The Stadium Riddle (Why you aren't "too late")
Why your brain thinks it's the ship has sailed with Bitcoin.
I want to start today with a riddle. It stumped me the first time I heard it, and honestly, the answer is one of the reasons I stopped worrying about being “too late” to Bitcoin.
The Water Dropper
Imagine you are sitting in the top row of a massive, watertight stadium - think Melbournes MCG.
Down on the field, there is a magic water dropper.
At 12:00 pm, it drops one drop of water.
At 12:01 pm, it drops two drops.
At 12:02 pm, it drops four drops.
It keeps doubling every single minute.
Here is the question: If the stadium is completely full and you are drowning at 12:50 pm, at what time was the stadium still 97% empty?
Stop and guess.
Was it 12:10? 12:30?
The answer is 12:45 pm.
At 12:44, you’d be sitting there looking at a few puddles on the grass, wondering why I trapped you in a stadium for 45 minutes to watch nothing happen.
You wouldn’t be worried. You wouldn’t see the wave coming.
Then…bam! Five minutes later, you’re underwater.
The Human Glitch
This is called exponential growth, and our brains are simply not wired to understand it. We think in straight lines (1, 2, 3, 4). We don’t think in doubling curves (1, 2, 4, 8, 16).
This “human glitch” is exactly why most people think Bitcoin is sketchy, or a bubble, or even if they were interested, that think they have “missed the boat”.
They are looking at the puddles at 12:44 pm and saying, “It’s nothing.”
But Bitcoin is built on three different exponential patterns that nobody talks about.
1. The Scarcity Explosion (The Pokemon Rule)
Roughly every four years, Bitcoin undergoes an event called “The Halving”.
Imagine if stores sold Pokemon cards, but only 21 million Charizards would ever exist.
At first, the store gets 50 new Charizards every 10 minutes. Then, four years later, they only get 25. Then 12.5.
Okay, obviously you can’t buy half a Pokemon card. But that’s the magic of Bitcoin—you can.
The supply gets cut in half, automatically, forever, but the pieces just get smaller and more valuable.
This creates a level of scarcity that not even Gold can match.
We are always digging up more gold (the supply increases every year). Bitcoin is already twice as scarce as gold is right now, and in 2028, the supply drops again—making it harder to find than any physical asset on earth.
2. The Security Universe
People worry about Bitcoin being hacked. But again, they are missing the math.
Bitcoin is secured by a cryptographic system called SHA-256. To break it, you would need to guess a combination from a pool of possibilities so large, it’s hard to describe.
Put it this way: There are roughly 10^80 atoms in the entire universe.
The possible combinations to hack Bitcoin are almost as high as that number (10^77).
Trying to hack Bitcoin is harder than finding a single specific grain of sand on all the beaches on Earth.
It is security built on exponential math so vast, it’s effectively unbreakable.
So, are you too late?
I get it. When you see the price has gone from tens to hundreds to thousands, it feels like the ship has sailed.
But people thought they were late when it hit $100. They thought they were late at $1,000. They thought they were late at $30,000.
They were looking at the stadium at 12:44 pm.
They saw a few puddles and thought the show was over. They didn’t realise that the doubling effect was just getting started.
Even if Bitcoin “only” grows at a conservative 25% per year for the next 20 years (way less than its history), a $10,000 investment today would turn into $867,000. Compare that to the stock market average (lets go with 10% per year), where that same money becomes just $67,000.
But let me be upfront with you - its not about making money here. Its about having a means of opting out.
The Opt Out Takeaway
Opting out isn’t just about leaving a job or traveling. It’s about opting out of linear thinking.
The world tells you to take the slow, linear path. Bitcoin operates on a curve.
Most people are standing in the stadium, looking at the puddles, laughing at the “magic water.”
Once you understand the math, you stop laughing, and you start building a raft.
In the meantime, if you have any questions about Bitcoin, leave me a comment - I’d be happy to answer them.
Thanks for reading.