Or, actually, let’s consider that that’s maybe not even a boat.
By Stout Cortez
About a decade ago, I switched careers to start working as a software engineer. I was particularly gifted in the field I was leaving — graduate-school dropout — but I found the compensation to be less than lucrative. At the age of 26, after a chance conversation with a college friend, I realized that I may not have missed the boat on becoming a productive member of society and took one of those coding bootcamps. Then, like so many before me, I grabbed my shovel and pick-axe and moved west to mine the fertile hills of Silicon Valley for tech-startup gold — or at least a job.
Software has been mostly good to me, but something that I’ve been terrible at is recognizing opportunity. For instance, I remember clearly the day that one of my coworkers saw a considerable increase in his holdings of one particular stock: Nvidia. Today, the chip-making company has the second-largest market cap of any tech company in the U.S. behind only Apple. Of course, I kicked myself for not getting in when he did.
“You can still buy the stock,” he said. No, I thought, I think I’ve missed the boat.
That was in 2016.
(The stock had just increased from about $1.25 when he bought it to $2.30. Nvidia stock is now worth over $140).
Another opportunity I was terrible at recognizing was cryptocurrency. Many of my coworkers at that same time period were buying the now $100,000 digital asset for about $500, but I refused to jump on board. However, I refrained not because I didn’t see the opportunity, but because I just didn’t understand it.
Not that I didn’t understand the tech — you can’t work in software in the bay area for more than three months without accidentally understanding the basics of cryptocurrency through general osmosis — I just didn’t understand how people could think it was a good idea. And, (as has already been established) because I am a fool, I thought it wise to not invest in anything that I just didn’t think of as worthwhile, whose use I just didn’t understand.
I’ve bitterly watched the line go up, year after year, waiting for it to crash back down to earth, rooting for its public failure like the spurned high school sweetheart of an A-list celebrity. But now, I’ve made my piece with crypto. It’s taken me eight years of decreasingly sincere attempts to do so, all eight of which were filled with annoyance, frustration, exasperation, impatience, and above all contempt, but as I was falling asleep the other night I finally achieved a revelation that has steadied me.
I have now made my peace with the next big global technology that will revolutionize humanity (just as soon as we figure out a use for it), and as a rehabilitated man I can proudly attest that I no longer actively root for its demise.
When I think of crypto adherents, I think of Joe. Joe is a former colleague and my friend, I guess. Joe is an insufferable tool. Joe loves ethereum. Talking with Joe is like listening to the greatest-hits album for turn-of-the-century alt-rock one-hit-wonder Dishwalla, and when he sees that black Sims character selection symbol that ethereum calls its logo the needle on Joe’s record gets stuck and I’m treated to his version of Counting Blue Cars until I wake up the next morning, unsure how I made it into my bed alive and with my sanity.
I get that Joe has spent time learning about the blockchain, and has calculated the expected work required to solve computational problems and analyzed that the cost of that work is worth the statistically expected benefit gained. I understand that devoting his brain power to understanding the technology required effort, and much like the mental effort required by suburban moms to convince themselves that their research into vaccine safety is superior to the work done by holders of advanced degrees in medicine, I understand that convincing himself that a proof-of-work blockchain is more than just a validated linked list was itself a work of significant mental effort. But up until now I arrogantly dismissed it with lazy comparisons of crypto bros to suburban anti-vaxxers.
“What is its use value,” I, apparently dumbly, would ask Joe. It is the currency of the future. “Have you ever used it to purchase anything,” I, the idiot, produced from my mouth like drool from the anesthetized halfwit. No, because it appreciates in value. “Then how is it a currency? What could it ever be used for,” I managed to produce by the sound of the friction of my only two brain cells rubbing against one another. It is a deflationary currency, so it’s both an asset and a currency. It will only ever appreciate, it is foolish not to invest in it, and in the future we will develop use cases for it once central currencies are no more.
But I did not share that vision, and I wasn’t convinced that decentralization was really the main feature. Knowing myself a decent bit, I did not think myself a fool; despite all available evidence to the contrary I still don’t. I thought Joe was the fool, and that crypto was a ponzi scheme, and I wrapped up that line of thought like a bow and called it a conclusion
For eight years I’ve dismissed Joe as just a tool, and cryptocurrency as just a playground for scammers. And then I had my bolt of revelation, and like the poetaster in Joanna Newsome’s Inflammatory Writ wrote in hunch to the small hours of the night to describe my shift in perspective:
I imagined Joe standing in the center of a museum, taking his turn with the other crypto true believers to behold and consider the masterpiece at its center, like a penitent visitor clasping his hands behind his back in reverence on the floor of the Louvre. I imagined the object of Joe’s attention as cryptocurrency itself, a sculpture of unthinkable size and heft but crafted to look almost delicate.
There it stands, like a modern David. An intricate interweaving of metal tendrils forming a lattice-structure, 40 feet high, every square inch of its surface composed of fractal intertwinings of non-repeating complexity. The lattice itself is over 178 miles of steel alloy tubing no more than a half centimeter wide, its serpentine interweavings together composing the requisite amount of overlap to make the structure the perfect amount shy of opacity to leave exposed perforations, allowing some of God’s light to pass through. The sheer difficulty of its composition is its point. Material scientists and technologists and professional appreciators can get as close as they like to it, can take in the realness of its genius, and with minds that know how hard it is to build such a promethean work affirm with no lack of certainty that yes, it is indeed genius. Nevermind that on approach to the piece its shape and form is apparent to the most uninformed layman: It is a massive cock. It is cryptocurrency. It is a massive, veiny, throbbing cock, and it taunts and degrades its observer, daring anyone who sees it to say “that’s a fucking dick” and risk being labeled a fool who can’t see the emperor’s clothes, who doesn’t understand the impossibility of its artfulness.
Artfulness.
That’s when it hit me. It’s not a currency, nor is it an asset, or a technology, or fraud incarnate — it’s art. What else has no use value, but is valued for its own sake? What else has its value change ephemerally, ethereally even, as sentiment changes around it? What else could be bought and sold and bought again and transported to a place of honor in the habitus of a connoisseur then left to sit and only at times be considered other than a work of art?
I felt the hate and tension leave me. Cryptocurrency was never an actual currency — it’s so obvious now — it is a statement about currency, and about value, and about all the delicately fake but stolidly real ideas we depend on to undergird a stable global society. It’s complex, and intricately beautiful, and in its throbbing heart an insidious insult to the very worst of our human nature. The genius of it is that those who naively invest in crypto, and those who do so cynically, and those who do so earnestly, and those who do so evangelically, along with those of us who just don’t get it — we’re a part of the piece.
And for a moment following the revelation I felt again a feeling that I’m all too familiar with: that I missed the boat in refusing to ever buy any of it. But then I thought something else...
(No, not that it’s not too late to get in. My nature is to commit this error again and again, and I accept that about myself.)
What I thought was this: Why regret? I’m not resigning myself to a lifetime of considering the cock. I have considered it in its time, and though I did not find it beautiful, the real and fleeting beauty was in the consideration of it. I wouldn’t want to soil the world’s most fractally meta piece of art ever devised by capitalizing on it, not staking out my position due to some virtuous temperance but because it simply is not my role to play in the grand sweep of its performance.
Like a shadow I have strutted and fretted my brief hour upon the stage, and on this matter you will hear me no more.
Stout Cortez is the pen name for a technology-agnostic software engineer and Tangle admirer in his late 30s. He hopes that he has connected with you — the cherished reader — without being overly crass.