How Much Bitcoin Do You Really Need to Retire? | Bitcoin 2026

All right. What is going on everybody? We've got a firecracker of a panel here. A very popular question on YouTube which I I know and love, but I'm Brandon from Green Candle for those of you guys who don't know me. Title of our panel is how much Bitcoin you need to retire. So, I think we'll just start off with that question right off the bat and we'll go down the line. So, we'll start off with Sean. Introduce yourself and then tell us what do you think? How much Bitcoin do you need to retire? >> Hey everybody. uh Sean Owen with a company called Salt Lending doing lending. So really our belief is that you want to hold Bitcoin forever and that the best way to do that is forever and anything you need along the way typically comes along in the form of some type of banking product. We we believe that lending is a big piece of that. Uh, and that really is just simply if you're going to retire on Bitcoin, you're probably along the way going to be forced with either needing to sell the Bitcoin or hold on and suffer through the liquidity and find it some other way. And we just kind of open up the ability for you to borrow cash against that like a bridge. Um, and as far as just going right in, you want me to go right in? >> Yeah. >> Uh, the right amount. I don't know that that question has a number. It's probably different for everybody. The way that I usually like to talk about it is either you're taking your extra savings and buying Bitcoin and then you're playing the put it away forever in storage which is one strategy or you're, you know, kind of doing like me more of an aggressive hardcore Bitcoiner where all my income comes in in Bitcoin and then I just borrow what I need to pay my bills on the other side. And I think that's kind of the delta between like three or four times the amount of time value. But it really depends on the person. So, I'm looking forward to the conversation. I think that the the wrong number is zero. Nobody should have zero. Uh, and the right number we'll figure out in this panel. >> All right. Trey does a lot on the fire movement. So, you can uh break all that down for us, Trey, but I'll ask you the same question. How much Bitcoin do you think we need to retire? >> 6.15. 6.15 BTC. That's what you need. Uh, no, we can get into the nuance there. I don't know if anybody's been around long enough to understand that meme, but uh I'm Trey Sers. Uh I am VP of sales at Unchained. Um Unchained for anybody who is not familiar, uh we help our clients to hold Bitcoin securely with succession planning in mind. We've got a suite of financial services. You can buy and sell Bitcoin with it. We have commercial Bitcoin back loans and different account types. Um IAS being one of the uh kind of most relevant account types for this question of retirement and long-term savings. Um, so if you're interested in that, we've got a booth out there. You can go check it out. Um, I also run a newsletter called Fire BTC in which I am delving into the synergies between the FIRE movement, which stands for financial independence retire early, and Bitcoin. Uh, Bitcoin is the perfect asset for low time preference, long-term saving, which is exactly what the financial independence retire early movement is focused on. um they typically use stocks or index funds as their vehicle of choice for savings. Bitcoin is so much better. Uh and so that's what I dive into in that newsletter and helping people to understand how they can think through what they need to retire, what that plan should look like um and and all the other interesting nuances to that really really uh fascinating question that everybody is is looking for a simple answer for. >> Yeah, 100%. Everybody wants a number. So, we've got 6.15 there. Now, now Mitchell, I would love to hear what you've got down there at the end over here. >> Thanks, Brandon. It's not 0.003, whatever you see on on YouTube, right, where 57 sats will be generational wealth. Certainly, it's a nuanced conversation and the number is going to differ for everyone. I tend to think of it in terms of age, right? So each age generation should be targeting probably a certain amount of Bitcoin. I think for my generation, generation Z, like one Bitcoin will probably do the trick. But that being said, continue to aggressively accumulate beyond that. But yeah, excited to kind of unpack the nuance of this conversation today. >> Yeah, 100%. And uh yeah, I mean I I know that you're you're saying the the low number to kind of, you know, to delve into me over here because I make a bunch of videos about 0.1 Bitcoin or 0.01 01 bitcoin is what you need to retire. And I think the reason that I always hit that low number is just because you know despite what you know these other assets have and the appreciation we haven't had an asset like Bitcoin with just the true finite scarcity of Bitcoin. So, you know, I I want you guys to kind of go down the line and talk about what you think