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.

Which Coins?

Researching how and where to open an account, I learned that the landscape had changed a great deal since I’d last looked into it. US exchanges are now required to implement KYC/AML (know-your-customer/anti-money-laundering) regulations. The Wild West days of crypto-anonymity are coming to an end. To open an account I was required to show my ID to my webcam and then let it scan my face.

It took me about an hour to set up my Coinbase account and transfer some money in. Not bad, considering I had no idea what I was doing. I had decided I wanted a small stake in three coins:

  1. Bitcoin (BTC), equivalent to digital gold. The original crypto coin. Limited supply, very expensive to mine. Small nations worth of electricity are expended each day trying to mine the last unmined Bitcoins. High name recognition, but very slow transaction speed. Bitcoin will never be used as a mainstream currency because it’s just too slow. But you wouldn’t try to spend your gold sovereigns at Target to buy water filter replacements, would you? That’s not what they’re for. You keep your gold sovereigns in a safe deposit box and look at them once every three years while muttering “my precious…” don’t you? Treat your BTC the same way.
  2. Ethereum (ETH). The second-most-famous coin. Higher transaction speed meaning ETH could potentially be used for commerce. A programmable asset, meaning that logic and contracts can be built into ETH transactions.
  3. Dogecoin (DOGE) because I like the picture of the dog, and so do a lot of people. Originally a joke currency. Infinitely mineable. Currently very close to useless. But extremely high recognition.

I Pay A Lot of Exchange Fees

Opening the Coinbase account was relatively easy, but I discovered that it wasn’t possible to buy Dogecoin on Coinbase. For that, I would need a Kraken account. So I opened a Kraken account. Easy enough, but I didn’t want to bother with linking my checking account to my Kraken account. Instead, I decided to simply transfer some ETH from my Coinbase account to my Kraken account. I choked on my coffee a little when I saw how much that would cost me. Transferring crypto is not cheap. Expect to pay at least $10 even for a small transaction.

But I wanted to own some Doge. For the novelty of it, if nothing else. So I bit the bullet, crossed my fingers, and pasted in the address of my Kraken account, half-expecting the coins to just disappear into the ether.

Lo and behold, the transaction worked. The Ethereum appeared in my Kraken account, less fees. Next step, convert my ETH to Dogecoin.

Except no, you can’t do that. On Kraken, you can only purchase Dogecoin with USD or Bitcoin.

So I converted my Kraken ETH to BTC (paying another $10 in fees) and then finally BTC to Doge ($10 later). Finally, I owned Dogecoin. A very small amount, mind you, because it was essentially a worthless novelty investment. I paid $30 in transaction fees to acquire $200 in Dogecoin, and felt like a sucker.

Expecting to Lose Money

I fully expected (and still expect) to lose money investing in cryptocurrency. It’s a wild, rapidly fluctuating market, and I bought at an all-time high for all three coins.

But as of this morning I’m up 22% in Bitcoin, 50% in Ethereum, and 350% in Dogecoin (last night I was up 500% in Dogecoin, but the price crashed this morning).

A wild ride indeed.

Some describe the probable future of cryptocurrency as “crashing upwards.” Crypto still doesn’t provide much utility, so the game is pure speculation at this point. But cryptocurrency isn’t going away, and is actually useful in many ways.

So essentially I opened a cryptocurrency account (well, two, actually) out of fear of missing out. Both on potential profits, but also on the dawn of what is potentially a new global financial system, one based on peer-to-peer networking and computer code instead of national governments and banks.

Money is only what we agree it is, and more people than ever are agreeing that money should look like this: