Yesterday was one of those days where you just sit there refreshing the same three tabs for six hours straight and dont get anything done. I dont really want to write a whole post about the Capitol, everyone with a keyboard is doing that right now and I dont think I have anything to add that a hundred other sites havent already said better. The one tech detail that stuck with me was Twitter actually locking the president out of his own account for twelve hours last night and making him delete tweets before hed get it back. Ive been on that site since 2009 and I have never seen anything like that happen to anyone, let alone someone with 88 million followers. Whatever you think about it, it was A Moment, and I dont think were done watching the fallout from it.
Anyway. I didnt actually want to write about that. What Ive actually spent the last two hours doing is way dumber and, honestly, kind of a nice distraction.
Around 2013 I put something like forty bucks into Bitcoin because a guy I knew from a forum wouldnt shut up about it. I forgot about it almost immediately. Ive moved apartments three times since then, gone through at least two laptops, and I genuinely could not have told you yesterday afternoon whether I still had a Coinbase account at all. But with everyone talking about the price doing insane things this week (its been flirting with numbers that feel made up, somewhere north of $35k last I checked) I got curious enough to go looking.
Finding the account was the easy part. It was still sitting in an old Gmail I barely check, buried under a decade of receipts and expired coupon codes. Getting back INTO the account was a whole different problem. The password manager I use now didnt exist when I made this account, so I had no saved login. Fine, password reset, no big deal. Except the two-factor was tied to a Google Authenticator install on a Nexus 5 that has been dead and in a drawer since 2016. So then it's the whole identity verification dance: photo of my license, a selfie holding said license next to my face at eleven at night under a desk lamp that makes everyone look like a hostage, and then a 48 to 72 hour wait for a human to actually look at it.
I dont really have a complaint here beyond the obvious one, which is that this is exactly the kind of friction that makes crypto stuff impossible to recommend to anyone who isnt already deep into it. My mother is never going to sit through a photo ID verification flow to check on forty dollars. Im not sure I even should be, honestly, given what its probably worth is basically a rounding error either way. But I submitted the request anyway because now Im curious and I want to know the number.
While Im waiting on that, a smaller aside: CES is supposed to start Monday and its the first time in the shows history its going fully virtual, no Vegas floor, no walking eleven miles a day between booths. Ive never been in person (this is a one person operation running out of a spare bedroom, not exactly a travel budget situation) so I always followed it through other peoples liveblogs anyway. Curious whether an all digital version of a show thats fundamentally about touching and standing next to gadgets actually works, or if it just turns into a week of press releases with worse production values. Well see.
Back to the Coinbase thing. Ill update this post or write a follow up once the verification clears, assuming it doesnt take a full week like some of the horror stories Ive read tonight while procrastinating on actual work. Ten years of blogging here and I still manage to find new ways to lose an evening to something completely unproductive. Some things dont change.