Crypto was NEVER a store of value.

Welp, good job, they did it.

What in the bloody f*ck did you think was going to happen?

In the spring of 2017 I started to get into crypto, did obscene amounts of research, and tracked discussion boards and trends of digital currencies going back to their inception- from the oldest HODLers in the space. Maybe it is because I did it this way that I have an "old man's" view of the uses of crypto- what I call a utilitarian realist view.

Being a utilitarian when it comes to cryptocurrencies has it's benefits, and of course it's drawbacks. When I first got into it, Bitcoin was trading at $1,272. I didn't have much money to throw into it at the time, but what I did, I utilized /as a currency/. Had I not used bitcoin for it's intended purpose I would have a lot more money to my name now. Maybe I wouldn't have lost my house due to budget cuts when I was working for the government during the pandemic. Maybe I wouldn't have had my head bashed in by the former partner I was forced to move in with, and subsequently had to run away from for my life and sanity.
You know, I have this horrid and momentus sense of duty for standing up for what I believe is the right call to make. I knew that cryptocurrencies could save us, as long as we didn't get greedy.

But we got greedy.

The first alarm bells started to sound five years ago when cyrptocurrenies became spilled and splattered across articles all over major news networks. When that happens, and I said this even then, it is the beginning of the end. That year, and in the ramp up to when Bitcoin Cash forked, people started a feeding frenzy, a bull market was created, and Bitcoin (with all other smaller coins riding on it's coat tails) started climbing to the moon.

We got to the moon, folks. Hell, we got to Mars and were on our approach to Jupiter. In August of 2021 those who held crypto by dumb luck, or chance, or very intentionally, were bitcoin millionares. I met one myself in my favorite speakeasy one random Tuesday night. A black hairdresser from Haiti with an interesting and veiled past and a story of how his aunt used to give him bitcoin when he was younger. She called him one night during crypto's breif halcyon days to tell him he was now (almost) financially free.

I don't blame him. He recieved a gift that ended up allowing him to travel and follow at least one of his dreams, albeit it could not fill the loneliness that plagues even the best of travellers. I don't blame him. I blame you.

Crypto was never a store of value. It was treated as a stock, and thus you took something that was decentralized and MADE it centralized by associating it in people's minds as an investment, not a tool. As something to use within the stifling confines of the modern global economy, not something that is supposed to break through and save us from it's woes.

Now we're free falling. Personally, I pulled out everything two months ago, out of both necessity and despair. Not despair about crypto, but within the physical realm. My final purchase with the last of my gains was a beautiful new acoustic-electric Ibanez.

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This is a correction, and a necessary one. We are going to start testing the bottom now, the equivalent of dipping your toe into a lake half-frozen over (excuse me for the allusion, it's poignant in the depths of winter here in the northern latitudes of the globe).

There is a bottom to test, but where that bottom lies is always the question.

And even at the bottom of the ocean there are vast chasms.

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