Gold hit $5,300 this week and I do not understand why anyone would be excited about this. It is a rock. You cannot stake it. It does not have a whitepaper. My portfolio has outperformed gold for three of the last seven years and I do not see boomers writing opinion pieces about that.

Then my exchange froze withdrawals for 72 hours due to what they described as "liquidity optimization." I could see my money. I could not touch my money. I began to think about what it means to own something.

My father-in-law has gold coins. He showed them to me once. I asked him where he keeps his seed phrase and he said he does not have one. He said the coins are in a safe. I asked what happens if he forgets the password and he said "it's a combination," and then he said he would call a locksmith. I did not know what to do with this information.

I have been doing research. Gold does not require an internet connection. Gold has no terms of service. When the gold market is down, no one writes a post-mortem about what the gold developers could have done differently, because there are no gold developers. Gold shipped finished.

I started a spreadsheet comparing the two assets. Scarcity: both. Decentralization: I wrote "no" for gold and then erased it. Trustless: I wrote "no" for gold and then erased it. I have been staring at two empty cells for two hours.

I bought a gold coin yesterday. I can hold it in my hand without connecting to anything. No one can push an update to this coin. No one can vote to change what this coin is. The gold in this coin has been gold for longer than life has existed on Earth, and it will still be gold when I am dead.

I think gold is decentralized. I think gold has been decentralized this entire time. I think we invented cryptocurrency to do what a rock was already doing and I do not know how to process this.

What if I wasted six years learning financial innovation when I could have simply bought a heavy yellow rock?

I am not taking questions.