While enjoying the last week off we’ll get before the last exam week of this term, I’ve run into a phenomenon that seems to have popped up in my social circle during the previous lockdowns. As a Dutch citizen, I’ve been fulfilling my civic duty by drinking beer on terraces at 12 AM, whatever the circumstances. Now that it’s possible to (legally) meet with friends again, I’ve tried reconnecting with people I haven’t seen as much as I ought to. At nearly half the nights I’ve spent drinking socialising  somebody would eventually bring up their trading app and suddenly start talking about the recent surge in Bitcoin, and whether they should invest their growing student loans into a cryptocurrency based on a meme dog.

I think Simmel missed one essential type when thinking of the respective social types; the crypto preacher has become a common fixture of life in the 21^st century and should therefore be given the attention it deserves. The crypto preacher seems to be the modern equivalent of a vampire. They only appear when the circumstances are just right, ready to strike and grow their congregation. They represent a church that pretends to print money. Their congregation is misled by sermons filled with showy, colourful graphs with lots of numbers that seem to mean things. This evangelist is tenacious and will not give up if you try ignore them. They will keep bringing it up until you give in, and finally buy some bitcoin.

So, naturally I did. While giving myself the excuse that I was using this as a way of engaging in ethnographic research among a newly found phenomenon. My father has always told me that trading shares is just a fancy way of gambling and that I shouldn’t trust anybody who pretends to know what’s going on. With this advice in mind, I was baptized into the church of cryptology and spent €100,- of my beloved loans from Uncle Duo on 0,002 Bitcoin. I have no idea what I’ve gotten myself into, but if I suddenly start talking about some weird crypto bullshit to you at two in the morning, you know to end the conversation and avoid me until I’m sober and broke again.
P.S.
Did you know that Etherium has spiked in the last twelve hours and has been on aa steady rise for the past month?
P. P.S.
While it should be obvious at this point, I do not know what I’m talking about and this is not financial advice. Only invest what you can afford to lose, and maybe do something more productive with your time than the bullshit that I’ve gotten myself into.