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@CorySwan Cory 🦢 Real Bitcoin @ Swan.com
Founder of @Swan the Real Bitcoin Company,
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The Battle for Monetary Independence

https://x.com/CorySwan/status/2079556750097690882
(with Pictures)

My grandfather Phillip Klippsten wrote those words aboard the USS Yorktown, 300 miles offshore from Tokyo, two days before the ship began launching strikes against the Japanese home islands.
He was 34 years old, married to my grandmother, Lily, the father of two young children, and desperate to get home to the ordinary life he had left behind in Kansas City. He did not know when the war would end, whether the operation would succeed, or whether he would live to see his family again. He knew only that an enormous force had been assembled, that the moment had arrived, and that the work in front of them could bring the war to its conclusion.
The opening pages of Phillip Klippsten’s war journal
His journal is compelling because it was written without the benefit of hindsight. History now compresses those months into a familiar sequence of battles, victories, surrender, and homecoming, but he experienced them as a long series of uncertain days filled with hard work, false starts, rumors, bad weather, fear, boredom, exhaustion, and an almost unbearable longing for his wife and children. He had no way to know which operation would prove decisive or which day would later seem important. He simply continued doing his job while thousands of other ordinary Americans did the same.
Little we do today compares with the sacrifices of his generation, and Bitcoin adoption is not a literal war. In fact, the entire purpose of our work is to help produce a peaceful transition to a better monetary system, without the destruction and human suffering that usually accompany the collapse of an old order. But his journal carries a lesson that applies to every great historical change: history looks inevitable only after the people living through it have done the work required to make it happen.
This summer, the United States celebrates 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. We rightly honor the founders, the soldiers who secured the new nation, and the generations of Americans who strengthened and defended it ever since. But America was not founded by people celebrating independence. It was founded by people acting to achieve it, at considerable risk to themselves, because they had concluded that free people should no longer live as subjects of a distant and unaccountable power.
Political independence was the great achievement of their generation. Monetary independence is the great unfinished work of ours.
My grandfather wrote that after watching visiting newspaper men report from the comfort of the officers’ quarters while paying little attention to the sailors whose repetitive, exhausting work kept the carrier operating. The public would see the heroic pilots, the great battles, the photographs, and the victories. It would rarely see the endless cleaning, loading, repairing, watching, practicing, and maintaining that made those victories possible.
Phillip Klippsten (center)
Bitcoin has its own version of this dynamic. Bull markets receive all the attention because they deliver the spectacle: new all-time highs, breathless media coverage, institutional announcements, political conversions, suddenly popular conferences, and millions of people discovering that they have always been interested in sound money. We should recognize those moments, but they are the visible result of work performed earlier, during the periods when Bitcoin was quiet, unpopular, and declared dead once again.
Bear markets are when developers improve the protocol and the tools around it, miners become more efficient, companies strengthen their products, educators refine their arguments, and committed Bitcoiners continue converting the fruits of their labor into better money. They are when tourists leave, distractions fade, and conviction deepens. The bull market gets the glory, but the bear market does much of the work.
In 2020, when we launched Swan, I wrote Ten Million Bitcoiners: The Intransigent Minority. Drawing on Nassim Taleb’s observation that a stubborn minority can flip an entire system, I argued that Bitcoin would become politically irreversible once the United States had roughly ten million committed Bitcoiners. I did not mean ten million people who had purchased twenty dollars of Bitcoin, snagged some ETF shares, or downloaded an app. I meant ten million Americans who owned a meaningful amount, understood why Bitcoin matters, and would strongly oppose any attempt to take it away from them.
At the time, I estimated that we had perhaps 100,000 Americans who met that standard. We needed a hundredfold increase, and I argued that driving adoption must therefore dominate every other priority. The greatest remaining threat to Bitcoin was not a technical failure, because Bitcoin had already proved remarkably resilient. The greatest threat was that the incumbent system might decide to coordinate an attack while the number of committed Bitcoiners was still small enough to isolate, demonize, and overpower.
Two years later, I wrote The Race to Avoid the War. My argument was that Bitcoin is going to win, but the manner in which it wins remains profoundly important. Bitcoin can emerge as the orderly, antifragile alternative to a failing monetary system through education, voluntary adoption, better products, and the steady growth of a constituency that makes political confrontation obviously futile. It can also win the longer, harder way, after capital controls, monetary chaos, collapsing currencies, and attempts by desperate governments to hold on to the power of the money printer.
