Certitude Isn’t Certainty
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“Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., via Bill Miller (2017)
In a 2017 essay, legendary investor Bill Miller wrote candidly about humility in investing—anchoring his reflections around bitcoin, then trading near $7,000 and ridiculed by much of Wall Street.
Miller didn’t make a price prediction. He didn’t claim to understand bitcoin’s full implications. What he did was more rare: he asked what many wouldn’t—“What if I’m wrong?”
Seven and a half years later, we're much closer to a concrete answer.
A Parade of Reversal
The list of reversals is long and growing.
BlackRock, whose CEO Larry Fink once dismissed bitcoin as an “index of money laundering,” now manages the world’s largest spot bitcoin ETF (IBIT). Fink now calls bitcoin “an international asset” akin to digital gold.
JPMorgan, whose CEO Jamie Dimon has continued to voice personal disdain for bitcoin, now facilitates access to bitcoin ETFs for its wealth management clients and offers crypto-related services to institutional investors. Dimon’s public skepticism has become increasingly decoupled from the firm’s operational stance.
Goldman Sachs, after years of flip-flopping, now offers bitcoin exposure to select clients through ETFs and is exploring crypto-linked structured products in response to demand.
Ray Dalio, once a vocal skeptic who claimed bitcoin was “not effective as money,” later admitted he “might be missing something,” and revealed a personal bitcoin allocation before stepping back from Bridgewater.
Paul Krugman, while still critical of bitcoin’s energy use and economic narrative, now openly acknowledges it is unlikely to disappear, a marked departure from earlier comparisons to tulips.
Certitude, it turns out, was not a very good filter for truth.
New Asset, Old Thinking
Miller’s insight wasn’t about bitcoin as much as it was about the mindsets needed to process paradigm shifts. As he wrote:
“New things are always greeted with skepticism by people whose mental models are anchored in the old ways of doing things.”
Bitcoin doesn’t fit cleanly into any one box. It isn’t a stock or a bond. It doesn’t produce cash flows. It’s a monetary protocol—neutral, decentralized, and digital. Trying to understand it using legacy frameworks is like trying to value email in 1997 by applying price-to-earnings ratios.
The result? A decade of missed opportunity from some of the smartest minds in finance—until the facts on the ground changed their minds.
Adoption via Humility
Miller’s 2017 investment thesis wasn’t anchored in conviction. It was built on asymmetry. His logic was simple: if bitcoin goes to zero, I lose 1%. If it succeeds, the upside is exponential.
The people who embraced this framework early didn’t do so out of blind faith—they did so because they remained open to what they didn’t know.
Bitcoin adoption, almost universally, is preceded by humility. Nearly everyone dismisses it at first. It feels too good to be true—because they’re applying old models to something fundamentally new. The mental shift only comes when you start evaluating it on its own terms.
Why It Still Matters
Bitcoin is no longer a fringe curiosity. It is now held by sovereign wealth funds, allocated to by corporate treasuries, and traded on public exchanges in the form of SEC-approved ETFs. Its infrastructure is far more mature. Its credibility is global. And its core thesis—resistance to debasement, seizure, and central control—has only strengthened.
But the most durable insight from Miller’s 2017 essay may be this:
“Anyone who owns bitcoin would be foolish to dismiss the opinions of the financial murderers’ row that has lined up against it… What gives me some comfort… is that they have not seen anything like bitcoin before.”
He wasn’t certain. He was curious. It is this mindset which aged better than almost anything else.
Chart Of The Week
"Bank of America puts Bitcoin in the same tier as the printing press, steam engine, light bulb, and World Wide Web. What’s wild is that the bank acknowledges Bitcoin as a once-in-a-millennium technology and still hasn’t built anything meaningful around it."
— Sam Callahan on X (source: Bank of America)
Quote of the Week
"Very few people see what's happening right now. The entire economic system is changing in front of our eyes. AI is unlocking huge opportunity, but it is also already taking jobs. And we are headed towards an inevitable debt reset.
Bitcoin is rising as the new monetary standard. A finite capital network where everyone will secure their relative standing as everything becomes more abundant thanks to AI and robotics. So what can you do?
Take full advantage of this brief period. This is a time of maximum opportunity for those who see what's happening. Bitcoin is still ludicrously undervalued for what it is. Lay your claim to the digital capital network of the future.
There is already a clear move out of sovereign debt and into hard assets like Gold and Bitcoin. But we haven't hit the tipping point yet. There's still trillions sitting in government paper. And that money will eventually flee for the hard money exit. By then the advantage that exists today will be gone. And you will look back and reminisce about $100K Bitcoin like we do about $1K Bitcoin today."
Podcast Of The Week
Bitcoin For Professionals: How Central Banks Are Quietly Shaping Your Doctor’s Advice
What if modern medicine isn't broken, but built that way? Dr. Ahmad Ammous shares his journey from traditional physician to systems-level thinker, revealing how fiat incentives have shaped both medicine and money.
From treating root causes to embracing Bitcoin as a tool for decentralization, his story is a powerful call to rethink how we heal, starting from first principles.
Subscribe to Onramp MENA’s YouTube channel to catch new episodes of the Bitcoin For Professionals podcast!
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