Brother, can you spare a Crypto?

By Ted Potrikus

Back in the day, I’d go through the first dozen-or-so blank checks in our family checkbook at January’s beginning just to write in the digits applicable to our new calendar year.

Now, I’m not even sure I could find the checkbook.

New Year’s Day, in fact, I wanted to buy something I found online. I got to the ‘shopping cart’ part of the deal and was prepared to enter my credit card details, and then saw the option to send them my money through Apple Pay. I vaguely remembered setting up that particular option when I got an iPhone a couple of years ago, and I thought, “Hey, it’s 2022, I’ll try this newfangled way of paying.”

My phone vibrated with a bouncy little icon telling me to double-click to pay. I heard the immediate ‘ding’ of success and before I knew it had e-mail confirmation of my order and its promise of delivery within 24 hours.

This reminds me of that Bugs Bunny cartoon where he dashes off an order for earmuffs, tosses it in a mailbox, taps his foot for a few seconds, and then receives from a motorcycle courier the just-ordered ‘package for Bugs Bunny.’ He’s back on stage bedeviling his opera-singing nemesis before the chorus is over.

Convenient, yes — particularly because it spares me the memory test of recalling my password; dangerous, though, because double-clicking a button doesn’t render the feeling that I’ve actually spent any money. Unlike a paper check — which was a handwritten affirmation that this specific amount was coming out of our account. Or cash, which was (is) a tangible decline in the amount that once lived in my wallet. Or slipping the credit card into the little slot — at least that’s an active process that can (and should) bring the reminder that yes, I’m spending real money.

I suspect the day will come — soon — that I start looking for ways to use this nifty Apple Pay gadget. The added benefit here is that it will make me feel like I’m not a complete Luddite and remain open, my advancing years notwithstanding, to change.

That’s where it ends, though: at some point, Apple and its Internet variants might try to drag me into cryptocurrency, but I’m not having it. I can’t tell a Bitcoin from a Dogecoin from an Ethereum.

Google offered me a ‘list of the top 50 cryptocurrencies,’ and it confused me to no end.

I read further. It said something about using Crypto to buy my NFTs.

I’ve heard a lot about NFTs, and I’m big enough to admit that I have no idea what that means beyond that it’s a “non-fungible token.” My web search led me to a site called The Verge, which wrote this: “ … most NFTs are part of the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency, like bitcoin or dogecoin, but its blockchain also supports these NFTs, which store extra information that makes them work differently from, say, an ETH coin.”

They go on: “NFTs can really be anything digital (such as drawings, music), but a lot of the current excitement is around using the tech to sell digital art.”

This article did not clear things up. No amount of explanation will ever clear it up when I read that people (“investors”) are out there dropping millions of dollars (real ones, not the made-up ones) on things like the first Twitter tweet ever tweeted or an original digital thing that has been reproduced a few gazillion times through other digital platforms.

Then when I read that my friends in the environmental community are up-in-arms about mining and the amount of energy needed to mine the stuff needed to make cryptocurrency, I get all backwards on it because I thought it was just a digital thing so why, and what, are we mining?

Never say never, goes the adage, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that at no time will I use or understand all this NFT and crypto business. For you readers out there willing to take that bet, please know that I accept cash and personal checks only.