Buying $75 of Bitcoin Every Friday Since 2019: The Full Receipts

Friday, 7:52 PM, March 13, 2020, lockdown week one, Chicago apartment smelling like the lentils I had overcooked: I set up a recurring buy of $75 in Bitcoin and physically wrote "$75 — price $5,241 — sats 0.014309" in a Moleskine that still sits in my desk drawer. I did not choose an amount carefully. Seventy-five dollars was the gap between my take-home pay and rent plus groceries, rounded down so aggressively it could survive any bad month.

What was at risk at that moment, honestly assessed? Not much money yet. What was at risk was discipline itself, because March 2020 existed to test whether a strategy built for bad weeks could survive truly insane ones. Markets circuit-breakered repeatedly that week. Brokers wobbled. My employer furloughed 15% of staff on March 27th, and my name landed outside the furlough list by alphabetical luck I did not earn.

The counterintuitive promise I made to myself that night: the rule has no opinions. No reading charts before buying, no pausing during crashes, no doubling during euphoria. One direction only — every Friday, regardless. This journal entry explains the second column of the notebook, the one labeled MISTAKES, which stayed mostly empty til 2021 taught it vocabulary.

year one: $3,900 of pure patience

2019-2020 purchases snagged average prices ranging wildly between $5,200 and $11,700 per coin depending on the week, exactly what averaging does mechanically. Total deployed thru end of 2020: approximately $3,900. The notebook shows one skipped Friday, July 24th, 2020, due to a wire mix-up with a security deposit refund — proving even automation needs a human to notice when autopay migrations eat instructions.

why not one big check instead

Friends asked why not lump sums. Legitimate question, statistically lump-sum wins more frequently historically. My answer then and now: lump sums require having lumps. $75 Fridays converted paycheck volatility into stack growth without decision fatigue. The strategy fit my actual life rather than a spreadsheet's ideal investor.

April 2021, when $64K tempted me

Bitcoin crossed $60K that spring and every cell in my body wanted to increase the buy to $300. The notebook's MISTAKES column records what happened instead, dated April 18th, 2021: raised weekly amount to $150. Then doubled DOWN further at $64K into May before the crash reamed that decision expressly. Purchases made above $50K took til late 2024 to breathe underwater-free. Honest math: those greedy months underperformed the dumb robot strategy by enough to matter but not enough to kill the whole approach.

back to seventy-five, flat

What saved the experiment from becoming a cautionary tale was the resumption in fall 2021 back down to $75 flat, no vengeance buys, no revenge-doubling after drawdowns. Ego snagged the April peaks. Humility resumed buying the October dips. Same notebook. Different handwriting energy, my partner Keisha observed, who witnessed the whole arc from across the couch.

the bear market that built everything

2022 delivered the real gift, unwrapped begrudgingly. Every Friday from January thru December snagged Bitcoin somewhere between $16,000 and $47,000, and since the rule prohibits stopping, my $75 snagged screenshots-worthy lows of $16,800 in late December 2022 — right when FTX despair peaked and normies declared the asset dead. Forty-nine consecutive purchases that year. Approximately $2,600 deployed into maximum fear accumulated approximately 0.146 BTC, currently valued north of double that dollar figure without exertion.

Compare with parked alternatives during that window: cash in my high-yield savings account earned a strong 4%+ through 2023 while I held untradeable paper losses. The savings account felt smarter monthly and looked dumber annually. Liquidity won on sleep; stubbornness won on statements. Both belong in a functioning financial life, contrarian take apparently.

notebook arithmetic, six years later

Totals as of last month, cross-checked twice against exchange records: about $23,400 contributed since March 2020, accumulating approximately 0.398 BTC at a blended average near $58,800 per coin. Current value hovers around $42,000-43,000 depending on the hour you ask, approximately +80% overall. The 2022 trough had shown -$9,200 at worst, a hole deep enough to bury motivation intact.

Half the stash transferred offline to cold storage in 2024. The other half keeps executing Fridays automatically, now thru a different platform after fee comparisons shaved recurring-buy costs from about 1.5% to 0.5%. Those percentage points compound silently like everythin else.

still writing, slower

The Moleskine ultimately filled in February 2026, ending on entry #294: "$75 — Fri — done." Its successor sits ready, same brand, wider rule. Some weeks I forget entirely until Saturday's notification confirms purchase number 295 or wherever we are, and this forgetting registers as success now, not negligence. Strategy behaving without supervision was invariably the point.

Last Friday evenin, 7:52 PM arrived and I was making jollof rice for friends, phone in another room doing its dull miracle. Keisha asked whether I still check the price. Only Saturdays, I said, sometimes. The rent stays covered, emergencies sit funded, bitcoin accumulates invisibly, and the cheapest value purchased across six years might be never once making a decision after midnight. Ninety dollars a month of indifference, compounding quietly into somethin my nineteen-year-old self would not recognize as investing at all. Good. It was not supposed to be exciting. Excitement was what the MISTAKES column was for.