yes we are in a bubble, yes there is lots of speculation, yes 99% of current cryptoassets will crash and burn, leaving investors in the dust. Bitcoin may or may not be around in 10 years. Maybe one of its competitors (Dash, Ripple, Litcoin, bcash*, Decred, Stellar) will supersede it. Maybe something we've never heard of will come along. Ethereum, NEM, NEO, Cardano? Which will win the fight for the smart contract space? Will it be winner takes all, will any of them survive to 2019? Anyone who says they know is lying or deluded.

What we can know though, is that blockchain as a technology and a concept is here to stay. The bull case for the magical future of a blockchain based cryptopia is made far better elsewhere so I won't make it here. I simply want to remind you that the mainstream media and seasoned experts can be and often are wrong. 

I see vast numbers of New York Times and FT opinion pieces slating blockchains for having no use cases (fundamentally untrue: see basic attention token, walton chain, agrello delta, digixdao, filecoin, storj, folding coin, golem and countless others), or how it's all one huge bubble which will crash and leave those silly youngsters hurting and the old boys laughing. The old boys might just be wrong.

Warren Buffet, whilst not often wrong and arguably has the best investing judgement of all humanity, admits he missed out on amazon & google. The 'expert' commentators were wrong on the internet, wrong on AI, and they are wrong on bitcoin and blockchains now. Societal progress goes in waves, whereby each generation brings forth new knowledge, technology and societal norms to be improved upon by successive generations. 

If you believe in something, don't let a past-it banker or journalist who has a sparkling reputation tell you your own opinions, research and facts are invalid. They might well be wrong.

Mass media internet commentary from the early 90s is laughable and truly shocking regarding the internet:

Marc Andreesen, the subject of the criticism in the first quote created the first internet browser: Mosaic. He's now worth billions and has changed the face of the world; all because he didn't listen to the 'experts' when he was 23. 

Trust yourself and your intuitions.

And for what it's worth, Marc is betting on bitcoin bigtime.



*Take that Roger Ver

We like money because we can do things with it.  It's worthless otherwise.

It's all too common to think about what we can do with the money we have. But that's the wrong way round, the valuable thing isn't money, it's what we get from it. We need to turn this on its head and think about what we really want in life and how much money it would take to get us there. If we don't do this, all too often, our expenditure simply grows with our pay packet and what would have seemed like an endless amount of money when you were 20, is now easily used up on 'essentials'.

So take a step back, add up everything you would like to spend in an ideal life and see how much you need.

Here's mine:

This is clearly liberal as I've put down every possible luxury I could give myself and in reality it wouldn't be this much, but this is my ultimate luxury lifestyle.

The total?

£30,660

That's less than I expected. I could live the rest of my life with that post tax and be really happy and live a very luxurious lifestyle (see NB below for how having children affects the equation).

Let's add tax in. Here's what it looks like, as you can see, I'd have to be earning £43k a year to have a post-tax take home pay of £30,500

The UK average earnings for those in their 30s is 30420. If you look at the average for professionals with a degree e.g. lawyers, doctors, marketing/PR specialists, managers, senior police officers, IT directors, the average jumps to £41,000, and that's for all ages. So with the starting salaries for these jobs rarely breaching £30k, it's not unreasonable to assume that the salary you need to live your best possible lifestyle might be reached in your early thirties.

So that’s all well and good, but what we really want is to be able to do whatever we want in life i.e. retire. And I don't mean do nothing, I mean do what actually motivates you in life whether it be art, literature, music, or the job you were doing anyway, but less hours and more time to socialise.

A widely accepted rule of thumb of investing is to be able to draw off annual interest of 6% (FTSE100 index tracker returns 5.5% annual average over the last few decades, and FTSE250 11.5%). So a lump sum of 716k would enable you to draw off 43k a year (if it's in stocks, you'd need even less, because of the disparity between capital gains tax and income tax).

How soon could one reasonably acquire that amount?

To make it simple and widely applicable let's take private tuition at a £30/hour rate (which is fairly standard for a graduate) as our sample job. 23,867 hours gives you your 716k. Or 596 40 hour weeks, or 12.4 years with 4 weeks holiday. Obviously for those years you also want to be living your ideal lifestyle. 12.4 years of 30k is 372,000. So that's another 6 years.

So in total, 18 years of working 48 weeks a year, 40 hour weeks, earning 30GBP/hour gets you to the point where you could invest a lump sum and retire and do what you like.

So if you went straight into that, at 22, you're only 40 and you are living the dream life.

It's not that I envisage doing nothing with my time from this moment on, I'd almost certainly still work. It's just that from this moment on, you have the freedom to do what you want in life and you don't have to do work you don't want to do. You can holiday if you like, you can spend a month reading if you like, it's up to you.

In fact, here's a blog post I prepared earlier on the exact problem of what we should spend our time doing to live a meaningful life…
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For those of you wondering where children fit into all of this, right here is the answer. I'd want to add on perhaps 50 per week for petrol, groceries and general purchases, plus 4000 a year for each child to cover holidays, the higher rental costs (although my 1000 per month is already pretty generous unless I'm living in London), hobbies, school trips etc. So maybe 6500 per child per year. That’s another 108k on the lumpsum, so just another 3 years of work or so.

In all of this, I'm making the assumption that inflation and capital gains on investments cancel each other out more or less (in reality I would expect capital gains to actually be higher)