In which I buy Bitcoin

June 2, 2021

I received my first investment advice from my grandfather. Granddad was a stoic Midwesterner, deeply religious, and a man of few words. He fought in the First World War and then went on to see the Great Depression, followed by World War II, so he experienced both good times and bad.

But regarding his investment advice:

Granddad was fond of telling a story of a man who lived in our town during the years immediately prior to WWII. The man was a well-respected tradesman. Of what trade, I can’t recall, but he was a carpenter or a bricklayer, or something like that. He had a wife and a couple of small children and he provided well for them. When he was in his middle years, he decided to abandon his trade and purchase a local restaurant that had come up for sale. He sank all of his hard-earned carpentering/bricklaying money into the establishment and he worked night and day to make the place a success. Sadly though, in spite of all of the man’s hard work and best intentions, the restaurant floundered. Within months, the man had lost all of his money and the restaurant soon went under. Devastated and financially destroyed, the man began to drink heavily and soon thereafter his wife moved away, taking the children with her. I forget the rest of the story, but I don’t think things ended happily for this guy.

“Never put your money into something you don’t know about,” was Granddad’s advice.

He didn’t have too much use for the stock market either, having lived through the ‘crash’ of 1929. He had a similar distrust of banks, although he came to tolerate them, but the stock market he told me was controlled by fast talking businessmen who were out to gouge the common man.

Granddad believed that real estate was the only investment worth making. He once told me that if I were to ever invest money into anything, to make sure you could “build a fence on it”.

So today, as I am considering my first cryptocurrency investment, I am wondering what Granddad would say considering the tiny smattering of knowledge I have regarding Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency I am considering buying. He certainly could not build a fence on the Blockchain. Yet today, I find myself sitting in front of my newly created Coinbase account ready to invest my hard earned cash (not much of it really), into a marginally understood form of digital money that was created by a mysterious man named Satoshi Nakamoto, who may, or may not, even exist depending upon to whom one talks. Still, I am intrigued by the concept of the ‘digital wallet’ that I am about to deposit my newly minted crypto funds into. I am more intrigued by the fact that this currency exists outside the realm of banks or government (Granddad might like that part).

But I am concerned about the environmental impact digital mining is taking on such fragile eco-systems as Iceland where a huge amount of cryptocurrency mining is taking place.

But I am going boldly forward anyway. More on my investment later.

Shortly before he died, Granddad cautioned me one more time. “Never buy a restaurant,” he told me. “It’s not in your blood.”

I told him I would never consider it.