A little voice in my head told me that maybe cryptocurrency was the future, and I should have a stake in it. That voice was wrong …
What follows is a morality tale for the modern age. It stars me, an idiot, and may produce strong feelings of schadenfreude in you, hopefully not an idiot. Ready? Let us begin.
Once upon a time, like, a year ago, cryptocurrency was going gangbusters. (I do hope you can keep up with this technical language; crypto can be complicated.) It had made the transition from being an obsession for nerdy libertarians (and the preferred currency of drug dealers) to becoming a topic of mainstream conversation. And prices were rocketing – bitcoin, the original and most well-known cryptocurrency, reached a record high of almost $20,000 (£15,500) shortly before Christmas last year. Staggering, when you remember that one bitcoin was worth about $13 five years earlier. People who had gambled on cryptocurrencies early on were getting insanely rich.