Buying newlyweds a crypto present is still the best gift
In the recent past (I couldn’t tell you when exactly because the last ten months have destroyed my conception of time and my place on this planet), a good mate of mine got married.
He is male and is called Adam and his wife is female, but not called Eve. He’s not your usual investor, he’s a master craftsman and I initially met him in a pub full of builders and local farmers.
His stag weekend was a shambles somewhere in Spain (I think) and on the flight home I asked him what he wanted for a wedding present. I thought about the usual toaster nonsense, but then came up with the brainwave, and utterly pretentious idea, to gift him £100 of Ethereum.
Rather like the marriage, this was supposedly a long-term asset and I told him he could cash it in at any time… the price of Ether at the time was around $300, I definitely remember that bit.
He still hasn’t cashed out, even with Ether approaching an ATH this week and likely to move on up further. Moreover, Adam has turned out to be a canny small crypto investor and he’s still married and now has a young child (who was not called Covid).
Unlike Adam, several people in the local pub at the time asked me what this Bitcoin was all about and I shared the little I knew without encouraging them to invest. Nobody likes a racing tipster who gives them a loser.
But it did mind me to think that if builders and farmers were getting interested in crypto, then the tipping point may have been reached and it might be time to cash out.
No disrespect to farmers, we all have our talents, but when a Stock Market means to them a place to buy cattle does render them somewhat unlikely financial investors. Although we all understand a bull market – boom-boom!
That feeling was bolstered when I was in the local greasy spoon (what days those were!) later that week and two of the most unintelligent men I have ever had the displeasure to overhear were also ‘discussing’ crypto. In fact, they may as well have banged the bones of the pig they were eating on the table, but I just about understood them.
That was the spur I needed, took my tax-free Capital Gains Tax profits and felt rather pleased with myself when the crash happened about a week later. Thank you to the Neanderthals who helped me, I salute the lard in your bacon sandwiches, but not your traditional ideas about race and women.
Now, three years later, the pub is closed, the greasy spoon has shut its doors forever and Bitcoin is leading the way, screeching past its ATH and probably heading for the moon with Ethereum in its wake. It really was rocket science after all.
In the interim, I’ve personally suffered the theft of 163 Ethereum, phished from MyEtherWallet and easily spirited away through the Binance exchange and have not been the world’s biggest evangelist of crypto after that experience.
However, I have learnt much in this time, I set up a podcast last year to interview the leading figures of crypto after doing much of the same at global conferences and have worked out who the good guys are.
Moreover, I’ve read the White Paper, I’ve read a load of books and I realised that there really was no stopping this technology, a thought that was accelerated by Covid and the mass printing of sovereign currencies to support the world and devalue money… with inflation ready to rage in 2021.
So I bought back in when Bitcoin was $9K in Q3 of 2020, not to speculate, but to invest in something I really had begun to believe in. Decentralisation has to be the future for everybody. Banks and governments have proved themselves to be incompetent gatekeepers for who, on a local and personal level, is a fairly decent species.
When 93% of the world is in recession, everybody is looking for safety, something to believe in and, who knew, that this haven would be something so volatile as crypto.
So, when the pubs reopen and people start asking me about crypto again, I won’t behave like a scaredy-cat racing tipster, I will speak stentorially about why Bitcoin is going to go up to $300K in 2022 and that might even be a conservative figure… and that they will be mad not to get involved.
Naturally, the wedding present of Ether that I gave to my mate Adam may cost me more than I originally intended, but I think I can eat that… unlike the bacon sandwiches of that greasy spoon, which may have given me an epiphany, but it also emptied my bowels. No shit, Sherlock!