Category: Memories

Poor Man’s Bitcoin

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

The communism withdrew from Bulgaria in 1989 and when the political police became unemployed, all sort of weird new things popped up to fill the gap. Grocery stores and supermarkets. New TV channels. More than one kind of ice cream. Fortune tellers. Horoscopes. Insurance racket. Chainmail too – you rewrite this letter 5 times and put it in 5 mailboxes and you’ll live a long and happy life. You don’t and you’ll die in pain. Multiple testimonials included.

One kind of chain mail had a price tag and wasn’t supposed to work, but worked for a while. Let’s call it The Poor Man’s Bitcoin. Here is roughly how it worked, excuse my faint memories for any inaccuracies.

There’s a sheet of paper, cut from a notebook, handwritten by a person who we can call “The Seller”. That sheet of paper contains the rules of the chainmail and 6 home addresses or PO boxes. Rules are as follows:

  • You need to send 2 Leva to the last 5 people in the chain, and also 2 Leva to the person who invented it (the number varied)
  • The way you prepare new copies is by rewriting the sheet and filling your name at the bottom of the list of 5 people in the chain, removing the first one
  • It contains terrible curses that will reach you if you violate the rules, sell more or less than 5 sheets of paper, or don’t mail money to the people in the chain
  • In order to get your money back, you need to temporarily become “The Seller”.

If you follow the rules closely, you should quickly get your money back – just find 5 people to buy your sheet of paper and letters with money would start flowing. Does it sound familiar?

  • It inflated algorithmically
  • Its intrinsic value was zero
  • The only things that kept it living for some time were people’s feelings and beliefs, mostly greed and fear of missing out
  • Some people loved it and were willing to fight that they’ll become rich once they get back their thousands of letters
  • It worked because people didn’t really understand how it works and look past the first 5 or 25 people who would give them money
  • Each transaction benefitted the author of the scheme + the regular system that guaranteed money transfer (the post)
  • Everyone could start their own chain letter

Once most of us were exposed to it, the number of letters turned out to be disappointing, and most people realized that these curses that guarantee the distribution don’t work, it vanished to be replaced years later by lottery tickets. Same feelings but no need to be able to write.

I find it amusing that so many people consider Bitcoin a form of investment while it’s pretty much like the chainmail from the 90s. At least this is how I see things. I do not understand how it works.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

On Forgetting Books

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

There’s a common wisdom that partners only do their best until they get married. This might be true or not but I’ve noticed similar things in various areas – diets, sport, alcohol consumption. An injury, a stressful situation, or just a long series of small transgressions and we are back to our worse selves but less hopeful. I think some of that is happening to my efforts to learn about Psychology and Marketing.

Yesterday I finished a book, called “To Sell is Human” by Daniel Pink. It covered areas of which I expected to be knowledgeable – engaging in conversations, noticing communication failures, active listening. The book is citing many others I’ve already read and even a research I’ve been aware of. Many takeaways, however, felt new. I checked my notes from “Verbal Judo” and “Crucial Conversations”. It was eye-opening. It felt like I forgot much of the content without ever using it. Then I checked a couple of other related books I read 2-3 years ago – I had no notes whatsoever.

Dale Carnegie suggested somewhere [citation needed] that his “How to Win Friends and Influence People” needs to be re-read, and I think also in another book suggested a slow pace of reading (no more than 1 chapter per day). All of that is so that the information sticks. The goal of reading non-fiction, after all, is not filling my home with books but learning skills and becoming a better human. Re-reading sounds a bit too much for me but read and forget is not a good strategy either (well, maybe it is, for “A Song of Fire and Ice”).

Here is what I plan to do:

– Write notes and keep highlights when I read non-fiction and self-help
– Write resumes with key takeaways so that I can go back and remind myself what was it all about when I need it.

I hope this makes my new year in reading more productive.