I am against clickbait, so the punchline is in the title, but I think this is a great real life example of the power of cryptocurrency.

It was a normal day in early November in 2016 when I met up with someone whom is a wizard at cryptocurrency for coffee and happend to live in the same city as me. A few friends and I were working to start a crypto company and they all lived outside of Kansas City. I met with them and had a really great conversation, and learned a lot about the platforms available and the technology. I left the coffee shop excited and driven to get to know more about crypto currency and how I could get involved. Little did I know the $15 I paid for the coffee would be the most eye opening part of that meeting.

One of the friends involved in this scrappy team is named Alex. He put together the coffee meeting and mentioned he would pay for the coffee as a thank you. $15 wasn’t a huge amount for me to spend for coffee, specially for a meeting where I learned so much. However we figured this would be a great opportunity to utilize cryptocurrency. We used the Coinbase app and he sent me $15 in bitcoin minus a small fee.

What was dramatic about this transaction was how easy it was. If you have spent any time researching crypto currency, there is a lot of scary language and articles that are technical and dense. Services like Coinbase are coming online rapidly that are making the transaction as simple as sending money to a friend via messaging services. I saw the transaction come through, had a little “woo hoo” moment and went on with my life.

Time went on. Bitcoin went up, Bitcoin went down. I am a software developer by trade, and between projects and exciting updates from Apple, I was distracted away from the crypto currency world and the project.

Then things started getting crazy. Our project started getting legs and the value of US dollar per Bitcoin started hitting all time highs. I started seeing this gif in my Reddit timeline frequently. This is a signal that Bitcoin is taking off.

To the moon!

I remembered that coffee money! I wondered what it was worth today. So on August 6th, 2017 at around midday I checked how much the bitcoin sent to me (0.02062366 BTC) was worth.

From $14.57 to $67.88 is a 365% increase on some money for coffee. Just let that sink in. What if you could go back and buy Apple stock? Google stock? Oh man, you would be rich! What if you could be Biff in Back to the Future and bet on the big game knowing the result! What if I told you that is happing right now? Try Googling “Bitcoin is dead” or “Bitcoin has peaked” and see how much it was worth. Now consider this, new tokens are being created for revolutionary services built on top of blockchain technology that allow you to “get in early” and benefit from the rise of a service. What if you were an early user of Facebook and knew it would blow up. What if you could buy a token that was tied to the success of Facebook, imagine what it would be worth now.

If I had gone to dinner instead of coffee and it cost $100 that bitcoin would be worth $465.90. That was just back in November! Only about 9 months prior to me writing this article. Something to consider next time you see a news story about crypto currency or have a friend who loves to talk your ear off about it.