of saving in just a true verifiable finite asset, what that can do to accelerate and, you know, why you think maybe that can help lower the amount that you need to retire um just fully just because of the potential price action of Bitcoin, the true scarcity and everything like that. So, we'll start with All right, if Mitchell's ready, he's chomping at the bit. So, let's see it. So, I I appreciate all your content, Brandon, and I, you know, poke fun at the the titles and thumbnails, but there is a lot of truth in in that, right? Because if you look at Bitcoin from a lens of total addressable market, there's one quadrillion dollars worth of stuff in the world that we save in. Real estate, gold, stocks, currency, commodities, all of that about a quadrillion dollars worth. Bitcoin's current market cap, 1.5 trillion. So not even 1% of its total total addressable market and it's the only thing we can't make more of other than human time. You can build more houses, can make more companies, you can dig up more gold, you can farm more weed and other commodities, right? Bitcoin is uniquely verifiably scarce. So I think a realistic long-term market share for Bitcoin could be between 20% and 50% of all of the world's value. I think 50% would be a very aggressive forecast. I think it's realistically probably more around 25%. But even then, that's $250 trillion worth of market cap. You divide that by 21 million Bitcoin, it's about a million dollars per Bitcoin. So from there, you can kind of do some napkin math. All right, if one Bitcoin is a million dollar, how much do I spend per year? How much Bitcoin do I need to retire? assuming Bitcoin, you know, grows up uh, you know, 5 to 10% per year over the long term. >> So, I'd like to kind of dig into this from the traditional fire movement perspective, which has has anybody heard of the 4% rule? 4% rule. Okay. What this means for anybody who's who's not aware, um, this was built on something called the Trinity study. It was back in the 1990s. Um some researchers looked at historical stock and bond portfolio across the previous like hundred years. And essentially the conclusion of this was with the 6040 portfolio you have a number of 25 times your annual expenses where you can draw 4% off of that and that portfolio will last for 30 years or more. uh in a lot of cases it lasted much more and you ended up with a lot more money than you started with. Um the traditional fi financial independence retire early movement uses this as the the target for what they are looking to save. So my annual expenses are $100,000 a year. I need $2.5 million in a savings portfolio in order to have enough to draw down on that to cover my annual expenses over a 30-year or more time frame. Um, well, if Bitcoin is the most scarce asset, the highest performing asset, like we all expect it to be, then that 4% is probably a little bit too conservative. So, the way that I like to think about this is um more of like a 25% appreciation rate for Bitcoin over at least the next, call it 20 to 30 years on average. Of course, there's going to be ups and downs. Um, and then if you go even more conservative from that, what that implies relative to the 4% rule is more like an 8% rule. More like an 8% withdrawal rate. And I know this sounds a little bit crazy. Oh, you're going to sell down 8% of your Bitcoin in order to fund your your retirement or your expenses. Uh, but the math is the math, right? like it just it works that way because of the asymmetric upside that Bitcoin offers in the way that its scarcity aspects are are working and the fact that we're in this period of adoption that is uh so new and still so nent. Uh so that's how I typically think about that most people don't own just Bitcoin. They own a sleeve of stocks and other liquid assets and then they also own Bitcoin. So, you can think of this as applying the 4% rule to your stocks and applying an 8% rule to Bitcoin. You can come up with a blended uh target for what you need to save in order to fund your retirement. >> Go for it, Sean. Let's hear it. >> Okay. I think the first thing with Bitcoin that you have to really work hard for is to think about it in terms of Bitcoin, not in the terms of the currency. It is very difficult until you really start paying attention just how much we think in terms of whatever it is we spend and pay taxes in. However, the I think that it's what Bitcoin can do for you that changes more importantly than a number. And once you start to put Bitcoin aside and you know you have some set number of Bitcoin not in dollars, you do yourself a favor because you you get out of this thinking of oh I should be trading or I should time the market or I should XYZ. And really the mentality of retirement in my opinion is one where you get to choose what you do. Not that you have to do but most people don't want to stop doing things. you just want to do it with a higher quality of choice and with um a better ability for you to be the one driving it. And the more