So I spent Sunday night on the couch with my laptop half-open and the TV on 60 Minutes, which is not something I normally admit to doing, and Charlie Rose is interviewing Jeff Bezos, and about twenty minutes in they cut to this video of a little octocopter picking up a box off a conveyor belt and flying it to somebody's porch. Prime Air, they're calling it. Thirty minute delivery, tiny drones, the whole thing. Bezos says four or five years out, pending the FAA actually letting this happen, which, good luck with that.
I want to believe it. I really do. But I've been doing this long enough to remember when Amazon Prime itself felt like a gimmick nobody would pay for, so maybe I'm the wrong person to be cynical here. Still, the segment aired the night before Cyber Monday, which feels like it was scheduled with a stopwatch and a marketing calendar rather than a camera crew that just happened to be free that weekend. My neighbor two doors down already complains about the mail truck idling in front of her mailbox for ten minutes every afternoon; I cannot picture a world where she's thrilled about a swarm of buzzing robots dropping cardboard boxes on the lawn. Also has anyone asked what happens when it's windy. Or raining. Or there's a dog.
Anyway I watched the whole segment and then went and checked my phone and Bitcoin had done something absolutely deranged.
If you weren't paying attention, over the Thanksgiving weekend the price on Mt. Gox blew past $1,200, and for a few hours a single bitcoin was worth more than an ounce of gold. Gold. The thing people have been hoarding since forever because it doesn't rot and it doesn't need a password. I remember reading about bitcoin back in maybe 2011 when it was worth something like thirty cents and thinking it was a neat idea for people who really didn't trust banks, and mining it on a home GPU seemed like a fun weekend project rather than something you'd tell your accountant about. I did not buy any. I want that on the record. I did not buy any, and I have thought about that decision approximately four hundred times in the past week, usually around 11pm when I can't sleep.
What gets me isn't even the price, it's how fast it happened. A currency nobody could explain to their parents was suddenly worth more per unit than the thing humans have used to store value for five thousand years, and half the tech press spent the week writing "what is bitcoin" explainers as if the concept was brand new, when some of us have had this conversation a dozen times at meetups where somebody's always got a laptop open to a mining pool dashboard. There's a guy at my old coworking space who apparently has a couple hundred coins sitting in a wallet from back when it was basically worthless, and I genuinely do not know if that man is going to end up rich or if the whole thing collapses into nothing by spring. Could go either way and honestly both outcomes seem about equally likely to me right now.
The thing that connects the drones and the bitcoin, if I'm being honest, isn't technology so much as timing. Both stories landed in the same week that everyone's already primed to spend money, Cyber Monday, holiday shopping, year-end everything, and both of them are, in their own way, a bet on the future being weirder than the present. One is a bet that a giant retailer can put robots in your airspace. The other is a bet that a string of code with no central bank behind it deserves to be worth more than metal you can hold in your hand. I don't know which bet pays off first, or if either one does. I do know I'm annoyed I didn't buy ten dollars of bitcoin in 2011 just to see what would happen, and I know I still don't want a drone landing near my kid's swing set.
Going to go make coffee and try not to check the bitcoin price again before noon.