There was a pattern to conversations with friends and family over the Christmas holidays. It went something like this: “Are your kids buying bitcoin?” before moving on to: “Have they convinced you to invest?”
One relative who graduated from university two years ago and was hoping to work in the restaurant business was now in the “bitcoin business”. A friend heard another tell of the small fortune her 24-year-old had amassed in less than a year of cryptocurrency investing and immediately asked for the young man’s contacts.
There were also a few people I met who were still struggling to understand the fundamentals. What is bitcoin in the first place, they asked, and how does it relate to blockchain, the underlying decentralised technology? One person ventured that blockchain was the casino and bitcoin the chips — an apt description since investing in cryptocurrencies is very much like gambling.