Yeah, I was that guy who got removed from eighth grade geometry class to work on algebra with the high schoolers. I’m a numbers guy. Every morning, I wake up and play my daily sudoku puzzle, except I fill in the numbers… with roman numerals. I have a t-shirt with the phrase “I <3 3.14″ on it, with a little picture of a rhubarb pastry… if you catch my drift. And when I heard last week about this big cryptocurrency thing going on (from my friend Todd, shout-out Todd) I just had to get in on it.
Cryptocurrency: let’s break it down. The main thing is “currency” and that means money. The prefix “crypto” means something that’s hard to understand. With a little 1+1=2, cryptocurrency is just money that no one understands. That’s what makes it so secure, in this high-tech digital age.
Now the main one that all my sources keep telling me about is this thing called Bitcoin. Here’s how I explained it to my mom, so try to keep up: if you put your money in the bank, the bank keeps a record of it on a ledger. That’s fine for most sheeple, but we’re sick of all those fees and suit-and-tie snobs! If you put your money in Bitcoin, the record is kept by Heath Ledger. Because Heath Ledger died in 2008, and he specified in his will that upon his demise he shall bequeath a universal crypto-record for fair use by anyone, Bitcoin was born.
People ask me all the time what they should invest in. What do I tell them? “Bet on Yourself.”
Yourself ™ is a new open-source peer-to-peer mumbo-jumbo digital disruptive dark web alt-coin that’s making a stir in the antique Yu-Gi-Oh! card trading community. And before you ask, yes I created Yourself ™ myself, and yes I’m exposing myself to legal repercussions by advocating that you purchase Yourself ™ yourself, but that’s how much I believe in this coin.
Ripple has been making waves in the industry recently… see what I did there? I also like Ethereum and Litecoin, but they’re super secretive. If you go down under the Walnut Bridge at dusk and talk to the guy who collects soda cans in his shopping cart, he might get you in on the game, but don’t tell him I sent you. Ralph and I have a good thing going. If you give him 50 USD, four Chuck-E-Cheese tokens, and a ½ gram pouch of crystalized methamphetamines, he can hook you up with some Litecoin. Ralph and I have a deal where I keep the username but he keeps the Coinbase password. It’s standard practice to keep things safe and secure.
A lot of people are afraid to get in on cryptocurrency because it’s too volatile. It’s not for everyone – you definitely need to keep a level head. When I’m afraid I’m getting in too deep, I like to think of my wins and losses as they relate to me, in discrete terms. For example, “I just destroyed my Macbook (-$1k),” “I just totaled my Toyota Camry (-$24k),” “I just found a Wawa hoagie! (+$7)” or “I just wasted a semester of Penn tuition (-$60k).” Before you know it, you’re going to be sick of all this winning.
Okay, now it’s time to get serious. I think we all learned a big lesson in 2008. I was only 11 then, but I was 19 when I saw “The Big Short.” Ryan Gosling taught me a lesson I’d never forget: when you make an investment, make sure there’s value behind it. We forgot this piece of advice when we structured the housing market around deficient bundles of weak subprime mortgages. But we will not forget that when we invest in Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency with a cute little doggy on it.
So while you’re going to your “date nights” and your “sports games” and your “scheduled exams,” I’ll be in my 40th street apartment mining PutinCoin from 25 GPUs I bought off Craigslist. The future is now, ladies and gentlemen. It’s time to buy in.