So I talked to a financial planner a few weeks ago. Wanted to chat about profit taking and moving my investments into hedges. Knew this guy from 2011 when some of our (rich) friends advocated we talk to him about our finances. In 2011? We were too poor and not worth our time. In 2018?

Our money came from crypto and therefore they wouldn't work with us on principle.

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It's remarkable to me the amount of irrational hatred the traditional financial community has for cryptocurrency. If you told them that Amazon stock could go to $200 over the next week they'd talk about shorting it, the bang-on effects on other stocks, what it would do to the Dow, what it would do to bond yields, etc. If you tell them Bitcoin could go to $2000 next week they say "good riddance" and refuse to even discuss tertiary effects. There's this giant $400b ($800b last month) hole in their thinking that they prop up with self-righteousness.

And yet.

Knight, the software salesman, figured that cryptocurrency was worth a gamble because he saw no better way to rapidly improve his life. He enjoyed his job — his company ranked him as one of the top sales representatives in the region — but he was with his fourth employer in a decade, and the pay, about $90,000 per year, left him feeling stuck in place. He had a wife and two children. He was only slowly saving for retirement. Unlike his father, he did not have a pension.

That's my light reading of the moment. It has the same themes of any finance book that looks at ordinary humans: the little guy is fucked. And crypto, from everyone I talk to, represents many things that traditional securities do not:

1) A chance to stick it to the man

2) A chance to participate in something revolutionary

3) A chance to feel the adrenaline rush of gambling

4) A chance to believe in an alternative to the current system

And it amazes me that everybody who actually works with money for a living just spits "tulip crisis!" and walks away as fast as their Mephistos can carry them.