Everyone Said the Bottom Was Lower — I Sent $410 at 6 AM Anyway

The buy button sat green at 6:07 AM on November 12, 2022. My phone leaned against the coffee tin, the kitchen was dark except for the screen glow, and Bitcoin read $16,680, down from the $67,000 I remembered from thirteen months earlier. Five days since FTX froze withdrawals. I typed 410, deleted it, typed it again, and stared for eleven minutes before my thumb moved.

The $410 was car-repair money, a fund Dana and I had built at $50 a month since 2019, and our crypto account was already down to $2,940 from the $9,000 I had put in during 2021. If Bitcoin kept falling the way my brother-in-law Rick predicted, that mornin's tap would erase another quarter of it by Christmas. Dana was asleep upstairs. I sent it anyway.

Everyone in my life said the bottom was lower, and the loudest voice saying so was mine. What saved me wasn't conviction about Bitcoin. It was an index card with three rules on it, written in a Wendy's parking lot in October 2021, and rule two is the only reason that $410 ever left our checking account. The card is coffee-stained and lives in my desk drawer, and rule two says somethin I'll get to — cuz without it, this story ends with me in the group chat at 2 AM, agreeing with nine people that I'd been a fool.

the $9,000 that became $2,940

I got in late and heavy, which is the worst combination available to a person. Between February and November of 2021 I put in $9,000 across eleven purchases, most of them clustered between $52,000 and $60,000, cuz a coworker's screenshots made holding feel like membership in somethin. By the time Terra blew up in May 2022 the account was at $5,100, and I remember doing the thing where you open the app, close it, open it again, as if the number owed you an explanation. Celsius froze withdrawals that June. FTX froze them that November. Each collapse took a bite.

The account bottomed at $2,940 on November 21, 2022, when Bitcoin touched $15,500, and that number is seared into the back of my eyelids. I did not sell. I mostly didn't sell because of the card, and partly cuz selling at a 67% loss felt like announcing to my wife that I had been exactly as reckless as her sister's husband kept implying.

nine opinions and one paid hour

The group chat had nine people in it by November 2022, and after FTX died, all nine agreed the asset class was finished. Rick, who has opinions the way other people have allergies, called for $8,000 Bitcoin by spring. Someone posted the classic chart with the arrow drawn into the void. The arrow pointed nowhere good.

That September I'd paid a fee-only investment advisor $250 for one hour, mostly hoping she would tell me to sell so I could blame someone qualified, and instead she said two things: cap this stuff at 3% of net worth, and stop making decisions inside the app after dark. I want to defend the chat here. Those people weren't idiots. Every institution that had spent two years telling us crypto was the future was mid-collapse at the same time, and gettin out was a fully reasonable read of the available evidence. That's exactly why the card mattered — rule two exists for the weeks when the reasonable read and the pre-written plan point in opposite directions.

the index card from the Wendy's parking lot

In October 2021 I panic-sold 0.06 BTC at $43,000 and felt sick about it for a week, so I sat in my car outside a Wendy's with an untouched baconator and wrote three rules on an index card from the glovebox. Rule one: crypto never exceeds 3% of net worth, measured quarterly, no exceptions for momentum. Rule two: when a household-name company in this market dies and reasonable people declare the whole asset dead, move $400 from the car fund into Bitcoin, and do not check the price for ninety days. Rule three: refill the car fund before buying anything else, even if its boring. The card took four minutes to write. It has outperformed every hot take ive ever read.

The ninety-day clause was the accidental genius part. Buying felt impossible unless I also promised not to watch, so the purchase and the panic got separated by a full quarter, which turned out to be the entire trick. Rick photographed the card at a cookout in 2022 and called it my security blanket. I pretended not to mind.

why 6 AM and not 2 PM

Slight detail, sizable consequences. My worst decisions in 2021 all happened between midnight and 3 AM — thumb-scrolling, six tabs open, conviction borrowed from strangers with anime avatars. The advisor's line about after-dark decisions stuck harder than anything else she said, so the FTX-week purchase waited for a cold kitchen at 6 AM, coffee brewing, Reddit closed, and me typing the same number twice just to feel its weight. Eleven minutes, remember. Not fast.

The order filled at an average of $16,650, which snagged 0.0246 BTC, and then I did the hardest thing in this entire story. I closed the app. Ninety days, per rule two, no peeking. The car fund got topped back up with my February bonus at $50 a clip, exactly like before, and Dana got a full confession over enchiladas in December that went considerably better than the version I'd rehearsed in my head.

fourteen months of nothing

Nobody warns you what buying near a bottom actually feels like, which is nothin. Bitcoin chopped sideways between $16,000 and $18,000 into the new year, and my 0.0246 BTC sat there being worth approximately what I paid, then slightly less, then slightly more, for long enough that I stopped translating it into dollars on sight.

The ninety-day rule expired in mid-February 2023 and I didn't notice for a week, which tells you what the clause did to my habits. By that October the position had doubled, and by March 2024, two years after the freeze that scared everyone off, my little account crossed $10,000 for the first time. It has since paid for exactly nothin. It sits at about 3.1% of our net worth, right where the advisor said to keep it, and the checking account that funded it has never once overdrafted.

Gary sold at $17,100

Gary, the same coworker whose screenshots had pulled me in during 2021, sold his remaining 0.4 BTC on November 14, 2022, at $17,100, and meant it when he said he was done. We got tacos in April 2024 with the price north of $60,000, and I braced for bitterness that never arrived. He'd moved the proceeds into an S&P 500 index fund through his 401(k), said the sleep was worth more than the spread, and asked my opinion on guacamole like nothin had happened. I think about that lunch constantly. Buying the bottom and exiting the top are both survivor stories. The rest of us are just negotiating with our own temperament, and Gary negotiated his way out clean.

the coffee tin at 6:07 AM

The kitchen still has the same tin, dented near the lid, and on some Saturday mornings im up at 6:07 before anyone else, standing there with the phone dark on the counter, remembering the eleven minutes and how certain my body was that I was about to light money on fire. Rule two has fired once since — March 2023, the USDC wobble, another $400 moved on a Sunday mornin with the same ceremony — and I hope it never fires again, because every firing means somebody's exchange died and somebody's savings didnt come back. The coins from that November morning are worth about $2,140 today. That's a nice number, not a life-changing one. What I actually keep from 6:07 AM on November 12, 2022 is the proof that a panic I could feel in my hands was survivable with three rules, one cold kitchen, and a thumb that waited eleven minutes before it moved.