Journey of the 十八coin
don't forget to bring your towel, Montressor
… we enter the scene in medias res.
What is Shiba Inu?
Shiba Inu is similar to and a competitor to Bitcoin, currently valued at a trillion dollars. It is up 777% in the past 30 days.
Great. I’m sold. How do I buy it?
Coinbase.
Unfortunately, I’m locked out of my Coinbase account. Despite their website offering two-factor authentication, once I log in I am only authorized to do their Know Your Customer workflow, and that server is down. Guess I can’t buy SHIB.
Surely there’s a competitor to Coinbase?
Robin Hood will sell you ETH.
Surely you’re joking, Friar Tuck.
I am joking. After struggling at Coinbase (which is down globally) I went to Robinhood and bought Bitcoin at the market rate. It should do better than my bet on Silver did.
Great. Now you can withdraw it and … why are you giving me that look.
There are no crypto withdrawals. Or deposits. From the website: “At this time, we don't have the functionality to allow customers to transfer their cryptocurrency assets into or out of their Robinhood Crypto account, but we’re currently working on providing those abilities for supported cryptocurrencies.”
Really? Are they a bucket shop?
They’re a publicly traded company. The government used to check things like that …
Eventually, I find my way to Gemini. After being swindled out of one company by Mark Zuckerberg, the Winklevii have founded a second one. I assume that for their third act, they will run for President of the United States, just as soon as all that Donald Trump nonsense wears off and they agree on who has to be veep first.
I buy $1000 of bitcoin and $1000 of ETH. I don’t plan to hold the bitcoin, so I don’t care about the price. What I want is SUSHICOIN … no, SHIBACOIN.
Quite reasonably, Gemini expects my original bank transfer to clear before sending me the untraceable Bitcoin. A Plaid Guarantee was enough to get them to accept the market-maker risk, but not the counter-party risk.
I leave the journey somewhat earlier than planned; clearly the universe does not want me to buy SHIBA with US dollars today. Perhaps in part two I will become a Doggy Billionaire, and become subject to Joe Biden’s Wealth Tax. Perhaps I will avoid one of the most litigious incidents of the 21st century.
Or perhaps I will find my way to the dark side of the Crypto Market. The UNREGULATED market.