I bought a Bitcoin. How could I not? I’d been hearing about it for years, which isn’t to say I remotely understood what it was. What I did know was more than enough to lure me in: that it was being hailed as the Way of the Future by some of the young lions of the investment world, who saw it as a natural next step in the evolution of money. I’d seen the story about the Norwegian man who bought $27 worth of bitcoin, and then found out, years later, that it was worth $886,000 and change. And the one about the Welsh IT worker who threw out a hard drive, forgetting that it contained the equivalent of $7.5 million. Today it resides somewhere in the Newport landfill site.

Make-believe amounts of money, sky’s the limit, no labor? This was precisely the sort of commonsense investment I’d been looking for. I’d watched the new crypto-currency as it charted from a ha’penny to a fortune. Bitcoin was real. But what would this strange, shimmering future look like? How would it feel to spend a bitcoin?

I logged on to Coinbase.com and entered my account information. Then I waited. For a week. During the time it took for my money to crawl through the financial system, Shawshank-style, and come out clean on the other side, the value of Bitcoin had begun a steady decline from its four-figure peak and settled, for a while, in the mid-$800s. Though I’d first tried to buy bitcoin while it was selling for $1,042, I wasn’t actually able to complete the purchase until it had dropped to $834. It all felt aptly symbolic: My New World money needed to rise out of the Old one’s poky, cobwebbed structures.

I wanted to spend my bitcoin immediately, that very night, but I was at a loss. What did people actually do with bitcoin? Clearly I needed a spirit guide, someone who would impart wisdom but who would also provide some idiot-level tech support. In my estimation, that would have to be Charlie Shrem, the 24-year-old Bitcoin millionaire who prided himself on being an "evangelist" for the new virtual money.

Two years earlier, Charlie had started a company, BitInstant, one of the first and most visible at handling bitcoin transactions. I first met him at EVR, the bar he invested in on West 39th Street in Manhattan. It was one of the few in town that accepted bitcoin.

I liked Charlie Shrem from the moment we met, with his winning smile and the improbable five-o’clock-next-Tuesday shadow on his chin. There was a nervous, distracted charisma about him. He rarely laughed, but just beneath that serious veneer, he was affable and smart. And distinct from the thousands of words I’d read and heard about Bitcoin, Charlie didn’t drag me through computer code or diagram the cryptographic innovations of the new currency. He didn’t go all A Beautiful Mind on me, because I assured him that I was never gonna comprehend the technical depths of Bitcoin. So, for my benefit, he used big, primary-color analogies, and for the first time, I understood the larger role this new money could have, the niche in the financial market that it had been created to fill.

"Bitcoin is two things!" Charlie explained, abruptly raising his voice. "There’s lowercase bitcoin and uppercase Bitcoin. It’s both the currency you send and the means by which you send it. While banks, PayPal, and Western Union are all the things that help move money around the world—the finance system—Bitcoin is both blood and vein. It’s not only the payment system of transfer: It’s also the unit of value being transferred across the system."