you think in terms of Bitcoin, the more I think you become able to see hope sooner on instead of waiting for forever, instead of thinking about dollars and instead of thinking about uh how do I time this quantity or percentage, although I don't disagree, I think there are some percentages that make sense once you get there. I think that in all the time, you know, 15 years now, it's just been very difficult not to fall down into the trap of thinking in the system that we've been living in when really Bitcoin is a different system altogether. And the sooner you can start to enjoy the ability to have hope in the future, which is the idea I think of retirement and what Bitcoin brings, the more you start to think about the finite nature of just how profound this is. It's a totally different human experience that nobody before us has had the opportunity, the luxury to have an to even get a shot to think of something that wasn't always uh produced or scammed or faked. And so, you know, retiring is a great question like how much is the right number? But I just think it it warrants needing to think about whatever you can put away is better than whatever you didn't put away. And whatever you hold on to that you didn't sell is better than what you sold. And it's going to be a heck of a lot harder to ever get back what you did sell again. And you're going to look back on time and wish that you had applied that that gift better. So hopefully you can just start to think in those terms sooner on. And then what happens is a byproduct of that is you start to become a better saver. It changes the way you think. It think you changes your perspective on how you spend. And it forces you to be more conservative in a way that's actually positive where you benefit where you prioritize quality over just volume. And then what happens because of that is you end up saving a ton more. And I think then you retire faster because of that. I >> I totally agree. It it's about optionality, right? You want to get to a point where you've reached financial independence and then you can choose to retire and go play golf or go hang out on the beach for the rest of your life. Or you could choose to retire, put on some new treads, go off in a different direction and fund a business. Um, you know, spend more time with your kids, travel the world, uh, or work on a passion project and that kind of thing. I think, uh, I I also agree with you that, hey, it's not just about the numbers. Um but the fact of the matter is that when we talk about the 4% rule or 8% rule or you know what what this target might mean, we are still talking about purchasing power, right? Bitcoin is money. It's a tool for uh helping to secure the goods and services that you need to make your life worth living and and provide for your family and all of that. And whether you're denominating that in fiat, in dollars, or you're denominating it in something like Bitcoin, it is all about purchasing power. and we're just talking about a difference in translation there. So, I do think like these guideposts are very much uh worth thinking about. They should not be hard and fast rules. Uh you you shouldn't think of them as some type of gospel like, "Okay, I've got 4% now. I'm good to go." Um it's meant to be giving you guidance. It's meant to to put together a framework so you can start thinking more long term and building towards something that can give you that optionality that Sean is talking about. >> Yeah, 100%. And and I think you know in Bitcoin we always talk about time preference and I think we've been kind of talking about it a little bit here but we were talking a little bit about this backstage. You know the traditional retirement path is you know you get a job early 20s you work 40 years and then you retire. And I think the unique thing of Bitcoin is that could potentially speed that up. And we were kind of talking about you know how much it's time in the market opposed to timing the market. Uh, so I want to hear your all's opinion about that and you know what you really think about when it comes to actually just holding Bitcoin for a little bit and how that could potentially accelerate that timeline. So we'll start off with Sean and and go down. >> I love this question and I like to think about it from a business side by side even though you could do the exact same scenario with in an individual. Let's say the first person comes out uh gets their first job, right? Like none of us every one of us came out on borrowed credit. We had to learn how to work for a living and then work hard and then save. You know, I like to use the analogy of two coffee shops. If you had a coffee shop that just started converting all of their cash flow into Bitcoin and then holding on to whatever they can, they're going to be selling a lot of it or they'll be barning against it. Uh however if you just look side by side and the reason this matters is that time in the market over four to five years roughly especially if you double