Chapter 2. How people find Bitcoin
Every number in the book has a source. To keep the book short, the notes live here instead of in print. Each source is listed with the section of the book it supports and the words it backs up, in the order they appear in the chapter. Web addresses are links; a page may have moved since the date shown.
The chapter page · Chapter 1 sources · All chapters · Chapter 3 sources
Why people come, and why they walk away: “People are far more likely to enter a new market in the month”
Markku Kaustia and Samuli Knüpfer, “Peer Performance and Stock Market Entry,” Journal of Financial Economics 104, no. 2 (2012): 321-338; Harrison Hong, Jeffrey Kubik and Jeremy Stein, “Social Interaction and Stock-Market Participation,” Journal of Finance 59, no. 1 (2004).
Why people come, and why they walk away: “Social proof: we assume something is right when people like us do it”
Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, new and expanded edition, Harper Business, 2021, chapter on social proof.
Why people come, and why they walk away: “Fear of missing out (FOMO), which is loss aversion fantasizing about a gain”, “a loss hurts about twice as much as a gain pleases”
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,” Econometrica 47, no. 2 (1979).
Why people come, and why they walk away: “A headline about a bitcoin millionaire is easy to remember”, “the first price you ever heard becomes the price in your head”
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science 185 (1974), on availability and anchoring.
Why people come, and why they walk away: “He first used the phrase in 2020 to explain why his company”
Michael Saylor, interview with Raoul Pal, Real Vision, December 2020 (“melting ice cube”), and MicroStrategy press release, August 11, 2020, announcing the first $250 million bitcoin purchase.
Late, and too late: “They said it in 2021 at $30,000 and in 2024 at $50,000”
Price milestones: about $100 in April 2013 and $1,000 on November 27, 2013 (CoinMarketCap Academy, “Bitcoin Price History and Events Timeline,” and davemanuel.com, “Bitcoin Price History,” retrieved September 2026); $5,000 in October 2017 and $10,000 in late November 2017 (same sources); $30,000 on January 2, 2021 (CNBC, January 2, 2021); $50,000 on February 12, 2024 (CNBC and CoinDesk, February 12, 2024).
Late, and too late: “psychologists have a name for the second part, inaction inertia”
Orit Tykocinski and Thane Pittman, “The Consequences of Doing Nothing: Inaction Inertia as Avoidance of Anticipated Counterfactual Regret,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75, no. 3 (1998); on anchoring, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science 185 (1974).
Late, and too late: “About 4% of the people on earth own any bitcoin at all”
River Financial, Bitcoin Adoption Report 2025 (March 2025), which puts the share of the world’s population holding bitcoin at about 4% as of early 2025; river.com, retrieved September 2026.
Where Bitcoin sits on the adoption curve: “A sociologist named Everett Rogers described this path in 1962”
Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, Free Press, 1962.
Where Bitcoin sits on the adoption curve: “A sociologist named Everett Rogers described this path in 1962, drawing on…”
Bryce Ryan and Neal C. Gross, “The Diffusion of Hybrid Seed Corn in Two Iowa Communities,” Rural Sociology 8, no. 1 (March 1943): 15-24; Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 1962 (adopter categories: innovators 2.5%, early adopters 13.5%).
Where Bitcoin sits on the adoption curve: “in January 2024, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) you can buy in an ordinary brokerage account”
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, statement on approval of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products, January 10, 2024.
Where Bitcoin sits on the adoption curve: “In March 2025 came an executive order establishing a United States Strategic Bitcoin Reserve”
Executive Order 14233, “Establishment of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and United States Digital Asset Stockpile,” March 6, 2025, Federal Register, March 11, 2025. As of September 2026 the order remained in effect, the reserve held roughly 198,000 bitcoin, all from federal forfeitures, and a bill to write the reserve into law (H.R. 8957) was pending in the House (24/7 Wall St. via Yahoo Finance, September 15, 2026; retrieved September 2026).
Where Bitcoin sits on the adoption curve: “The International Telecommunication Union puts world internet use under 1% in 1995”
International Telecommunication Union, world internet users as a share of population, as compiled by Internet World Stats (1995: 0.4%; 1999: 4.1%) and Areppim (1995: 0.7%; 1999: 4.6%); retrieved September 2026.
Ignored, laughed at, fought: “from a 1918 speech by an American union organizer named Nicholas Klein”
Nicholas Klein, address to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America convention, Baltimore, 1918, proceedings. Commonly misattributed to Gandhi.
Ignored, laughed at, fought: “then chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, called bitcoin “rat poison squared””
Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, May 2018, as reported by CNBC.
Ignored, laughed at, fought: “The laughing continued through 2017, with claims that bitcoin is like the “tulip bubble,””
Jamie Dimon, remarks at the CNBC Delivering Alpha conference, New York, September 12, 2017 (bitcoin “a fraud” and “worse than tulip bulbs”), as reported by CNBC.
Ignored, laughed at, fought: “So is Bitcoin a giant bubble that will end in grief?”
Paul Krugman, “Bubble, Bubble, Fraud and Trouble,” The New York Times, January 29, 2018.
Ignored, laughed at, fought: “Bitcoin itself is a hyped-up fraud. It's a pet rock.”
Jamie Dimon, interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box from the World Economic Forum, Davos, January 19, 2023 (“Bitcoin itself is a hyped-up fraud. It’s a pet rock.”).
Ignored, laughed at, fought: “A policy analyst named Joseph Overton described the range of ideas”
Mackinac Center for Public Policy, “The Overton Window.”
Worth repeating: “he put a printed copy of the column in a blender with water”
Bob Metcalfe, “From the Ether: Predicting the Internet’s catastrophic collapse and ghost sites galore in 1996,” InfoWorld, December 4, 1995; blender episode, Sixth International World Wide Web Conference, Santa Clara, April 1997, per Wired; column date and wording per Quote Investigator, “I Predict the Internet Will Soon Go Spectacularly Supernova” (March 2020), retrieved September 2026.
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