The first thing I found out? This is the closest thing in finance to riding an angry bull at the rodeo. The value of a single Bitcoin has gone as high as $1,200 and plummeted on bad news for the currency, like theft through hacking, to less than half of that. So caveat investor, says the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra. Those spoilsports put out an alert warning investors that it could be “more than a bit risky” to buy and sell Bitcoin because of all that volatility, and that there was a potential for fraud in dealing with some of the companies that say they are involved in the Bitcoin world. Bracing!

Wouldn’t you know it? The bureaucrats are circling.

The Internal Revenue Service has been looking at Bitcoin too, and with something of a gimlet eye. It recently tried to get a fix on just what Bitcoin is, because commerce is the sort of thing that the I.R.S. likes to get a piece of.

On March 25, the friendly fellas at the tax office took a stab at telling us what Bitcoin, and other virtual currency, is. The answer, roughly, is that it’s more like property than currency — and, by the way, you do need to pay taxes on your Bitcoin transactions.

Does that sound like paperwork and trouble? Well, you might say that, and news of the potentially burdensome ruling drove the cost of a Bitcoin to below $500. But many people took the news as a move forward for the legitimacy of the currency, or investment, or whatever the heck it is.

To be fair, something whose value bobs and weaves this way does sound more like an investment than a currency. In fact, it sounds like many investments I’ve made in my proven track record of buying high and selling low. It’s a gift.