Crypto crash!

I've always hated cryptocurrency. I knew it would be the ruin of many people. It certainly seems to be just that, this week at least. As the blockchain bros keel over one by one, let's look on the bright side. Maybe this catastrophe will kill this fad off before it crashes the entire economy. If you've been waiting for Congress to step in, you've been kidding yourself.

Anyway, even a skeptic such as I has a slight case of the Bitcoin blues. A little over a year ago, in order to open a small, funsies account on a sports gambling site, I was arm-twisted into placing my stakes in crypto. So I bought a hundred bucks' worth of Bitcoin and threw half of it into my big, bad sportsbook account.

Now, I know I'm a lousy gambler, and so I cautiously held out the other half. It's sitting in a mysterious place that exists somewhere in the ether, supposedly, connected to me by my phone. As I frittered away my 50 bucks gambling (I'm down to my last $3.05, but hanging tough), I'd go in and check on my crypto once in a while. And lo and behold, back in November it was worth more than $84! I had to laugh. I couldn't pick a winner in an NBA game to save my life, but I was killing it in Cryptoland.

In the intervening months, I've come to some conclusions about sports gambling. One is never, ever to watch the TV show Daily Wager, which is hypnotizing in its own way, but exists solely to talk you into betting on stuff you know nothing about. For a while there, I was watching it religiously, carefully selecting what I thought were nuggets of wisdom from their blathering pundits in Las Vegas. Next thing you know, my 50 bucks at the sports bookie was pretty much gone. So I stopped watching that show, for my own good, and decided to stick to wagering on what few sports things I had observed with my own eyes.

As my gambling record inexorably sank, I consoled myself with the killing I was making on the Bitcoin. But alas, that's gone the way of my sports picks now. My account started out as as the equivalent of a little under $49 (somebody took a cut somewhere, probably the crypto bro who tried to buy that Congressional seat in McMinnville), but now it's down to something like $25, and plunging fast.

Of course, so is the stock market, but not a 70 percent drop in seven months. I knew that crypto was a confidence scheme. Imagine the people who once had thousands, or millions, in it. They'll be selling their Teslas pretty soon.

Then there are all the rubes spending big money on NFTs, which as far as I can tell are specially marked computer files containing such priceless data as images of cartoon apes. It's hard to believe that grown people are dumb enough for that. But these days, it's hard to believe a lot of what goes on.