No crypto for me. Too dangerous.

[DFW]

27. I know I SHOULD understand crypto by now

But I don’t and really haven’t made a big effort to grasp it. Bitcoin’s jump from $20,000 to $100,000 in a few years can’t be denied, but I still don’t know how or where I could buy or sell one.

I’m woefully conservative in such matters. It took me decades to accept gold as a reserve of value, and this was many years after part of my job was assisting central banks around the world manage specific parts of their gold reserves. Gold pays no interest, can’t be eaten, lived in, or used to heat yourself in the winter. Its only practical uses that I could see were as jewelry and in electronics, but it couldn’t be denied that many civilizations had valued gold for millenia. Alexander the Great minted gold staters to pay his generals. The Roman emperors minted gold aurei for centuries, and Byzantium minted millions of gold solidi after that. Electronics may not have been a big consumer of gold in those days, but the use for jewelry was, and you didn’t need a computer access code to negotiate it. I don’t need a computer screen for some Central Bank to show me a thousand hundred-year-old twenty dollar gold pieces or British gold sovereigns. The ask me to the vault because I can spot fakes when I hold them in my hand. They are really there.

When people come on here and tell me they are down 200% of an investment, I start to lose confidence in their ability to convince me of their grasp of the subject. If you have an uninsured house, and you lose it in an earthquake, a hurricane or a tornado, you lose up to 100% of it. That’s it. You can’t lose it again.