The emperor’s new clothes

“Buy bitcoins” I said to Tom, back in September. We’d got £1000 in Premium Bonds sat there doing nothing; bought when I was a stripper and had £10 notes to burn. It seemed better than stuffing the money in a bank to languish, depreciating over time. But the vouchers had stagnating in a desk drawer for years. It made sense to do something else with them, and this brave new digital gold rush appealed to my pioneering spirit.

As well as writing about marriage, parenting, autism, and slightly more salacious stories about stripclubs and relationship market forces, I also write blogs on technology at work, which is how I’d become aware of this virtual ‘cryptocurrency’ that was incrementally increasing in value at a much better rate than anything else, certainly well above interest rates, and probably more quickly than gold.

“Let’s take a gamble on it,” I said,  “But don’t let’s gamble more than we can afford.”

Tom looked into it – he used to be a trader and as such, has as little faith in the banking system as anyone – but he also knows his stuff. He was head of his desk once, before the financial crash. He did his homework and placed orders to buy at various prices, low and high, and as the market bubbled up, we bought, and when it fell again, we also bought – we were hedging our bets on a long term upward curl.

Bitcoin is exciting – a decentralised currency that have the dubious reputation of being largely untraceable. It has been implemented in the rise of ‘dark’ websites like Silk Road, where you could buy weapons and drugs online. When Silk Road was finally shut down, in a multi pronged FBI sting, a month or two ago, the bitcoin market wobbled, but I told Tom to hold firm.

The way bitcoins are ‘mined’ through the solving of ever increasingly difficult puzzles, and the fact that they are finite – no devaluing them by printing out more – means that they will increase in scarcity and their value, short of a sudden mass drop in confidence, will rise over time. And what with US looking shaky as its government shuts it doors over a surpassed and compromised ‘debt ceiling’ that can never be patched up and European banks slashing rates, neither the dollar or the euro look particularly steady safe anymore. In my infinite wisdom (ie. I read a couple of books about trading after the financial meltdown) I said, “bitcoins are going to bubble. Where governments can devalue currencies, people are losing faith in traditional financial tools. It’s a safe haven for people’s money. We took our gamble.”We’re going to be bitcoin millionaires,” I had boasted, jesting, to sceptical colleagues, when I told them about my faith in this digital bubble and  our small investment.

But then I got cocky. “Trade with the profit,” I said to Tom, as Bitcoins gadded about, losing or gaining $50 or $70 dollars at a stroke.  He did, playing around bits and pieces, trying to make half my daily salary again each day on the markets. It was fun, and financially stretched, seemed to make low risk sense. But bitcoins’ general upward trajectory, that has seen early investors of peanuts sitting on pots of virtual gold, is marred by a tendency to leap about all over the place in a market that hasn’t worked out what to do with itself quite yet.

But still, I felt like it had a long way to go before the bubble burst. Yesterday, it airlifted. Tripling in value in 24 hours, I noticed the news as I scanned Twitter, answering retweets and  flicking between browser windows to scan my stats on WordPress, which have also taken a surge, looming like Twin Towers  on horizon graphs of my hits and impressions from the last two days, where suddenly, on the back on one article in a broadsheet supplement, my readership has increased 100 fold. Maybe I was going to be a writer of renown, I thought smugly to myself.  Maybe we were going to be Bitcoin millionaires after all.

“Look, Tom,” I said, “Bitcoins have gone crazy.” He looked at me, suddenly grey and mournful like a puppy, shamefacedly doing a shit.

He’d made me a chicken salad earlier, nonchalant, maybe slightly eager to please. It had been perfect. He’d seemed normal. Not said a word.

“I feel sick,” he said.

“Why?” I said, suddenly growing steely. “Why Tom, what have you done?”

“I was trying to trade them like you said,” he said, looking like a toddler about to get slippered. For the record, I have never slippered a toddler, but I can only imagine.

“What have you done? We still have some right?’

“No not really, no… fuck all….”

“What have you done?” my voice growing louder, more teachery, tinged with hysteria.

“You said to trade them. They looked like they’d bubbled – they tripled in value,” he said, gathering himself and becoming bullish, a trader with balls once more. “No asset should do that, this isn’t a logical market.”

Both of us desperately trying to sound like we know what we’re talking about.

“But why the fuck did you sell them?” I’m really yelling now, really really yelling. The neighbours are listening intently. I feel a bit cool, like I’m in Homelands, or Twin Peaks or something, using terminology that makes me sound like an adult, when really, I’m crying like a baby inside.

