My Friend Paulchen and the Magic Internet Money

My friend Paulchen—designer, meme scholar, generally one of the more switched-on people I know—has been on me about Bitcoin for years. Not aggressively, just persistently. The way you’d keep mentioning a mutual friend you’re certain someone would like if they gave them a real chance. Crypto isn’t a bubble. The blockchain is real. Litecoin and Ethereum are the future. Miss this window and I’ll spend the rest of my life explaining to people why I didn’t get in when I had the chance.

I haven’t put a single euro into any of it. Not because I’m certain it’ll collapse—I genuinely don’t know, and nobody does—but because I have a reflexive suspicion of anything where the pitch is fundamentally "get in before it’s too late." The moment a company adds "Bit," "Block," or "Coin" to its name and watches its valuation triple overnight, the signal has been lost. That’s not investment, it’s mass suggestion.

John Oliver dedicated an episode of Last Week Tonight to breaking the whole thing down—the mechanics of the blockchain, what cryptocurrency actually is and isn’t, the specific flavor of mania that surrounds it, and why intelligent people keep losing everything in it. It’s the clearest explainer I’ve encountered on the subject, partly because he doesn’t treat it as either a revolution or an obvious scam, but as both simultaneously. That ambiguity is probably the most honest position available.

Whether it prompts someone to liquidate their savings or simply confirms that the whole ecosystem is a fever dream expressed in spreadsheets, I can’t say. Paulchen would say the former. I’d say neither. But at least afterward the thing has an actual shape—which is more than most conversations about crypto ever manage.