Cryptos for dummies
Cryptos, in fact, are easy to understand. You take a computer program which creates units in number limited by technical imperatives (algorithms). You name these units ‘currency’ (‘coins’). You sell this ‘currency’ to people who give you real dollars to buy your junk, sorry ‘currency’.
In front of the enthusiasm for these new ‘currencies’ — presented as a refuge from the dollar! — exchanges are created, on which the value of the crypto ‘currencies’ soars (because the demand is strong). Here comes the miracle! The multiplication of gains in the Jesus way! Ten units of crypto currency that you bought for US$10,000 are soon worth US$100,000. Ten times more! In a few months!
Rises up a proud generation of crypto-millionaires driving gold-plated Maserattis who would have worn a dozen Rolexes on their arm if they had been even longer. In the unheard of world of these kings of the world — oh, so gorgeous! — if at 25 you don’t have your ten Rolexes and as many Pateks, you’ve missed your life.
I myself had the chance to meet the crypto. Personified by Mademoiselle Vanessa.
It was just one year ago. On a beautiful autumn afternoon, I am on a terrace of the place Brugmann, in Brussels. A friend insists on introducing me to his new relationship. In the age of 21–22, she walks onto the terrace like Lauren Bacall enters a chimpanzee enclosure, and immediately gives me a look that makes me feel like I’m passing under the chair I’m sitting on. Vanessa doesn’t really hold out her hand to me; she lets it hang in the air, vaguely in my direction, waiting for me to greedily seize this opportunity to touch genius. My friend is taking good care of Vanessa, lighting her extra-long extra-fine cigarettes.
Suddenly, Vanessa I, empress of all the Cryptos, takes the floor, without ever looking at me. The spectacle of her luminous false nails (gold?) indeed monopolizes Her attention. Vanessa wants to explain to me what she is doing. Hosanna, my God! Will the secret of alchemy be revealed to me? Vanessa is, in her own words, a ‘crypto-millionaire’ and, she says in a flurry of investment concepts and strategies of which I don’t understand a third of the way through, ‘I’ve made enough money so that my children and my children’s children and their children will never have to worry about their livelihood.’
I humbly sip my coffee, aware that I am experiencing what is probably the apotheosis of my existence. Stupidly, as arithmetic slugs like me do, I try to figure out how many millions we are talking about. Since Vanessa has shared with us the amount of her initial investment, which is necessarily derisory, a quick calculation tells me that if the Crypto Empress is indeed a millionaire, she is at most the owner of one million. No matter! She is only 21 years old! Who am I to question the Transcendence when I, at 21, was stupidly studying law and philosophy on the fourth floor of the Louvain library?
When the conversation ceased to interest her, that is to say when she had finished speaking, Vanessa simply got up, and left without a word, generously sharing with us, in full nostrils, the Chanel N°5 with which she seemed to have smeared herself from head to toe, as well as the exhaust fumes of her Aston Martin special series with the hand-stitched seats (red thread, for the connoisseurs). My friend thought he had to say, “That’s a hell of a woman,” which seemed to me at the time to be as inappropriate as “What an ace, that Jesus-Christ!
Three days ago, I ran into the crypto empress again in the same establishment on Place Brugmann. She now works there as a waitress and seems to have replaced the Chanel N°5 by the sweat of when you work.
I would have tipped her.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have any KryptoQuackQuack on me.
