Patsy Crawford scribbling away
Got your virtual Bitcoin wallet yet? What, no? I can’t say I blame you.
We started to watch a doco-film about cryptocurrency the other night, and we lasted fifteen minutes.
It was so arcane that it almost required sub-titles. We cannot be this dumb, I thought.
If Snoop Dog and Fifty Cent can get on top of Bitcoin, surely we can.
Sadly it was not to be.
Our fifteen minutes of staring at the television screen was an exercise in hyper-frustration.
Not only was the cryptocurrency concept outlined in total gibberish, the people on screen - young, nerdy-with-attitude, supremely self-confident – were so damned condescending.
“If you don’t get what we’re on about, tough luck you old coots!” seemed to be the show’s leitmotif.
I would invite anyone who can explain a currency with no visible coinage, no bank, no central authority, and no bored tellers, that is run from huge sheds crammed with computers that beep at one another to write in - preferably using words of few syllables! Bear in mind, there’s a vast mass of humanity who know naff-all about it.
Not wanting to capitulate so spinelessly on the subject, I dug around the Net to see who was into this sort of nonsense.
I expected captains of industry, financial giants or at least a clutch of Bendigo Bank branch managers to be up there, snootily looking down on the uncoined.
Wrong! Bitcoin appears to be where rappers, luvvies and movie stars go to turn their readies into tokens.
Have they, by some quirk of nature, been blessed with a special insight that allows them to negotiate the labyrinthine trails that lead to cryptocurrency?
Frankly, I doubt it. Let’s face it; Snoop Dog is not exactly Warren Buffet in the high finance department.
Then there’s Steven Seagal - all that karate chopping and leaping from high industrial fixtures appears to have paved the way nicely to Bitcoin.
I could - and will - go on.
A quick sprint through the list of top crypto-players turns up Gwyneth Paltrow, Paris Hilton and Mike Tyson.
Kanye West (since he has a church, perhaps that should be “Reverend West”?) has dipped his toes into Bitcoin waters.
Johnny Depp probably needs the crypto price to go through the roof, given the eye-watering amounts of cash he and his ex Amber Heard are forking out for their ludicrously self-centred day in court.
Despite my brief troll through the Net I remain none the wiser.
The most fun has been finding out who’s lavishly promoting cryptocurrencies. It’s a who’s who of the monied up and celebrity-prone.
It takes an awful lot of electric power to mine it too.
One doesn’t print or create cryptos; one mines them via enough electricity to spark up the Tasmanian power grid.
The sneaky crypto miners will stop at nothing.
Next time you get a crank call, it could be one of them, digging away virtually at the computer power in your phone.
If it’s Gwyneth trying to flog her Goop gear, hang up.
