Yeah, you read that right, there are meant to be two 'Not's in the title. We spent quite a bit of our time at Tuttle this morning trying to not talk about bitcoin, about the price, about the people, about cryptocurrencies in general, because really, that's why we're not working in one of the investment banks upstairs, we don't want to talk about money all day.
But it's really got it's claws in.
The soap opera of ups and downs is irresistable. And interpretation is everything. You might think the Bitcoin price has been on a roller coaster for the last few days, well yes, but that just shows up as whiskers in the daily chart shown above - yes it closed down a little on Wednesday but since then back to the up and up, at least on a 1-day basis. You see! How easy it is to slip back into casual chatter about the chart and oh my, isn't it exciting. And yet, no, really, it's not, it's what we choose to do with it that really matters. If all there is in this is watching numbers on a screen go up and down, and hope that mostly they'll go up and get emotionally charged when they go down then we might as well be playing the established forex or stock markets.
Where's the freedom, the expression, the humanity in all this?
So we tried. But we failed. And then we tried again. And got a little relief by talking about stupid other people who were mesmerised by other stupid cryptocurrencies. But ultimately we realised we were still doing it, we'd failed again.
So we walked out into the cold, December air and wondered whether it might snow.