Ninety Days After the Halving, My $8,000 Moved 5.2% and That Was Fine

Saturday, July 20, 2024, 8:05 in the mornin, back porch, coffee goin cold next to a spiral notebook where I'd written one number at the top of the page: 67,650. That was Bitcoin's price ninety days after the April halving, and underneath it, underlined twice, sat the number I actually cared about — $8,415, the value of my 0.1244 BTC. My brother had guaranteed the position would double by July. It had moved 5.2%. I wrote fine next to the underline and closed the notebook.

The $8,000 was four percent of my net worth, a ceiling I'd promised my wife in writing, and the quarter's real test was never the price. In 2021 I had been a chart-refreshing wreck — forty-plus app opens a week during the last bull run, sleep scheduled around Asian trading hours I didn't even trade. The halving quarter of 2024 was the experiment: hold a position through the most hyped event in crypto, on a prewritten plan, with my attention contractually rationed. If I could do that, the 5.2% was irrelevant.

The most useful number on that notebook page isnt a price at all. It's 11 — the number of times I opened the app in ninety days, verified by a screen-time tracker my brother made me install as part of a $100 bet — and the way I got there involves reading ETF inflow reports instead of candlesticks, a sell plan written in April before anything happened, and one rule about what I'm allowed to do before coffee.

block 840,000, April 20, 2024

The halving itself was, for somethin so anticipated, aggressively undramatic: block 840,000 mined on April 20, 2024, cutting the new-supply reward from 6.25 to 3.125 Bitcoin per block, and I marked the moment by doing nothing, which was the plan. My brother Dane hosted a cookout where three grown men watched a block explorer countdown like it was the ball drop, and the price did approximately nothin that weekend, which everyone at the cookout interpreted as evidence for whatever they already believed. I went home early. That was also the plan.

the $100 bet with my brother

The bet structure got hashed out in February 2024 over chili: fifteen or fewer app opens per quarter, verified by the screen-time tracker, loser pays $100 into the winner's kids' college fund. Dane was sure I'd crack; I'd been the guy who opened the app during his own wedding rehearsal dinner in 2021, a story my family retells with unlimited joy. The rules allowed a notebook instead: prices and portfolio value written by hand, Saturdays only, from the exchange's weekly statement email, which is why the July 20 page exists in my handwriting at all. Writing numbers by hand on a schedule turns out to be an altogether different activity than watching numbers dance in real time.

eleven opens in ninety days

Eleven opens in ninety days, and I can tell you what each one was, because the notebook logs em: two to execute the April purchases, one in May after a two-factor reset, four Saturday statement checks that ran long, one June day I broke and looked during a dip to $58,000 — logged, confessed, counted — and three rebalance-adjacent peeks I'll defend at trial. Eleven, against a historical baseline of approximately forty a week. The dip day was the hardest, and the notebook entry from it says only: still here, fee for nothing. The bet was won on July 1st, when Dane paid the $100 into my daughter's 529 with theatrical disgust.

ETF inflows instead of candlesticks

What I read instead of charts, per the attention contract: the weekly net-inflow reports for the spot Bitcoin ETFs, which put a slow, institutional number on the same mania I used to watch in neon. Friday evenings, ten minutes, one table — billions in, billions out, the aggregate of what Fidelity and BlackRock and the rest absorbed that week. Watching flows is like watching tide gauges instead of waves. Ten minutes, one table. It gave me a feel for the cycle without a single candlestick, and it fed a calm thesis: post-halving supply cuts plus steady demand ordinarily resolve slowly, over quarters, on a delay nobody can time from a five-minute chart.

the sell plan written before April

The sell plan was written April 6th, before the halving, in pen: trim 0.02 BTC if the price crossed $100,000 before September, trim another 0.02 at $120,000, otherwise touch nothin until the January rebalance. Pen, not pencil, because pencil invites editing. Not one trigger fired — the price spent the quarter between $54,000 and $72,000 and never came close — and the plan's real job turned out to be not selling at $58,000 in June, when every cell in my body filed a motion. A plan you write while calm is a legal document you serve on yourself while panicked. Mine sat there in April's steady handwriting and did its job without being read twice.

where the 5.2% actually went

Where did the 5.2% actually go? Nowhere, which is the honest answer and the whole point of the exercise — a mark-to-market wiggle on an asset I'd promised to hold through wiggles. The quarter's real returns were behavioral. For scale: my index fund did 4.1% over the same ninety days, with dividends, and required exactly zero notebook entries. The crypto allocation drifted up to 4.6% of net worth by July, which meant January's rebalance would trim a few hundred dollars back to target — a capital gains tax event I'd pre-cleared with my accountant, budgeting $40 of tax, logged on the notebook's inside cover where boring things live.

the 2028 line at the bottom

The 2028 line sits at the bottom of the July page, written that same mornin: April 2028, same porch, same notebook if it survives, do not raise the percentage. I've since added pages for the April 2025 and April 2026 anniversaries, and the notebook now runs three years of Saturday handwriting, 5.2% at the top of the first page and fine beside it in pen. The coffee that mornin went cold, the way coffee does when you're busy finding out you've changed. Dane still texts me candlestick screenshots sometimes, fishing. The phone stays in my pocket til after coffee now, which was the last rule and the easiest one to keep. Some bets you're glad to win twice.