You’ve Got Better Things to Do with Your Money

I’m going to take some steel discs, slugs – you know, the kind you find in electrical outlet boxes – stamp HarCoin on them plus my profile, and sell them at auction. I will call them HarCoins.

I’m going to number them serially through an RFD chip that will be embedded in the slug. If tampered with it destroys the coin – making it worthless. Like Bitcoins I will only make 21,000,000 of them. I’m keeping 1,000,000 of them as my seigniorage fee. I’ll sell 2,000,000 HarCoins each year until they are gone. 

I will have a website where you can buy and sell coins at auction on my site. I suggest you hold on to them and see what the market does. If you want, I can store them for you and when you sell them, you don’t have to ship them, you can just change ownership to your buyer. 

You know these babies are going to go up in value. Why not? The Dogecoin did (see below).

HarCoins beat the hell out of Bitcoins. They are not some algorithmic software ephemera: they are real, physical things. You can hold them and admire them. You can carry them around in your pocket and show them to your friends (not recommended). Or you can just sit back and watch the price skyrocket on the HarCoin website. Unlike those Bitcoin storage companies, the HarCoin can’t be hacked and stolen. Plan that trip to Bali. Buy your kids a house. 

Not a bad idea, hey?

Don’t mock me: other than cryptocurrencies being a figment of code versus my physical HarCoin, there is little difference. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. Ditto the HarCoin. 

The Bitcoin was developed by a mysterious, still anonymous programmer. Its program is called blockchain technology which stores data (in bits and bytes) on a distributed ledger. That means that the data comprising the “coin” is carried on many computers in the blockchain world. The coin algorithm is unbreakable and unchangeable. You have the only ownership “key” to your coin and are the only one that can access it. If you lose the key, you are SOL.

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoins go up in value because buyers think they will go up in value. In other words, they are total speculations which rise and fall on the whim of buyers’ belief that they will go up in value. Stocks at least give you a piece of a company. If they make money, their stock goes up. Cryptos, including Bitcoin, don’t do anything. Except maybe for illegal purposes on the Dark Web (e.g., the infamous Silk Road).

There are lots of cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin. According to Coinbase there are 8,509 of them traded on their platform. The famous Dogecoin was created to make fun of cryptos. It was a “meme coin” (their logo was a dog). It got as high as 54¢ in 2021 and now trades at about 9¢ with a market cap of $11 billion! 

I think the explosion of Bitcoin prices in 2020-2021 was due to the Fed’s money “printing” to pay for all the massive government spending during the pandemic. The Fed’s assets grew from $4.1 trillion to almost $9 trillion in about 24 months, an unprecedented increase in new money. That signaled speculators that inflation was sure to follow. Bitcoins had traded at “modest” values until then when prices skyrocketed to $66,000 during the Fed’s splurge. Bitcoin prices collapsed in 2022 to about $16,000 when the Fed slowed their money expansion. Price stability isn’t a Bitcoin strong point. (See image on page 14)

Bitcoin prices have recovered to about $42,000 per coin since. The reason, as its believers predicted; inflation lifted its ugly head and speculators believed that Bitcoins could be an inflation hedge. That seems to be a hefty price for something that doesn’t do anything. Whatever you wish to believe, Bitcoins aren’t an investment, they are a pure speculation.

As Lord Overstone said, “No warning can save people determined to grow suddenly rich.”

As P. T. Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

My suggestion: if you really want something for nothing, buy HarCoins.