We are still running that race, and the work still happens one person at a time. Every committed Bitcoiner was once someone who did not understand Bitcoin. Every meaningful position began with a first purchase. Every person willing to defend Bitcoin began by learning why 21 million matters, why ownership differs from exposure, and why money controlled by transparent rules is preferable to money governed by institutional discretion.
The American founders did not merely replace a British government with an American government. They advanced a radical proposition about the relationship between the individual and the state: people possess rights that precede government, legitimate authority derives from the consent of the governed, and the purpose of political institutions is to secure liberty rather than dispense it as a privilege.
The constitutional system they subsequently built reflects a realistic understanding of human nature and concentrated power. Authority was divided among branches and levels of government because even good people should not be trusted with unlimited discretion. The system did not depend on finding a permanently virtuous ruler. It attempted to establish rules, incentives, and institutional checks that would restrain every ruler.
Bitcoin applies this proposition to money. It does not ask us to search endlessly for wiser central bankers, more disciplined politicians, or a sufficiently responsible committee with the power to determine the value of everyone else’s savings. It replaces discretion with rules that are transparent, predictable, and extraordinarily difficult for any individual, institution, or government to change.
No man can vote himself a privileged allocation from Bitcoin’s issuer, because there is no issuer. No president can create more Bitcoin to fund a favored project. No central bank can change the supply schedule in response to political pressure. No corporation can dilute every existing holder to finance an acquisition. The network applies the same rules to everyone, whether they own $10 of Bitcoin or $10 billion.
This makes Bitcoin the most powerful tool for monetary independence ever created, but its existence does not guarantee its adoption. Bitcoin does not buy itself, explain itself, defend itself in Congress, teach your children, help your friend take custody, or persuade your family to convert a portion of its savings. Those are human actions, undertaken by individuals who decide that monetary independence is worth pursuing.
The founders did not believe that independence could be secured by spectators, and neither should we. Freedom is not a condition we passively inherit and permanently possess. It is a way of organizing society that must be continually understood, exercised, strengthened, and passed forward. This is true of political freedom, and it is equally true of monetary freedom.
Let’s be clear about what we mean when we talk about killing the bear market. No company can command Bitcoin’s price to rise, and no single campaign, purchase, or group of people determines the market. We cannot promise a date, a price target, or a magic incantation that will turn every chart green. What we can do is reject the passivity that allows a bear market to become a state of mind.
That passivity takes hold when people begin waiting for someone else to act. They assume adoption will resume only after Wall Street gives permission, Washington offers encouragement, the media discovers a fresh story, or the price has already risen enough to make buying feel safe again. It produces the strange but familiar spectacle of people becoming more enthusiastic about acquiring Bitcoin as it becomes more expensive and less enthusiastic as it becomes cheaper.
We are repeatedly told that Bitcoin needs a new narrative before the next bull market can begin. This gets the causality backward. Narrative follows price. Bitcoin does not need journalists and bankers to invent a new reason for it to succeed. When the price rises, they will write the narratives for us, because journalists need stories that sell ads and bankers need stories that sell deals. They will announce that Bitcoin has been transformed by institutional adoption, sovereign accumulation, monetary instability, geopolitical fragmentation, artificial intelligence, or whatever explanation fits the moment. The underlying case for Bitcoin will not have suddenly changed. More people will simply have acted on it.
Bitcoin already has the only narrative it needs. Governments continue to spend more than they collect, central banks continue to debase currencies to sustain the system, and people everywhere continue to need a form of money that cannot be printed, censored, frozen, or altered for the benefit of the powerful. The contest is not between two competing political programs for administering the same broken monetary order. There is a third option outside the endless struggle between kleptocrats and communists: money governed by rules rather than rulers.
The Bear Army is made up of defeatism, distraction, exhaustion, cynicism, and short-term thinking. It tells companies to retreat and stop investing. It tells individual Bitcoiners that their purchases are too small to matter, their conversations persuade no one, and their efforts will have no effect on history. It teaches people to stare at the price while ignoring the steady expansion of the network, the infrastructure, the knowledge base, and the committed constituency around it. Most damaging of all, it persuades Bitcoiners to stop evangelizing at precisely the moment when evangelizing can do the most good.
This is the BEST time to bring someone into Bitcoin. Would you rather persuade a friend to begin buying while the market is quiet and prices are low, or wait until the next all-time high, when the media is screaming, everyone is chasing, and your friend reasonably wonders why you did not tell him sooner? Would you rather wear the Bitcoin shirt when everyone suddenly thinks it’s cool, or wear it proudly now, when it communicates real conviction? Would you rather reconnect with the Bitcoin friends who helped you through the last cycle, or leave the old group chat dormant until price makes everyone care again?
