The number on James Altucher’s Bitcoin promo pages is $114, while the number in the primary sources is $60, and the difference is not a lie but a retelling compressed across thirteen years. It is the kind of detail that matters when you are trying to see what a call actually looked like at the moment it was made.
The May 2013 call was not made at $114. It was made at roughly $60, on a Wednesday morning, after a conversation with Naval Ravikant that lasted long enough to flip a skeptic into the first merchant in Bitcoin history. The $114 figure that shows up in current marketing copy is a later reference point, borrowed from a 2017 blog post where Altucher was explaining why people hated him for the ads that ran that summer. Two different moments, two different prices, collapsed into one headline. The receipt that holds is the $60 one.
This is the piece about what the call looked like before the 50,000% gain. Track record articles list the wins. This one traces the genesis of the win that started the crypto track, because the structure of a first call is more useful to a reader than the highlight reel.
The Skeptic
In early 2013, Altucher was not a Bitcoin advocate. He was a software guy who had been coding since 1985 and who looked at the protocol the way a coder looks at anything new: with suspicion. He has said publicly that he trashed Bitcoin in March of that year. The specifics are his own, but the posture is on the record. He arrived at the call from a morning spent with someone who could explain the technology at a whiteboard.
Naval Ravikant, the founder of AngelList, walked Altucher through Bitcoin as something more than a payment rail. Ravikant’s argument, as Altucher has retold it, was that Bitcoin was a “Choose Yourself” currency: no institution at the center, no permission required, no counterparty who could freeze you out. The framing landed because it matched the thesis Altucher was already building for his book. Choose Yourself, the book he was about to release, argued that the old bargain with institutions was broken and that the only reliable bet was on yourself. Bitcoin was the currency version of that argument.
The pivot took weeks rather than years, with a March skeptic becoming a May merchant, and that speed is the detail that gets lost when the call is retold as a long-held conviction. It was not. It was a fast turnaround driven by one conversation and a thesis that was already loaded.
The Store
In May 2013, Altucher built what may have been the first Bitcoin-only online store. He sold the PDF of Choose Yourself for 0.1 BTC per copy. Bitcoin was trading around $60 at the time, so each copy went for roughly six dollars. He sold about a hundred copies before the book’s wider release on Amazon in June.
The store was the call. There was no price target in the traditional sense. He did not say Bitcoin would reach a specific number by a specific date. He committed capital and reputation to the asset by accepting it as payment, on camera, before almost anyone else in mainstream finance was willing to touch it. That is a different kind of call than a CNBC price prediction. It is a call you make with your own product, your own book, your own launch.
The CNBC clip aired on May 15, 2013. Herb Greenberg asked him, on air, whether he had done the Bitcoin store for publicity. Altucher’s answer was that he had done it because he believed Bitcoin was a Choose Yourself currency and that the book should be available in that currency before it was available in any other. The exchange is on tape. It is the moment the call became public.
The $114 Question
The $114 number in current promo copy deserves a footnote. Bitcoin did reach $114 in 2013, later in the year, during the first major run. Altucher’s 2017 blog post about the Bitcoin ads references the period after his CNBC appearance and the price at which things were trading then. Over time, the $60 store and the $114 later reference got merged in the retelling. The marketing copy carries the merged version.
This is natural compression rather than a scandal — the kind of thing that happens when a thirteen-year-old call gets turned into a bullet point, and it is exactly the kind of detail a reader searching for the receipt needs to know. The call was made at $60, and the asset went to $114 within months, then on to $1,100, $20,000, $60,000, and well beyond. The 50,000% gain that gets cited is measured from the $60 entry, not the $114 one, and the math is kinder at the lower number, which is the one the primary sources support. Past performance does not guarantee future results. The returns cited in this article are calculated on public market data from publicly stated entry points, and the exact figures depend on the entry and exit points used.
The Brand Became the Call
What makes the Bitcoin call different from Facebook or Apple in Altucher’s track record is that it fused with his brand: the Facebook call was a CNBC segment, the Apple call was a CNBC article, and the Bitcoin call became the name of a philosophy.
“Choose Yourself currency” was the bridge between the book and the asset rather than a throwaway line: the book argued that institutions would not save you, and the currency was the proof of concept, a store of value that no institution controlled. Altucher spent the next decade building products, podcasts, and presentations on top of that bridge. When he launched Deep Blue 2.0 in July 2026, the AI screener was pitched as a tool for the same person who had taken the Bitcoin call in 2013: the individual investor acting without permission from the legacy system.
The lineage runs from the 0.1 BTC PDF store to the $49 per year AI screener, with the mechanism changing while the audience stayed the same.
The First Call Before the Result
The reason to write this as a standalone piece is that a first call looks different from a win. A win is retrospective. You look back at $60, you look at today, you print the percentage. A first call is prospective. You stand in May 2013, Bitcoin is $60, almost nobody in mainstream finance is talking about it, and a guy who was a skeptic a few weeks ago is now selling his book for it on national television.
The call could have gone nowhere. Bitcoin spent the next two years in violent swings, blowing through $1,000 in late 2013, crashing to $200 in early 2015, and testing everyone who had taken the early position, and Altucher himself has written about the hatred the Bitcoin ads generated later in the decade. The call became comfortable in retrospect rather than in real time, and that is the structure of a first call: the conviction arrives before the evidence, the evidence arrives on a schedule nobody controls, and the person who made the call spends the intervening years being told they are wrong until they are either vindicated or forgotten. The track record keeps the vindicated ones. The distribution does not show you the calls that never came back.
What the Reader Takes
The Bitcoin call is not a reason to buy what Altucher is selling today, but it is a reason to understand how he works: he finds a technology adoption curve before the market prices it, attaches a thesis that is larger than the asset, commits publicly and early with his own product as the proof, and is willing to be wrong for years before being right.
The $60 store, the 0.1 BTC price, and the CNBC clip with Herb Greenberg asking the publicity question are the receipt; the 50,000% that came after is the result.
More on Altucher’s choose-yourself philosophy and his broader big-call track record elsewhere in the Guru Files.