I almost hesitate to write the name out of sheer exhaustion at its ubiquity—but, deep breath, here it goes: cryptocurrency. Are you as sick of hearing about it as I was just a few weeks ago, when explanations of it—usually centered around Bitcoin—along with breathless narratives of its life-changing, bank-account-invigorating wonderments, popped up everywhere I turned in my news reading, my Twitter-feed scrolls, and my newspaper lifestyle trend pieces? When one of my best friends started ranting and raving about the entire “blockchain revolution” and his recent decision to toss some money into Bitcoin (which had, yes, gone from $900-something at the beginning of last year to around $20,000 toward the end of the year; as of this writing, it hovers around $11,000), I vented my rage at the entire puffed-up concept by demanding he explain to me what sort of hectic nonsense this entire scheme amounted to.

Guess what? It’s not that complicated. But yes, right about now seems an apt time for an all-important notice to my dear readers: You’re about to read financial advice from someone who until a week or two ago had, in the entirety of his life—aside from some fairly rote 401(k) behavior—invested in the stock market exactly once. When I was 13, a business-savvy family friend mentioned something about Chrysler staking their bottom line on a new kind of car; if it worked, he said, the company’s stock might skyrocket; if it failed, obviously, the company was finished. Somehow, I managed to buy a handful of shares of the stock at around $3—which I then sold around the time the stock peaked a few months later somewhere around $16 or $18, netting myself a handy hundred bucks or so along with the right to pat myself on my greenhorn greed-is-good back. But having once ridden the white lightning with such blistering success, I thought, Why not quit while I was ahead?

Understanding crypto, though, is simple—with a little help from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s perpetually useful willing suspension of disbelief. You don’t have to read the myriad stories and posts and think pieces about how to understand crypto, or Bitcoin, or the coming transformation of our entire way of doing everything: They’re generally overly complicated and, perhaps more importantly, just not that much fun. Can I explain to you exactly how blockchain technology—the DNA of crypto, if you will—works? Of course not. I can tell you that it works something like this: Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies basically record every transaction and distribute the records of these transactions equally to all parties involved. Every now and again a “block” of these transactions is verified and essentially sealed up and stacked on top of the last block, creating a chain.

In the cryptocurrency world, these “transactions” are users buying and selling different cryptocurrencies, usually in the form of virtual “coins.” (Some of the more well-known ones: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin.) When people talk about the “blockchain revolution,” they’re generally noting that the blockchain can be used for secure transactions of almost any type: storing and moving birth certificates, votes, insurance claims, whatever. The revolution I’m concerned with most presently, though, is the one about to take place in my bank account.