Should Your Mother Buy Bitcoins? –
Should Your Mother Buy Bitcoins? -Should she? I don’t know about your mother, but I’m a mother, for that matter, I could be your grandmother, and I have an opinion about this, to be sure. Not that I know anything substantive about Bitcoin and crypto coins, in general, cuz I don’t, but I don’t totally totally understand the underhanded sly relationship of the Federal Reserve to the USD and I still have some of those. Although not as many as I’d like. I do have a little Bitcoin. As in very little. As in a bit. Okay, in the guise of full disclosure, I have a whole $65. 42 worth of Bitcoin and that’s after the recent run-up this week. Hey! I have a little skin in the game and that’s what counts. And I might have even made a slight profit if I hadn’t gotten excited and put half of it into Doge right before it went down by 50%. But, that’s how I roll! You can’t be entirely risk averse and still play the deal. But, should YOUR mom buy Bitcoin? It depends on what she wants to accomplish and if she can stand to lose any of her hard earned bucks. If your mom’s rolling in dough she probably doesn’t need your advice on what to do with her dollars, but she’ll be in a good position to try it on in a bigger way. Me? Not so much. I don’t mine coinsdon’t have a rig and I have my hands full with my current electricity bill, so I buy mine with cash I earn the old fashioned way. It’s called working. As a result, I’m cheap. It also means there’s not a lot of extra cash just lying around. Whenever I have an extra $500 on hand, it’s not going to make it as far as opening a Scottrade account. It’s much more likely to end up turning into new tires or new brakes, Transformer-Style. Here one minute; unrecognizable the next. How’s a mother to grow her nest egg if she doesn’t have any seed money to start it with? Personally, I’m tired of that old analogy, Just save your vanilla latte money and in no time you’ll have six months savings in the bank and be on to building your vacay account. в Right. That’s a lot of freakin’ coffee. If you can do that, we need to start a 12-Step group now. More to the point, it’s a long long road to a small piece of financial freedom if you’re relying on your latte budget to cover it. So, I can’t invest in Scottrade at the rate of $15 a week, but I could play with some Bitcoin, if I was up to losing it. And if it’s coffee money to begin with, I was already losing it and that doesn’t count tipping out to the barista. And who knows? I could win. Here’s the thing, investing in Bitcoin is accessible. Even for me. I can buy it in as small amounts as I like or jump in to the deep end of the pool. The point is I can do it when I can’t invest in other things. Besides, it’s fun. Very important. Like your mom, I might have seen the word Bitcoin floating around the internet at one point or another, but I didn’t actually hear about it enough to pay attention until everyone else over 30 (or not a techie) heard about it and that was with the raid on SilkRoad. First time I had ever heard about SilkRoad, too. Even as a Bitcoin Newbie I regret the association with drugs that SilkRoad painted Bitcoin with. Come on, I know you’ve heard it, Bitcoin? Oh yeah, I’ve heard all about that! I guess it’s good for buying drugs with. в Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so is cash, or gold, or sex. They all work just fine in the right marketplace. Besides, we all know Bitcoin rocks it in the pizza buying category. So there! And with Netflix talking about accepting Bitcoin, we’re going to totally own Friday nights any time now. And that’s the other thing. In order for your Bitcoin to really matter, it’s going to have to make the transition from the virtual world to Main Street brick and mortar businesses. Bitcoin isn’t going to change anything or rock the world the way it could until it has been adopted by enough people to make it common. Maybe this is the biggest reason you should get your mom into a little bit of Bitcoin. Your Auntie, too. Even if you have to gift her with it. As soon as the Boomer Ladies adopt it, Bitcoin will go mainstream and next thing you know, we’ll all be buying our next haircut and color with it at the salons. I know, I know, we ruined Facebook and Bitcoin might not be as edgy, cool, and hip when your mom is buying support hose with it, but it will be stabilizing and gaining value. And that’s good for you. I do have an Ol’ Biddy Bitcoin plan of my own. I plan to buy and hold one bit at a time, $30 a throw, a couple times a month. And watch it grow. Or not. I find it invigorating. It ties me into international news in a new way. There’s a whole world of Bitcoin communities out there I could plug into if I got my nerve up and figured out how to open a Reddit account. It gives me something to think about other than when is China going to call our debt or whether Washington will go into another pissing contest about the budget shortfall. I get to feel all rebellious, counter-culture, and avant-garde and I gotta tell you, you need to grab those moments when they come by. Your mom will love Bitcoin just for that. She can talk about it at lunch with her friends now and no one will understand a goddamn thing she’s saying. At all. There are few things that rival Cool. Even at fifty. You know what I really like about Bitcoin? It connects me to my son and a bunch of other young folks who are out there making stuff happen and shaking up the place. It gives us plenty of lively conversation and a chance for me to practice not knowing anything much about whatever it is we are talking about. My son gets to show me a new world through his eyes and we haven’t done that consistently since he was three or four. I love it. I can’t pretend I’ve wrapped my mind around the whole someone made Bitcoin and sent it out into the Internet and now you have to go find it, like some kind of giant Easter Egg Hunt Gold Rush thingie. в I know it has something to do with tracking transactions, which makes no sense to me whatsoever. But it doesn’t have to. You all can go mine them all night long. I only have to monitor my own transactions. And remember the password to my wallet.
