I watched the Super Bowl on Sunday.  I’m not normally a pro football fan (though I do faithfully watch Penn State football games).  But there’s something about the Super Bowl that I really enjoy.  It’s a purely American event.  I sit on the couch with my husband and eat pork rinds and pizza and chicken wings as we watch the game.  And when the game doesn’t hold my attention, the commercials generally do.  My personal favorite this year was the Doritos-loving Sloth.  But the thing that kept popping up in the ads this year was cryptocurrency.  I was stunned by the number of ads for both crypto and for places to store your crypto.  And it made me realize just how little I know about the topic.

I started in on research and was quickly in over my head.  The things I did gather is that there is the cryptocurrency itself (Bitcoin, Dogecoin, etc.) and the crypto wallets (Coinbase, Mycelium, etc.).  The currency that doesn’t physically exist is then stored in these wallets that don’t physically exist.  The whole thing is a bit unsettling to me.  There have been so many news stories about how crypto has been extraordinarily volatile.  So this is less like a savings account and more like an investment in the stock market.  Except even more volatile.  I’m normally not terribly conservative with my investment strategies, but crypto is not where I want my retirement funds to be invested.  I think if I were to venture into this world, I would not invest anything that I wasn’t prepared to lose altogether.  And that’s the same strategy I use for gambling (I like the nickel slots on rare occasion, as well as raffle and lottery tickets).  I go in prepared to lose.  It’s a form of entertainment rather than an investment.

I think the reason the crypto commercials left me feeling unsettled is because of the sheer number of those ads.  The last time I remember that many similarly-based Super Bowl ads was in 2000, for Super Bowl XXXIV.  Fourteen different tech companies (most of them no longer in existence) advertised during that Super Bowl, which is why it is still referred to as the Dot Com Super Bowl.  What makes this so unsettling for me is what happened just a few months later.  That is when the Dot Com Bubble burst.  A lot of people lost a LOT of money in the stock market that year.  A lot of tech companies lost significant value, and even more shuttered altogether. (Personally I breathed a huge sigh of relief that I had sold most of my investments in 1999 to put a down payment on a condo).

Cryptocurrency might be the way of the future.  Or it might not.  But right now, I’m looking at it more as a gamble than as an investment.