34,000 Bitcoin millionaires have been wiped out. Shall we start a crowdfunder?

Oh dear, how sad, never mind

photo © 2024 Alistair Dabbs

Banks. Bastards, all of ’em. Yah boo sucks, right?

And yet everyone complains whenever a local branch of these detestable institutions is closed down. What is that all about? Some kind of cheeky-chirpy working-class “I ’ate ’em but them’s fam’ly, yer naah, lor luvva duck apples and stairs do us a lemon gor blimey Mary Poppins” stereotype?

“They may be bastards but they’re our bastards”?

Sort of. Not everything to do with banks is despicable. The big metal safe in a bank’s basement isn’t a bastard. Nor are any of those intrepid customer-facing men and women who are employed at the high street branches to fulfil the life-affirming role of holding a clipboard and saying “hello” when you walk in.

Nor are their equally indispensable colleagues who must derive their job satisfaction from roaming the lobby and apologising to every customer in turn for the fact that the automated paying-in machines don’t work. In fact, scratch that: here in France, they’ve dispensed with the helper goblins altogether. If the machines don’t work, so the gallic reasoning goes, then you cannot be using them correctement.

So at the least the traditional idea of a bank – thick walls, long queues, the passive-aggressive thumping of rubber stamps – isn’t necessarily a bastard. Just because it kept getting robbed by Paul Newman and Robert Redford doesn’t make it the baddie. High street bank branches feel like alien places to enter but at least you know what they’re for.

Even when they get closed down and you are forced to do your money stuff online via the worst examples of web coding known to humanity, you can find comfort in the knowledge that there is probably an ATM not too far away. You may not need any cash; just knowing an ATM still exists in the centre of town somewhere is enough to calm your nerves.

The part of banking that involves investments, futures, moving digits around the world, conjuring profits from nowhere, buggering up economies, paying big bonuses to those performing the worst – now that’s the bastard. Unreliable and untrustworthy.

Of course it is, and has always been. Money is just a self-induced con-trick for reasons of convenient exchange of goods. We have all bought into this idea, quite literally. It’s a flimsy house of cards built purely on bluff – not a great scenario but there it is. The current economic woes are largely the result on that bluff being called: your classic bursting of a bubble.

So is the craptocurrency bubble burst yet? Hah. This has been predicted for the last 15 years. It just inflates, deflates and reflates again. Why? Surely it’s obvious.

There was a BBC report that sticks in my mind, just a few short years after Satoshi Nakamoto emerged from the first mine with his hands covered in genesis-dust. The article quoted a professor at the London School of Economic who asserted that there was a correlation between the rise in Bitcoin exchange rate value and the number of Bitcoin stories appearing in the media.

How I wish someone would pay me to say stuff like that. “When something is relentlessly hyped, people get interested in it.” I could be a media guru, me.