that so let's just say less than a decade in the Bitcoin terms it is profound the difference from thinking in terms of one currency versus the other one will just always be on the treadmill that coffee shop will be putting cash away and they'll be floating it and they'll be paying their bills the other is just going to be building this wedge of value and this is provable in math, you can spreadsheet it out. It it it always ends up being more even if you really mess it up than than if you didn't. And so I think that's true of somebody coming out of high school or or even if you're just hearing this for the first time today, there's this bright potential for in four to 10 years, 4 to 8 years for you to rightsize your life in any situation, which is pretty amazing because you could start with zero and still end up better off. Now, I can't say that for, you know, somebody who's later in life that's starting from scratch that's going to do it just in dollars. Now, you're back on the yield curve. Now, you're gambling. You're thinking about how do I invest in stocks now? How do I go play the market? What am I going to do? And I think with Bitcoin, there's this ability to just rep prioritize savings again versus investing or speculating, which you really do see when you look over the time horizon. If you're looking at that analogy of somebody working for a living and what the difference is if they save in Bitcoin or not. I don't know what you guys think. >> Yeah. One thing that I really appreciate about Bitcoin is it has allowed me to shift my mentality. When I first got into Bitcoin, I was 20 years old. And this was the exact question I wanted to know. How much Bitcoin can I get where I can just twiddle my thumbs and never have to work or do anything ever again? And that was the mindset I approached Bitcoin with. And it was 2020 and you had stock to flow and everyone's like, it's going to 500,000 next year. I was like, I got I got to get in. Got to get in. And Bitcoin shifted my mentality over the past five or six years to where I don't ever want to be in a position where I'm just twiddling my thumbs doing nothing, right? I want to be creating to provide value. You're talking about saving. How can you save? By producing more value than you consume. And so when I think about this question, it's the mindset of I never actually want to be a net consumer, right? I wanted to have that independence where I can work on things I really enjoy and have passion projects, but always being active and being a value contributor to to society. I think that's one of the things Bitcoin's all about. >> Welcome to predict. [music] The world is a market. Everything is a market. Every headline moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. Bet on your instinct, your prediction, your edge. Dual Bits predict where everything is a market. >> Yeah, 100%. And uh I I'll lay this up to you in a second uh Trey, but uh I mean just personally for myself this, you know, I I worked a fiat job like many people did out of college and I stacked aggressively for 4 years and it allowed me to pursue what I'm doing right now. And kind of what you're saying, Mitchell, down there is, you know, it just kind of gives you that optionality where you can really pursue maybe a passion project and just give you more leeway to figure it out. And I know Trey, you talk a lot about this, so let's hear what you have to say about um, you know, your stacking sprint. >> I didn't mean to take your thunder. My bad. >> Um, yeah, I I think I want to answer your question in kind of two parts. The first is, you know, when we think about the power of compounding, uh, people talk about this in general terms in traditional finance and in Bitcoin. And whether you're talking about, you know, a 8 to 10% compounded return in the stock market versus a 20 or 25 or 30% compounded return with Bitcoin or the power law and however that shakes out. Either way, there's two there's two important um kind of ways to think about this. First is that the more you do now today, the sooner that compounding mechanism starts to work for you. And so you mentioned this uh a concept that I've called the stacking sprint. And the way that I think about this and write about this is commit to a 4-year period of hyperfocus on intentional saving blasting out your savings rate to the extent that you possibly can and do that for four years. And after four years align with a Bitcoin having cycle. At that point, if you've gone kind of balls to the wall and put as much away as you possibly can, you will likely be in a position where that compounding mechanism is working for you to the extent that you don't really need to save nearly as much anymore going forward. You've frontloaded all the work. You've sacrificed a little bit upfront, this low time preference view of things that Bitcoiners so like to focus on. And now you can get into a place where you're kind of coasting. um you're you're taking your foot off the accelerator