“I said trade the profit, you idiot, not the investment.” Our bitcoin purchases, averaging out at a nice cheap $60 a piece, were suddenly worth three or four times that. Only Tom had sold them. And yet they’d continued to go up and up and up and now buying them back looked significantly riskier.

But if you’re not in it, you can’t win it, was my spurious logic.”Buy them back” I said, looming over him like the white witch abut to turn him to stone,  and cowering he bought them back. Now we have a lot to lose. I’m terrible with figures. Concepts however, I’m really fucking good at. If an asset is on an upward trajectory, and you bought it cheap, don’t sell the investment. It’s not rocket science.

Tom is the sous chef to my head. I tell him what to make, and he executes it perfectly – like the beautiful chicken and toasted walnut salad he made earlier last night. Left to come up with his own recipes, his flavours are terrible. He has no vision, but he’s great at the nitty gritty. I, however am not. I hate technology, and I get in a tangle trying anything new, although given the right research, I can write coherently about complicated concepts that sound as though I know what I’m talking about, even if I actually am rather vague. It’s vision like this that stuffed the banking world up in the first place.  I can’t follow instructions and I hate doing what I’m told. I would have made an excellent trader, with about as much nous as the many I’ve met on nights out in the City with Tom.

Tom follows instructions to the letter, making great Ikea furniture, and beautiful, perfectly formed fish finger sandwiches for the kids, where mine will always come out crispy and black where I can’t be bothered to set the timer. Together, we work well, but we struggle to understand each other’s failings.

And there’s a little bit of Tom that likes to self sabotage. He likes to pick the pieces up when things go wrong, and I think he’s scared of too much success.

This can lead to explosive rows. Last night’s took the biscuit.

He cringed, while I raged. “How often in life do you have the chance to take advantage of a boom like this? Especially when you’ve bought into it cheap? Not very fucking often!” I screamed, “and yet you sold?”

“It looked like it had reached a peak…” he blustered, tripping over his teeth in the face of my wrath.

“Fine,” I screeched, “Sell the profit, but if the investment looks like it’s going up over time, don’t sell the investment.”

It went on in this vein for some time.

At a certain point over the timbre of my own voice saying the same thing again and again, each time with more hysteria, as if I was watching myself on film, and I’d just brought down Lehman Brothers, I could hear footsteps upstairs. It was Ava crawling into Jonah’s bed. I found them cuddled together like kittens first thing in the morning, and I felt so guilty about waking them I wept.

“Why are you sad, mama?” Jonah said, and thinking about the impact of my yells on their seeping subconscious, I made up some lie about them making me so happy I cried. I doubt he bought it.

The world of children is so straightforward. Logical even. Adults fuck it up, with status, power and money. In the playground, the premise is that democracy rules supreme, too young to create their own hierarchies, the levellers of wearing the same clothes, eating the same food and having the same rules apply regardless means the only advantages you score are those that god – or rather- your mama gave you.

It’s what makes adult life seem so ridiculous. That I am getting stressed that Tom sold an assert that isn’t worth anything really, only what people are prepared to believe it’s worth. A bitcoin has no intrinsic value, except that it is rising where other things that people once trusted, like dollars and euros, or even the old stalwart of property are looking increasingly volatile.

And yet, since Tom lost his job trading other things that have essentially no intrinsic value – things like packaged up bits of overpriced debt that represent people’s hopes, dream and shattered lives, we’ve been buying basic bog roll to save 10p here and there. And that gets wearing after a while. So I’m prepared to believe the bitcoin emperor’s wearing a suit of finest gold thread.

You have to play the game. Buy bitcoins and hope that this digital dream has a happy ending. Except, if it scars the dreams of my children and rips us apart through stress, and disappointment, anger and regret, it won’t –  wherever our initial “investment” ends up in 20 years time.

I made him buy them back, though, at over 10 times what we initially paid. I’m not ready to give up on the dream just yet. And to his credit, he didn’t actually lose any money. He just didn’t make as much as he could have. But I’m not ready to hand him that yet. Just like the last time he made a bad call on a trade that ran away from him, when he lost his job for a bank that soon went under, he’s given me a stick to beat him with every time I’m scrabbling for a coupon, or trading down in my weekly shop, or writing a shitty blog no one reads for less than a penny a word. Because I haven’t had the opportunity to fuck up quite so much as him. Except that,  now I’ve got a readership, perhaps, in fact, I have.