Money is life. For nearly every human being on the planet, it’s more important than children, mom, art, whatever. Technically, it’s a record of payment. It can be a currency, but it doesn’t need to be. For an abstract idea, both real and unreal, money is quite tangible. Money means your kids eat or go hungry. Money enables a bag of paper to be exchanged for a house full of appliances. Money can be sex. Money can be murder. Say “money” three times fast and it feels like a marble of vanilla ice cream rolling around on your tongue. And money is all kinds of emotional. It’s attached to self-worth, shame, and safety. The other morning I noticed my wallet had no more money in it, so I went to an ATM and a neurological reaction turned the feeling of ten pieces of paper in my hand into “happy,” “more relaxed,” “more secure,” all at once.

You may not know what money is, but you know what is money.

But now money’s changing, perhaps forever.

What is crypto? A couple years ago, crypto was the future, according to your cousin at Thanksgiving. It had something to do with Internet drugs in China? He couldn’t explain it very well; it sounded like another one of his schemes. But then, out of nowhere, crypto kind of was the future. Bitcoin bros the world over became millionaires. And then the bubble burst, everything went to hell, everyone consoled your cousin while breathing a sigh of relief, because crypto had disappeared, and none of you needed to figure out what the hell it had been. Only crypto didn’t disappear, it just went quiet. And this Thanksgiving, the evangelists will tell you it’s bigger, more relevant than ever, only they’re not just your cousin anymore. They’re the People’s Bank of China. They’re Mark Zuckerberg. Talking about crypto today is more like talking about the climate crisis. Forget real or unreal. It’s “how soon,” and “oh crap.”

Crypto is life. You just don’t know it yet.

The Rise and Rise of a Crypto King

Brian Kim is real, but that’s not his real name*. Kim immigrated to San Diego for graduate school in his early twenties. About a decade later, he is millennial in several ways that will be familiar to anyone watching recent sitcoms. He likes music and hanging out with friends. His parents have high expectations for him that he feels he does not quite fulfill. He doesn’t like his job and isn’t sure how it became his career, though it is lucrative: Kim is an elite academic coach with many clients who are wealthy, in some cases very, in a few cases ludicrously so, all of them quite happy to pay top dollar so their kids receive the best (legal) test prep that money can buy.

*In addition to providing this person with a pseudonym, certain identifying characteristics have also been changed.

Which is how Kim, by living in a small apartment (“very small”), minimizing his expenses, and subsisting on ramen packets for nearly a decade, managed to save a decent amount of money. And then suddenly become wealthy—very wealthy, even ludicrously so.

Kim heard about crypto from a friend I’ll call Derek*. “I think it was about 2013 or ’14,” Kim said. “[Derek] was like, ‘Hey, I’ve been looking into this and I really think maybe we should invest in some Bitcoin.’ ” Kim was intrigued, but he didn’t follow through. Like a lot of people, he’d heard about Bitcoin, the original crypto and still the OG, but it didn’t sound fully real. Then, in 2017, he tried buying some “altcoins.” An altcoin is essentially any cryptocurrency that isn’t Bitcoin; in October 2019, a database listed over three thousand of them. Some improve on Bitcoin’s core technology by offering more secrecy, or better security. Many are simply wannabes, copycats that inspire wildcat behavior, that get painted by the wide brush known as “shit-coin.” Still, some alts have outperformed Bitcoin itself; in 2017, a coin called XRP rose by 36,000 percent.