and you're letting your balance sheet do the work that your income used to do. And so this stacking sprint, I think, is really powerful. You commit for a very short period of time. Four years is not all that long. And then after that point, you can kind of slow down your your saving. You can start to spend more in the knowledge that that compounding is going to work uh work for you and get you to your goal without you having to do a whole lot more. >> I love that you brought that up. That's like the exact mental model I use. And it's interesting because it allows you to quote unquote take profits without selling your Bitcoin, right? Because during that balls to the wall period where you're saving well over half of your income in Bitcoin once you've done that for 4 years, all right, you can save 25% and all of a sudden you free up some free cash flow to, you know, take your wife on a vacation or go on a boy's trip or do whatever, right? and actually start to enjoy the fruits of your labor, but you you're not actually selling the Bitcoin. You're just tapping into some of that other uh income. And one thing about this balls to the wall period, cuz I did this, I literally Sorry for that term. >> I graduated college, I moved back in with my parents, I sold everything, I bought as much Bitcoin as possible. And one thing that really helped me out, and if there's any young people, I recommend this. Don't focus only on the limiting your expenses. Also focus on making yourself a force multiplier, increasing your capacity to earn income, reinvesting in yourself during that. I think that kind of goes hand in hand, right? Lower your expenses, sell the chairs, you know, eat noodles and rice and whatever, but also make yourself more valuable so you can earn more income to stack Bitcoin. >> Well, yeah. I I don't advocate for like living on rice and beans and living in a cardboard box during this period. Uh the the idea is to be very intentional and make sure that the money that you are spending is actually adding value to your life and that you're not just frivolously wasting it on stupid stuff or subscriptions that you don't need or you're driving way too much of a car that's not actually giving you the value that you need. Like th those types of things uh so that you can expand that savings rate so that you can accelerate the ability to put that money into Bitcoin and take advantage of the compounding nature of this like highly valuable asset for savings. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think these are great points and, you know, to I guess parlay on to that, you know, we've been talking about timing in the market. Obviously, Bitcoin's very volatile, right? So, I think while you're retiring, you can see uh you know, $100 this week bought you more Bitcoin than it did the next week and then maybe it it flip-flops back and forth. How are you guys looking at that as a strategy? you know, kind of building and compounding that over time and maybe making the purchases almost like price agnostic and and and ignoring the I guess like Bitcoin for dollar exchange rate while you're stacking. >> Yeah, that's a great question. One way I do that is I mine Bitcoin. So the company I work for Block where we offer Bitcoin mining as a service and when I have a Bitcoin miner running on my behalf at one of our data centers, I don't have to consciously decide if I'm going to buy Bitcoin today or tomorrow. I'm just stacking Bitcoin every single day. And additionally, you can deduct 100% of the cost of the minor in year one. And for most people, your biggest expense, the thing that eats into your income more than anything else is taxes. And so I can save immediately on taxes by deducting the entire cost of the minor. And it's automatically stacking Bitcoin for me. So I don't have to sit here and question whether or not now is a good time to buy because we know you should just be stacking SATs every day for at least four years and let the compounding do its trick. So mining is the way I I enable that for myself. >> All right. Then Trey, is there any uh you know tactics that you're using during this time period to whether it's holding for an x amount of years or holding in a certain vehicle? Um is there anything that you're using to make it more price agnostic? >> Well, I definitely think you should automate your savings as much as possible. like set up a DCA that is buying Bitcoin on a regular time period so that you're not thinking about it and then uh make some, you know, intentional choices about any excess cash flow that you're coming into as to what portion of that is going to go to buying Bitcoin. But I want to I want to kind of hit on something else that you were alluding to there in your question, which is I think one of the biggest fears that everybody has when they're starting to think about retirement is, well, what happens if I build up to 25 times my annual expenses and then 2008 happens or 2022 in Bitcoin winter land happens and all of a