So my brother-in-law texted me Thursday night asking if he should "put a couple grand into the Bitcoin thing before it's too late." I was at the office holiday party at the time, standing near the cheese plate, and I looked at my phone and just laughed out loud. Not because it's a dumb question exactly. Because I've gotten some version of that text four times this month.
In case you've been avoiding the internet: Bitcoin is having an absolutely deranged week. It touched somewhere around $19,783 on Coinbase earlier today, which is a number that still doesn't feel real typing it out. Back in January it was under $1,000. Under a thousand dollars! My coworker Dave bought some in 2015 as a joke, like fifty bucks worth, and he will not stop bringing it up. He brought it up twice at the party. I love Dave but I was ready to throw a stuffed mushroom at him.
And tonight, of all nights, CME Group is flipping the switch on Bitcoin futures trading. The contract goes live this evening and starts trading tomorrow morning. CBOE beat them to it a week ago with their own futures product, so now you've got two of the biggest, most boring, most institutional exchanges in the country basically saying "yeah, this is a real asset class now, sorry." That's the part that actually makes me nervous, more than the brother-in-law texts. When the exchanges that clear pork belly futures start clearing Bitcoin futures, you know a huge pile of money that used to think crypto was a punchline is now looking for a way in without having to explain a "seed phrase" to their compliance department.
I don't own any Bitcoin. I want to be upfront about that because I think it colors everything I'm about to say. Every single time I've looked into it seriously (and I looked hard back in 2013, and again this past summer) I end up in the same place, which is: I don't understand what actually anchors the price to anything. Gold has jewelry and dentistry and a few thousand years of cultural weight behind it. A stock has earnings, in theory. Bitcoin has "people believe other people will pay more for it later," which is a fine theory until it isn't. Maybe that makes me the guy who didn't buy Amazon at $2 either. I've made my peace with maybe being that guy.
What's weirder to me than the price itself is how fast it's become a normal dinner-table topic. My mom asked about it on the phone Sunday. My mom! She wanted to know if it was "the same as PayPal." It is extremely not the same as PayPal, but I get why the wires are crossing: from the outside it all looks like "internet money," and the nuance between a payment processor and a decentralized ledger with a fixed supply cap isn't exactly a fun thing to explain between courses of pot roast.
Meanwhile there's a whole separate conversation happening about the FCC's net neutrality vote from earlier this week that I'm not even going to try to fully get into tonight — that's a big enough topic it deserves its own post and honestly I want to sit with it a bit before I write anything useful about it. Funny that both things happened in the same seven-day stretch. One story about who controls the pipes, one story about a currency nobody controls at all. Feels like the internet is having some kind of identity crisis this December.
Also, separately, completely unrelated: I went and saw The Last Jedi on Friday night and the theater was packed to the point where I had to sit in the second row and crane my neck for two and a half hours. Worth it, mostly. My neck disagrees.
Anyway. If you bought Bitcoin at $200 in 2013 and you're reading this, congratulations, you're insufferable and I mean that with love. If you're thinking about jumping in this week because your brother-in-law or your mom or Dave from the office won't shut up about it — I'm not your financial advisor, I'm a guy with a blog who still uses a flip-phone-era budgeting spreadsheet, so take that for what it's worth. Which is probably not much, given that number up top.