Just remember the password people!

I have some tricks for doing this, which I have scrawled in the inner part of the margin of the manuscript.  Here is Matt Levine on Bitcoin:

I half-joked yesterday that “perhaps the cost of bitcoin storage — keeping your private key in a vault, worrying about hackers, etc. — is so high that arbitrageurs need to charge $1,000 for a month of it,” but maybe it’s the right explanation? Everything I read about bitcoin storage is utterly exhausting. “A private key printed out on a sheet of paper, cut into pieces, and distributed among family members who don’t know how to put it back together; an encrypted file loaded on a USB stick and buried in the backyard; a password committed only to memory;” a private key engraved on a metal plate and stored in a safe; a safe deposit box at a bank; an account at an exchange that gets hacked and loses its customers’ bitcoins. Buying bitcoin futures is a way to get exposure to bitcoin and avoid the bitcoin-storage problem: You never have to store bitcoins because you never own bitcoins; you just get paid dollars for the amount that bitcoin goes up. But the storage problem doesn’t go away; you just offload it to the arbitrageur who provides you the bitcoin exposure. Maybe the arbitrageur needs to charge you $1,000 to cover her storage costs. If you think these markets are efficient, then the gap between the futures and the spot is telling you how much — in out-of-pocket expenses, in theft risk, in psychic pain — it costs to store bitcoin.

Here is more from Matt:

If I told you that there was an asset that is an excellent store of value even in inflationary conditions, how much of your gold portfolio would you reallocate to that asset? One percent? Three percent? Fifty percent? All of it? Sure, whatever, if you believed me. But we are just assuming that bitcoin actually fulfills that function, in order to decide its valuation. Bitcoin has had a pretty good run, but so far it’s a short one; there’s no historical experience of bitcoin retaining its value in periods of global financial crisis or rich-world inflation or even just, you know, people not talking about bitcoin for a minute. So far the evidence that bitcoin is a good store of value consists of the fact that bitcoin’s price keeps going up. That is not bad evidence! But it is not a ton of evidence to build a store-of-value valuation around.

If Matt told me, I would allocate at least two percent.

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