sudden the market gets cut in half. Now the value of what I've saved has also been cut in half. Am I going to be able to survive that? It's a very real concern. It's something that is much easier to talk to in conceptual terms than when you're actually living through it. And something that shouldn't be taken lightly, but you kind of have to make a commitment to this view of retirement and and your process that you're um that you're pursuing and then trust that it's going to work out uh because of the long-term averages of how that compounding works. And then one other like tip that I would give people is just maintain a a mentality of flexibility. Nobody says that if you retire tomorrow and the Bitcoin price gets cut in half that you have to just continue on as if nothing happened, right? If you maintain an air of flexibility, you can figure out how to take up some consulting work. You can find some part-time work to just cover the the gap a little bit. You can cut your expenses or go do some geo arbitrage and live in a cheaper part of the world. uh use that as a you know an opportunity to take your family to somewhere else and and get some new experiences. There's a lot of different ways that you can react. And I think people get hung up uh on um oh no, I'm going to retire. The market's going to crash and then you know I'm I'm dead. There's there's there's no way to recover from that. That's just not how humans uh humans operate. And so you just got to keep that in mind. >> Yeah, I'm going to double down on the dollar cost averaging set it and forget it. just find a way to not care about the prices, that you're not timing the market. The important part is is that you start to set the mentality and that you have a system that is accumulating Bitcoin of some sort, whatever you can. There's the extreme version where it's everything and there's there's the extra amount, but either way, dollar cost averaging is just far wiser than trying to time the market because the psychology is different and it it doesn't train you to suddenly think about being a trader and getting in and out. The other thing is is that it's very deceptive. So in fact, the fact that Bitcoin's got 50 what 50? It's so much money right now trading every 24 hours. It's the highest liquid. It's the most liquid asset that we have out there that's global. And that's a great thing. That is a protective measure. Whenever you have a stock that's illquid, it's a bad thing. Whenever you have a stock that's highly liquid, it's a good thing. And that's because the market's there. And that's the best opportunity for having optionality. So, it's important to recognize that just because you can see the price does not mean you need to sell into the price. Uh, it's a positive benefit. The other thing that's extremely powerful is that if you're accumulating and you're not caring about price. What I mean by that is, you know, nobody does that with real estate. You don't look at your house every day and be like, I got to sell it today because the price is down. And everybody be freaking out if we did that. But liquidity in the market's a good thing. So, don't confuse liquidity with the ability for optionality, which is actually security. And then third, I would say, you know, for people that are in the business like we are where we offer lending against Bitcoin, you know, that comes with risk. But what the safest way to think about that is that like a rainy day, if you've been putting aside your Bitcoin forever, and you need to tap into it. Well, what that does is it allows you to time the market. So you say, I don't have to sell. I've been responsible. I've saved a lot of money and now I'm hitting on a life event where I need a little bit of cash. It's a 202 kind of situation in 2008. you can borrow against a little bit and then pay it back and not have to sell. That's actually the more responsible way to think about that. So there's there's these pointers that I think all come back to you have to start by thinking in terms of Bitcoin and the unit of account as best you can. Put it somewhere. Even if you need somebody's help like a custodian, put it a place where it's not just easily on the market, you can trigger sell it and then have the tools ready to go so that you have kind of a plan and then it it functions much more like an RA or something that's designed for that. And you know, it's a long process. Nobody's gonna get it right first, but you got to start somewhere. >> Exactly. Well, there's a lot of nuance to this question, and I think these guys did an outstanding job answering it. So, why don't you guys give it up for this panel up here, and thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> [music] >> Every year this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, [music] to build what comes next. And every year the stage [music] gets bigger. Sound money [music] center stage. So, where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. [music] Nashville, July 2027.