So I bought a tiny bit of Bitcoin back in October 2013, mostly as a joke. I think it was something like sixty bucks worth, bought off an exchange whose name I genuinely cannot remember anymore, and then I did what everyone who wasn't a true believer did: I forgot about it. Wrote down a password somewhere, moved on with my life, didn't think about it again for roughly four years.
This week I thought about it again.
If you haven't been paying attention, the price has gone completely unhinged over the last two or three weeks. It crossed $10,000 right around Thanksgiving, which felt insane at the time, and then just kept climbing past that like $10k was nothing. By the time I actually sat down and tried to log into Coinbase on Wednesday night, the number on my screen (when it loaded, which is its own story) was hovering somewhere around $15,000 a coin. For a currency that was worth about $120 when I bought in. I am not a genius investor. I am a guy who forgot a password.
Except logging in was the whole problem. Coinbase has apparently been getting hammered so hard by new signups and panic trading that the site was basically unusable for me for two straight days. Pages spinning forever. The app just sitting there on a loading screen like it was thinking real hard about something. I'd get in for thirty seconds, see a balance, try to click through to actually do anything with it, and get bounced back out. A friend of mine who does ops work for a living texted me a screenshot of some outage-tracking site showing Coinbase basically pegged at "major issues" for most of the week, which, fair enough. If your service tripled its user base in a month you're going to have a bad time.
I'm not even mad about it, honestly, which surprises me a little. There's something almost funny about a piece of software from 2013 running headfirst into 2017-levels of internet hype. Nobody built for this. I don't think anybody could have.
What I keep thinking about, though, is how weirdly disconnected the actual experience is from the number on the screen. Everyone's talking about Bitcoin like it's this abstract financial phenomenon, line go up, chart goes brrr, but for me this week it was extremely concrete and extremely annoying: I have an asset, apparently, and I cannot touch it. The site won't load. Support hasn't answered the ticket I filed Tuesday. There's a real amount of money sitting behind a login screen that keeps timing out, and the only thing I can do about it is refresh and wait, which is a very strange feeling to have about money.
I did eventually get in this morning, briefly, long enough to see the balance and immediately have the page die again before I could do anything with it. So the forgotten bitcoin remains forgotten, just now for a different reason. Instead of "I lost the password" it's "the website is on fire." Progress, I guess.
A part of me wants to just cash out the whole thing right now, lock in a number I'd have laughed at in 2013, and be done with it. Another part of me remembers that this exact price action, this exact euphoria, is usually the part of the story that ends badly for the people who show up late. I don't think I'm late, exactly. I bought in four years ago by accident. But I also don't have any particular insight into where this goes next, and neither does anyone else confidently tweeting about it right now, no matter how sure they sound.
For now it's just sitting there. A number I can look at sometimes, when the site deigns to load, that keeps going up while I do nothing at all. Which might be the most 2017 sentence I've written on this blog in a while.
Anyway. If anyone else is having Coinbase load forever and just wants to complain about it together, my inbox is open. Misery loves company, especially the kind of misery that's currently up several thousand percent.