He Waited Ten Years to Sell. Then He Found a Way Not To.
Marcus bought his first Bitcoin in 2015 and never sold a coin. On paper he's wealthy. In real life he's cash-poor — because selling would cost him a decade of capital gains and the upside he's been patient for.
Then his kid got into university, and tuition doesn't care about your thesis.
Old-world Marcus sells — grudgingly, into a soft market, booking the tax hit. 2026 Marcus does something else: he deposits Bitcoin (as RBTC, Bitcoin on Rootstock) into a vault, an isolated smart-contract position, and mints BPD, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, against it at 0% interest (one small borrow fee, no annual rate). Tuition gets paid in borrowed dollars. His Bitcoin never leaves the contract, never gets sold, never triggers a tax event. He repays the BPD later and gets every coin back.
The whole thing works because there's no company in the middle. The collateral sits in code, not on a lender's balance sheet. The safety numbers — a 110% minimum collateral ratio, a 150% recovery threshold — are hard-coded and identical for everyone, not set by a committee that can change its mind after you've committed.
Marcus borrows conservatively, keeps his ratio well above the minimum, and monitors it himself, because self-custody means the responsibility is his. Smart-contract risk is real and it's still early; he learned the mechanics before he committed a satoshi.
But he solved the patient holder's oldest problem: he needed liquidity, and he didn't have to sell his conviction to get it.
That's the point. Borrow against Bitcoin at 0% interest — keep the stack, use the value.
