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Your Crypto-Weary Soul

If bear markets terrify you, take some advice from an experienced economic researcher and editor at Forbes who bought Bitcoin for $14. Things are far more serious when you’re charged for Bitcoin’s price oscillations:

You think you have been through hard times with crypto this year? Let me tell you a few stories. To set the record straight, I never expected bitcoin to rise above $14. That was where it sat the day I finally got skin in the game. I downloaded a wallet and sold my bowtie for 3 of these things.

I had no idea or inkling of what would happen next. I didn’t predict it, didn’t urge it on, never recommended that anyone buy it, never suggested it was a new glorious way to make money. I would have been happy if bitcoin had forever stayed equal in value to the world’s most valuable national currency: $1. So far as I’m concerned, that alone should have been headline news for a century.

My writings on the topic from early 2013 were about one thing only: this stuff really does seem to work. After years of incredulity, and a pior decade of failures, I had come around to realizing that cryptocurrency really was alive. It finally worked. We have a money for the digital age: behaves like real property, can’t be duplicated, trades without an intermediary, and functions outside government and the central bank.

How exciting is that? For me, with a career-long loathing of government fiat and a deep longing for sound money, it was the most exciting thing in the world. It was the ultimate intellectual turn on. All these amazing features of the digital world had finally come together. My interest was purely intellectual, just as my fascination with money as a topic had been since I first bumped into the subject when I read my college roommate’s book on the history of Weimar.

What I had not expected is that my celebration of this technology would be interpreted by lazy readers as a buy signal – or a pump and dump. I was mistaken for being a stock picker of sorts, not because of anything I wrote but because many people are too intellectually dim to imagine that a financial technology can be admired for its architectural beauty completely independent of its price.