One of my favorite technology tales is how Blockbuster executives once laughed Netflix out of the room when they offered to sell for 50 million. Today, Netflix is worth over 350 billion dollars. In baseball, we that call that a ‘swing and a miss.’
The Blockbuster CEO at the time, John Antioco, dismissed the offer, considering Netflix a ‘niche business’ and downplaying the significance of the dot-com era. While hindsight is 20/20, the best leaders learn from other people’s mistakes rather than allowing history to repeat itself.
In more recent terms, just 15 years ago, anyone reading this could have acquired a Bitcoin for thirty-five or forty cents. Yes, cents, as in the pennies the U.S. Mint no longer manufacturers. In simple terms, even a modest early allocation to bitcoin went on to create extraordinary value.
The point here is that very few life-changing investment opportunities come down to a lack of capital, but instead are linked to a deficit in understanding, bad timing, or a simple lack of conviction by the decision maker.
In both cases above, the real problem is that neither opportunity felt particularly urgent. Netflix had a good thing going, but they were losing money on paper, and widespread, high-speed internet was still a few years away. Bitcoin looked experimental and deeply controversial, with early use cases that ensured most serious institutions wanted nothing to do with it.
That instinct felt rational, and I speak from first-hand experience here. Turns out, just because Bitcoin wasn’t bootstrapped to any real economies, was being used as a theoretically anonymous payment method for criminals, and came under early scrutiny of the U.S. government, it was still the very best investment vehicle of all time, by several orders of magnitude!
Fast forward to today, and the decision window hasn’t closed, at least not entirely. It has certainly moved, however. The warning signs are still approximately the same—inflation, out-of-control national debt, endless wars, and all the typical state-sponsored debasement mechanisms. None of these dynamics ever really goes away, and this reality should cause any financial institution leader to consider what it might take to help their member actually protect the fruits of their labor.
In this same vein, a couple of weeks ago my sixteen-year-old daughter told me she ‘couldn’t pay back her employer’ after being overpaid on one of her recent paychecks. When I asked her about this she said, ‘all my money is in crypto, it’s just easier that way.’
And, as much as I talk about the need for institutions to get plugged into the future of money, I do not encourage my kids to avoid traditional banking models, and I certainly don’t tell them to ‘invest’ all their money in crypto. So, I chuckled a bit at her response, but then I asked a follow-up question: why is that?
Her answer is probably more important than the original statement. She told me that most of the friends she plays video games with use Litecoin. That is how they send money to each other. That is how they buy and sell things. It is simply the default inside her social and economic circle.
She also runs a small online business selling three-dimensional digital items that she designs: furniture, artwork, and other virtual goods. Inside that ecosystem, almost no one uses U.S. dollars unless they absolutely must.
She wasn’t making an ideological statement or even trying to avoid traditional banking. She isn’t ‘into crypto’ in the same way the discussion is often framed.
She was simply describing how money works in her world, which, by the way, is the world where the vast majority would rather own crypto than retirement accounts.
There is another detail that matters here.
All my kids have accounts at credit unions. I had to co-sign to help them open those shares because, in Nebraska, you cannot open a traditional bank or credit union account on your own until you are nineteen.
They want to use the traditional banking system but have to constantly figure out workarounds due to their age, or arbitrary limitations on their accounts.
And even when they do everything right, the system rarely meets them where they’re at. Just last week, my nineteen-year-old son was hit with non-sufficient funds fees over a handful of small ($1-$5) transactions. Fees of $28 a transaction for a $2.50 charge at the convenience store will teach a valuable lesson.
The lesson is simple: from his perspective, using a credit union account makes everyday life harder, not easier. I want you to re-read that last sentence, because the reality is that while the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers were raised to tolerate this kind of friction, Gen Y and Z have very easy alternatives in PayPal, Venmo, CashApp, and the crypto of their choice.
This is how displacement (member attrition) happens in real life.
Not through dramatic exits or ideological rebellion. Through needless points of friction that accumulate in the wrong places and for the wrong reasons.
Blockbuster didn’t lose its customers overnight; it lost them one transaction at a time, one rewind fee at a time, and one late fee at a time. That is, until a parallel system became easier, less expensive, and more fully integrated into the real lives of real people.
Similarly, Netflix didn’t win because DVDs stopped working. It won because it revolutionized the delivery methods, economics, and expectations around access to entertainment.
Bitcoin at thirty-five cents was not an investment opportunity in the way people talk about it now. It was a broader market signal that a superior system of exchange was forming.
Litecoin inside gaming communities is also a signal. Digital goods marketplaces settling transactions outside traditional rails is a signal. Young consumers building financial habits before they ever form loyalty to a traditional checking account is a signal.
I’ll often talk with CU executives who say their members aren’t asking for digital assets. I’m sure that’s true in the same way that Blockbuster customers weren’t asking for streaming video. And once those customers stopped renting DVDs, well, we know how that story ended.
I’m not at all concerned that my kids prefer crypto to the digital dollar—what does make me stop and think is that their economy has little to no use for legacy banking models.
Nothing that is being said here should be construed as an argument for abandoning regulation, risk management, or responsible governance. There is, however, an argument to be made which goes something like this: “you can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”
Early decisions are rarely comfortable. Late decisions are rarely optional.
The institutions that survive structural shifts won’t predict the future perfectly, but they will decide, early enough, that appropriate action and responsible participation both matter more than certainty itself.
As I continue to pay closer attention to how and where money is moving, I am increasingly convinced the real risk facing credit unions goes way beyond antiquated technology stacks or operational inefficiencies. The real threat is the habit of spending massive amounts of money on things that long ago stopped mattering to the members you haven’t yet attracted.
That is a conversation worth having next.
