'Buy Bitcoin, plant a tree, lower your time preference': a Sequoia story

cointelegraph.com:

When the market falls faster than a tree in the forest, the phrases “zoom out,” and “lower your time preference,” take root.

“Zoom out” refers to taking a break from the omnipresent price charts that populate news feeds and Twitter threads. Consider looking at the price of Bitcoin (BTC) over the past five years–as opposed to over the past 6,12 or 18 months.

But what does “lower your time preference,”–popular parlance among Bitcoiners, actually mean? Commonly attributed to Saifedean Ammous, the polarizing author who penned The Bitcoin Standard, lowering one’s time preference translates to thinking long-term, and to valuing the future over the present.

In contrast to a fiat standard, where money loses value due to inflation; a system in which quick gains, immediate satisfaction, and instant gratification make the medicine go down, a Bitcoin standard promotes delayed gratification. The theory is that in a Bitcoin Standard, the value of money saved in Bitcoin goes up over time to be enjoyed at a later stage.

This lesson is a tough pill to swallow, (particularly during a crypto winter) but it's a vital step to understanding Bitcoin. At least, that’s what Fangorn, a passionate Bitcoiner turned tree-planter believes. A software developer and history major with a background in biology, he stumbled across Bitcoin on a Hacker News site in the summer of 2017 (when one BTC was worth around $3,000).

Something twigged during 2017 and 2018, but it took the Covid-19 market crash of 2020 for Fangorn to really “go down the rabbit hole.” He read more broadly, engaging with popular Bitcoin author Gigi’s works, who wrote 21 lessons as well as an article called Bitcoin is Time. At this point, a lightbulb went off:

His appetite for understanding