Snow Day
02/19/2026
When I was growing up outside Philly, snow days had a whole ritual to them. You’d wake up at five in the morning (the only time in your entire childhood you’d voluntarily set an alarm that early), sneak downstairs in the dark, and flip on the local news. The school closings scrolled across the bottom of the screen in alphabetical order, white text on a blue bar, and your entire emotional state depended on where your district fell in the alphabet.
Mine started with a U. Which meant I had to sit through every single district from A through T before I’d know if my day was about to change. The anticipation was genuinely unbearable, and I say that as someone who now teaches for a living and has sat on the other side of that equation (honestly, the teacher side is pretty great too). That moment when your school finally appeared on the screen was one of the purest feelings I’ve ever experienced, and I am not exaggerating even a little bit.
I bring this up because I realized recently that the snow day feeling never actually went away. It just found new places to live.
If you’ve been in crypto for any amount of time, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The 3 AM price checks. The wallet refreshes. The Discord notification sounds you’ve Pavlov’d yourself into responding to instantly. It’s the same emotional architecture as watching that scrolling bar, and honestly I think the reason so many of us got hooked on this space in the first place is because it gave us a feeling we hadn’t felt since we were nine years old in our pajamas on a Tuesday morning.
The thing about snow days that nobody really talks about is that the actual day was usually nothing special. You’d go outside for an hour, throw some snowballs, get cold, come inside and watch TV until someone told you to do something productive. The day itself was fine. But the finding out part, that split second of discovery, was transcendent. That’s where all the magic lived.
Crypto works the exact same way. I watched Bitcoin cross $100,000 for the first time in December 2024 and I promise you the feeling was indistinguishable from seeing my school’s name on that blue bar.
Seven years of watching and waiting and the payoff is this brief, perfect moment of confirmation. That’s the snow day. And then (just like when you were a kid) the day goes on and you find something else to worry about pretty quickly.
Of course, the flip side is also true. Sometimes you’d sit through the entire alphabet, A through Z, and your school just wasn’t there. That was devastating in a way that’s honestly hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. You did everything right, you woke up early, you checked the weather, you looked outside at what was clearly enough snow to cancel school, and it just didn’t happen
.
Bitcoin hit its all time high near $126,000 back in October. It’s sitting around $68,000 right now. If you’ve been here long enough, you know the feeling. The storm came, the snow piled up, and somebody somewhere decided we’re going to school anyway. Pretty brutal tbh.
But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: even after the worst non-snow-day of your childhood, even after the most devastating morning of watching that blue bar scroll past your district without stopping, you still woke up the next time it snowed and checked again. You never stopped believing that the next storm might be the one.
I’ve been in this space since 2013. I bought my first Bitcoin with a money order I walked into a bank to fill out (honestly that still sounds made up when I say it out loud). Since then I’ve watched this whole world grow into something I never could have predicted, from DeFi summer to NFTs to AI agents transacting on the blockchain autonomously. The snow days come and go, and to be honest I’ve probably had more non-snow-days than snow days at this point, in both the literal and crypto sense of the word.
At the end of the day, the snow day feeling isn’t really about the snow. It’s about believing that today might be different from every other day. That some external force might interrupt the routine and hand you something you weren’t expecting. And if you’re paying attention (and honestly, if you’re still reading this newsletter, you pretty clearly are) those moments show up way more often than you’d think.
You just have to be willing to wake up early and check the screen.
That’s it for today - I hope you have a great day!
BFG