Who is Smitty?

The Story

I first heard about Bitcoin around 2015 or 2016. Didn't care. It took the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 to get me to actually look into "crypto" at all, and yes, that included the infamous Dogecoin. Within about a year I circled back to Bitcoin and realized it was the real one. The rest were jokes and gambling.

The first time it clicked for me was learning about the fixed inflation rate and the 21 million supply cap. I had no financial training before this, just some undergrad economics. But the monetary policy made immediate sense to someone who thinks in systems. The second click, the big one, was discovering the power law in Bitcoin's price history.

That's when I started pulling the actual data. I compared Bitcoin against gold, oil, equities, real estate. I applied the same data analysis skills I'd built over a decade in materials science. Power-law behavior in an economic asset is vanishingly rare. When I saw it in Bitcoin it shocked me, and as an engineer it made me want to see what we could do with it that was actually useful.

The post that put me on the map was a single chart showing the power-law-driven devaluation of four major world assets (gold, oil, stock market, real estate) all on one graph. Max Keiser and other high-profile voices picked it up. "Everything goes to zero against Bitcoin" and all that. After that, the decay channel model, oscillator work, and retirement guide content all went similarly viral.

I think of Bitcoin as reliability technology. I'm interested in its performance and its possible failure modes. Where could the price go if X happens? When has historically been the best time to stack? What over/undersold regime are we in right now? What outside forces could threaten the network? I pull in and analyze as much Bitcoin-related data as I can get my hands on to explore new possibilities and probabilities, and I build new metrics and models along the way.

One thing people get wrong about my work: I don't make tight price predictions. I deal in probabilities, not certainties. Some of my analyses are exploratory, not final. For example, the business cycle now appears to be the dominant price driver, but is that directly causative? Will the correlation keep strengthening? These are open questions, not settled.

Why pseudonymous? I sort of fell into it. I'm still an active specialist in industry (science, research, engineering) and I provide expert advisement on systems I've been building for over a decade. As the Bitcoin side of things grows into a real business, keeping the two reasonably separated makes sense, at least for now. The name? One of my favorite books is Orwell's 1984. The protagonist is Winston Smith. Swap the first letters of his first and last name and you get Sminston With.

The goal: build the best set of Bitcoin models and metrics out there so people can navigate this asset with clarity instead of hype. Show what Bitcoin has done and what it will probably do. Give people the conviction to Stack Early, Stack Hard™ and set themselves up for the future.

You've come to the right place. Join me.