About a month ago I opened a Coinbase account. I’d been watching Bitcoin since it’s inception, but had always been reluctant to buy in. I didn’t want to store significant amounts of “money” on a hard drive that might be lost or damaged, or in a password-protected “wallet” that I might lose the password to. I liked the idea of cryptocurrency, but whenever I looked into the details of how to actually acquire and store Bitcoin, I lost steam.
My hesitancy seemed prescient when Mt. Gox (the largest Bitcoin exchange at the time) experienced security breaches, coin theft, bankruptcy, and collapse. I patted myself on the back once again for avoiding crypto when Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX ceased operations and declared bankruptcy, taking the coins of its investors with it. Gerald Cotten, who ran Quadriga from his laptop and kept all the passwords in his head, may or may not have died in India in 2018 (Reddit sleuths are convinced he is alive and well).
But as the price of Bitcoin rose, so did my FOMO. Trump’s four years of reckless spending and tax cuts made me wary for the future of the US dollar as well. What if China decided to peg the yuan to BTC (or to its own national crypto coin) instead of USD? There is no rule that the US dollar will be the global reserve currency forever.
I realized that cryptocurrency was here to stay, and I might as well have a stake in it.