The Semiquincentennial is coming

Don't let crypto grifters take your precious

That unpronounceable name means half of 500 and it’s also the name of the party we’re going to throw in a couple years when Merica turns 250 years old.

The Bicentennial (celebrating 200 years of Merica in 1976) hit during a family road trip and my dad explained to me what all the fuss was about. My dad got his degree in History and he was excited about the Bicentennial. He also liked some coins in his pocket. The US Mint made commemorative Bicentennial quarters dated 1776-1976 and from that day forward my dad saved every one he got.

When we cleared out my dad’s safe deposit box it was HEAVY. We found 40 rolls of bicentennial quarters in the bottom. There are 40 quarters in a roll or $10 apiece and a couple of rolls weigh a pound. 1600 quarters, $400 bucks, 20 pounds. 50 years later and they’re still worth 400 bucks, not a penny more. I’m betting they skyrocket in value for the Semiquincentennial and then we buy a bunch of bitcoin and get rich.

Peggy is skeptical

Twenty pounds of quarters was too much for my backpack on the plane ride home so my kids and nephews all grabbed a few rolls. If we’d emptied them all out we couldn’t have dove in them like Scrooge McDuck.

Ten rolls surrounded by a bunch of other coins from my dads stash. Huey, Dewy and Louie Duck don’t know what to do.

My dad collected coins, my mom collected stamps, Peggy collects records, I collect comic books, our kids collect baseball cards. If you collect something, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Humans have been making coins for over 2,500 years. Here’s another treasure we found in the safe deposit box; at 250 years old this Austrian coin is older than the United States.¹

Aside from the Maria Theresa Thaler coin around my neck - which is very cool - coins now are annoying. There just isn’t much you can buy with them. I used to keep a bunch of quarters in my car for parking meters but now I use an app or card for that like everything else.

Chunky Nickels, tiny Dimes and Pennies. Pennies may be the downfall of American civilization. You need them to make change yet there is nothing to spend them on so they live rent free in your house filling jars and cans and bottles gathering dust. We keep minting more and more and now it costs three pennies to make one new penny and we have enough of them in circulation to give a few to every single human that ever lived on this planet. If you’d like to go deeper down the Penny rabbit hole, here’s a ticket:

American Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny

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Watch out, here comes the crypto. Yes I’m fascinated by crypto. I was originally drawn in by the antics of the cult of grifters it minted. Thank you my Substack brother

Andrew Smith

for reminding me of this fun word (just wait, the graft is coming).

Molly White rose to fame mocking crypto bros and she maintains the ultimate crypto grift list at Web3 is Going Just Great.

After the spectacular fall of Sam Bankman Fried and his crypto exchange FTX (see Crypto boy is going to jail) a bit of hot air wheezed out of the crypto bubble. SBF was sentenced to 25 years in jail for fraud. His cronies are back in the news as his ex-girlfriend/CFO and government star witness Caroline Ellison was sentenced to 2 years in jail while fellow exec Ryan Salame got 7.5 years.

Binance, the only crypto exchange larger than FTX before its collapse, took less of a hit, but their CEO had to resign, pleading guilty to fraud. His name is Changpeng Zhao and he got 4 months of jail time and a fine of $4.3 Billion dollars. Billion. Changpeng shrugged off the fine.

The amount of money flying around in crypto is mind boggling. I think that’s why I can’t look away. Something big is going on and it’s here to stay. Crypto PACs are spending big across political races in a coordinated campaign get regulators to leave them alone. Molly created a new site that tracks crypto graft: Follow the Crypto.

Donald Trump recently endorsed crypto, after initially dismissing it, including a new crypto token. Fuckery is afoot: World Liberty Financial Scam. More from Molly’s newsletter here: Issue 65 – World Liberty Fiasco

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The tech behind crypto is solid. There is a bigger lesson here. Tech may be impartial, but beware the grifters. Social media is another unintended consequence of tech. AI? Hmmm could be, we’ll see.

Crypto isn’t going away, so here are two things to know:

1. Blockchain

2. Bitcoin

Blockchain is a digital ledger of transactions. It’s a special purpose database. Each transaction is stored in a block that has a persistent link to the prior block. Blockchain is decentralized, meaning it’s available to anyone with access. It is immutable, meaning once a block is written, it cannot be changed. It uses a cryptographic techniques to ensure immutability including hashing where a digital fingerprint of each transaction and block is created that will no longer match if the data is changed in any way. Blockchain is used in voting and healthcare - anywhere you need to track critical discrete events.

For crypto, blockchain creates a decentralized, trusted way to maintain financial transactions. Today we use a lot of banks and governments for that. Do we need them? They sure think so.

Bitcoin was the first implementation of blockchain. The first ‘gensis block’ was created 15 years ago. Bitcoin’s origin is myth, created by a mysterious person or group named Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi disappeared one year after he/she/they created bitcoin.

You can read Satoshi’s original white paper stating a simple intent of more efficient financial transactions as well as the cryptographic techniques at bitcoin.org. You can also browse the bitcoin blockchain there. Since the tech is open to all, over 10,000 crypto tokens have sprung up since then. Most are worthless; bring on the dancing grifters.

Logo created by Satoshi Nakamoto and placed in the public domain

While most crypto tokens are junk (at this point we know the grift), bitcoin keeps going up. You can’t buy much with it, so it’s a collectible just like my dad’s quarters. Supply and demand and Satoshi made sure the supply would be limited - no more than 21 million bitcoins can ever be created. So the demand is increasing. A single bitcoin is worth about $60,000 today, up 3X since the SBF debacle. What’s gunna happen to it all!?

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Regardless, you can’t jingle bitcoin in your pocket or roll it across your fingers or stick one on your elbow and flip it around and catch in your hand. The US is minting six new quarters for the Semiquincentennial and a commemorative dollar coin to boot and you bet I’ll be saving every one I get.

1. This is a Maria Theresa Thaler Austrian coin minted sometime between 1741 and 1780. Maria was the only female ruler of in the House of Habsburg. She ruled Austria, Hungary and Bohemia at the age of 23. The MTT became a universal silver currency across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India with over 500 million minted.