It’s time to embrace our Bitcoin blues

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I did a monumentally stupid thing at the beginning of January. I bought some Bitcoin. Actually, that’s not quite true. That makes me sound like Elton John frittering £40,000 a week at his florist. What I did was buy some different cryptocurrencies. A tiny bit of something called Ethereum and another one called Ripple, which is a nice, unthreatening name, isn’t it? Sounds like something you’d eat on the beach in Cornwall.

The way this came about is tragic, and here goes: I have been meaning to buy a new sofa for my flat for three years. And since sofas cost around eleventy million pounds, what this wannabe Warren Buffett thought she’d do was punt a few hundred quid on these exciting new cryptocurrencies everyone was talking about – even though she couldn’t quite explain what a cryptocurrency was.

Then, when their value definitely shot up 500 per cent in a matter of weeks, maybe even days, she’d sell her cryptocurrencies and buy one of those velvet sofas she’d been gazing at online like an internet pervert. I bought the currency on a website in, ooooh, under seven minutes (it was scarily easy – if I can do it, a seven-year-old with a credit card slipped from your wallet could manage it in seconds), and started measuring up the space in my sitting room.
A day or so later, I signed into my online trading account like the she-wolf of Wall Street. Here goes, I thought with a thrill, how much have I made? Maybe I could get a new sofa and some nice new cushions from Molly Mahon? (Google her if you’re into block prints. I never knew wallpaper was an aphrodisiac.) But when I looked at my “portfolio”, there seemed to be a mistake. It was all red and I’d already made losses in both my cryptocurrencies. What a mystery! The media had been talking of cryptocurrency millionaires for weeks. Surely I hadn’t managed to buy some at its very peak? Only a total moron would do that, I chuckled to myself. No, no, it would be all right. I just had to wait for the markets to shift. I clicked back to the sofa website for another quick peek.

We are now a month or so on from my impulsive shopping spree and I’m sorry to tell you that as cryptocurrencies have tanked further, my portfolio looks bleaker than Philip Hammond’s. As I write this, I am 15.7 per cent down on Ethereum and – wait for it – 69.9 per cent down on Ripple. In 1630s Holland, there was a sailor who accidentally ate a tulip bulb one morning with his herring, believing it to be an onion. It was the height of tulip mania and it turned out he’d swallowed a rare Semper Augustus bulb worth thousands of florins. The poor chap was thrown in prison for a year. Clap me in handcuffs, I am the 2018 equivalent of that sailor.
But there must be a few of us kicking about, right? I’m not the only idiot in the village. Come on, who else fell for it and is now too nervous to confess? It feels like the 21st century equivalent of buying a madly expensive pair of shoes or some sort of gadget and squirrelling them in the back of the cupboard. I’ve been keeping it quiet for weeks out of sheer embarrassment but finally caved last week and told my sister.

I had to, the burden of humiliation was too great. She cried with laughter. Real tears. But this is coming from a sister who, as a student one summer, pretended to our parents that she was in South Korea learning taekwondo when, actually, she was sleeping on the floor of a friend’s flat in Wimbledon because she’d spent all her earnings from working in a sandwich shop on beer instead.

So, this is my advice if you too are in this situation and looking at your Litecoin or your Tron (the facile names should have been a clue) in a similarly forlorn manner.

Tell the person in your family you are least scared of, or the member of your family who has done something even more stupid. Admit your transgressions to them. It helps. I’m telling you. A problem halved and all that. And my sister will be the first person I buy a yacht for when Raspberry Ripple or whatever it’s called takes off again later this year. Because it will, you know. Everyone’s saying that on the internet.
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