We reject that posture. Bitcoiners do not need to wait for the bull market to return before we resume building the intransigent minority in earnest. The next bull market will be fueled by the people who learn, buy, build, organize, and commit during the bear market. Bull markets do not descend from the sky as gifts, and they do not begin because a banker discovers a clever phrase. They emerge from the cumulative actions of human beings who have decided that the future is worth building before everyone else can see it.
My grandfather never says he stopped being afraid. He says he looked at the man responsible for leading the battle, saw him calmly doing his job, and decided to do his own. Courage is contagious. So is conviction. When leaders remain focused instead of panicking, other people discover they can stand up too.
That is why Swan is launching 50 Days for Freedom, a campaign to accelerate Bitcoin adoption, grow the ranks of committed Bitcoiners, and advance the cause of monetary independence 250 years after America’s declaration. We are not taking the summer off. Every weekday on X Spaces, Café Bitcoin will bring together old friends, new voices, builders, educators, founders, and committed Bitcoiners who are ready to coordinate, generate ideas, launch campaigns, and make things happen. Swan will be in the trenches all summer long, and we invite the entire Bitcoin ecosystem to join us.
For the next 50 days, Swan is cutting Bitcoin purchase fees to 0.50%, with Swan paying our clients’ withdrawal fees as always. We committed to this rate for the duration of the campaign because urgency is the point. Swan is putting its economic energy behind adoption for 50 days, and we ask Bitcoiners everywhere to put their own energy behind it as well.
USS Yorktown October 1945
We want people hesitating to make their first purchase to get off zero. We want existing Bitcoiners to increase their recurring buys, to make that big purchase they’ve been postponing, to take advantage of low fees while the campaign is live. We want every Bitcoiner to recruit someone, answer questions, share the best educational material, explain the difference between Bitcoin and crypto, and help another person move from curiosity to genuine understanding and ownership. Buy the Bitcoin shirt and wear it. Pick up a children’s book about Bitcoin and read it to your kids. Reopen the group chat. Schedule the video call. Get the posse back together. They want to hear from you, and you want to be there for them.
We also want people to take possession of real on-chain Bitcoin rather than settling for financial exposure that leaves the actual asset somewhere else. Swan has always paid the network fee for our clients’ withdrawals, because we want our clients to own Bitcoin and develop the confidence to secure it appropriately. Buying Bitcoin is the beginning of monetary independence, but understanding and controlling what you own is what makes it real.
This is how we will reach ten million Bitcoiners, and this is how the race to avoid the war will be won. We do not need one heroic action from one extraordinary person. We need sustained action from millions of ordinary people who understand that the work matters even when the world is not yet paying attention. The Bear Army is counting on us to wait for a new narrative, a higher price, or permission from the very institutions Bitcoin was built to route around. We intend to disappoint those bears.
My grandfather wrote those words by flashlight with a picture of Lily in front of him, after the captain announced that Japan had asked for peace. What he wanted after months of battle was not glory, power, or a permanent life of heroic struggle. He wanted to go home to his wife and children, return to work, and live an ordinary life as a free man.
Lily and Phillip back home in Kansas City
That is what freedom is for. Bitcoin is not the purpose of life, and accumulating money for its own sake is not a worthy substitute for living. Sound money is valuable because it helps people preserve the results of their work, make plans across time, support their families, build institutions, take risks, and devote more of their lives to purposes they choose.
Your savings represent hours you worked, risks you accepted, businesses you built, time spent away from people you love, and consumption you postponed for the sake of the future. When the monetary system allows others to dilute those savings without your consent, it weakens your claim on that future. Bitcoin offers a peaceful alternative, giving every individual access to property that cannot be created without limit, altered for political convenience, or administered according to a different set of rules for the powerful.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, Americans declared that they would no longer live as subjects. We have inherited the political institutions, cultural traditions, and extraordinary prosperity made possible by their courage, but the best way to honor that inheritance is not merely to look backward and celebrate what they accomplished. It is to identify the unfinished work of freedom in our own time and do our part to advance it.
This summer, Swan will spend 50 days lowering the cost of buying Bitcoin, educating new Bitcoiners, supporting existing Bitcoiners, and recruiting the intransigent minority that will make monetary freedom irreversible.

We invite you to buy, learn, take ownership, increase your commitment, and bring someone else with you. The Bear Army is counting on us to remain passive until the price tells us it is safe to act, but history has never been made that way.

It is time to finish the job in front of us. Let’s defeat the bear, build toward ten million Bitcoiners, and win the race to monetary independence.