In the year 2010—a time when phones were becoming smarter while the rest of us were still figuring things out—my husband spent forty dollars on something called Bitcoin. This was not done with the confidence of a prophet, but with the curiosity of a man who had found a strange new coin on the ground and wondered if it might someday buy him a sandwich.
At that time, Bitcoin was so new that one dollar could buy anywhere from a few hundred to more than 1,000 of them. It was less an investment and more an experiment, like purchasing a parrot that might one day learn to talk—or might simply sit there and judge you in silence.
Some of the Bitcoin was used, as experiments often are. About ten dollars’ worth disappeared into the world, never to be seen again. The remaining thirty dollars’ worth was carefully recorded as a key, written down in a notebook, and placed somewhere safe. This is what we tell ourselves when we put important things in notebooks.
Nine years later, we moved to our family farm, which is the sort of place where time moves slowly but clutter does not. Boxes were packed, unpacked, and repacked. Papers were reviewed with good intentions and discarded with great efficiency. Somewhere in this noble effort to simplify our lives, that notebook was thrown away.
We did not notice.
Then came the latter part of 2020, when Bitcoin decided to introduce itself to the world with all the subtlety of a brass band. Prices soared. Headlines shouted. Fortunes were made overnight. That was when my husband informed me, in a tone usually reserved for medical diagnoses, that he could not find the key.
It turns out that we were, at least in theory, multimillionaires.
In practice, we were not.
The money existed in the way buried treasure exists in novels—technically real, emotionally thrilling, and utterly useless if you do not know where it is buried. We had millions of dollars we could not touch, could not use, and could not recover. Wealth, it turns out, is a shy creature when you lose the door to its cage.
The following morning, I got up and went to work.
I built websites. I helped business owners understand and implement artificial intelligence without losing their minds. I worked on Google Business listings, branding, logo design, and StoryBrand websites. I did all the things I had been doing the day before I learned I was rich, and the day after that, too.
This was not an act of courage. It was an act of reality.
Being a millionaire in name only does not pay the electric bill, nor does it provide much comfort when one is staring at a to-do list. I learned something valuable during that season, though it was not the lesson most people expect.
Potential is not the same as power. Ownership is not the same as access. And money you cannot reach is about as useful as a ladder that stops one rung short of the roof.
What saved me from panic was not imaginary wealth, but very real skills. I knew how to create value. I knew how to build things that worked. I knew how to help other small business owners turn ideas into assets they could actually control. These were not theoretical talents; they showed up for me every morning and did their job.
And that is why I still show up.
Would I still be working if nineteen million dollars were sitting safely in the bank? That is an interesting question, and like most interesting questions, it has no honest answer. But I do know this: I would still be doing something useful, something grounded, something that helps people build lives and businesses that do not vanish when a notebook goes missing.
Because real security does not come from windfalls. It comes from skills.
Real wealth is not what you might have someday—it is what you can rely on today.
And that, I have found, is worth more than Bitcoin ever was.
