Poetry

pixabay image

By

Emily Madapusi Pera

On the Cryptocurrency Bubble

Why is stupid stupid?

Assuming it would blow over, we could be busy

improving our lives.

Collective insanity:

A gold rush of irrational,

whether or not we should all invest

in today’s version

of tulips.

Past performance we see

and want future results, hence:

beanie babies,

dotcoms,

rhodium,

Florida land,

baseball cards,

and Herbalife,

still a publicly traded company.

The next big thing a mania,

a lottery, dumb luck retrospected

as genius;

nifty, a newly innovative way

the blogging herds lead us

to lose money.

Why is stupid stupid?

Not just somebody’s hairdresser

on a morning show talking about their quick million –

but us who are mesmerized.

You can fool the software side

but protocols don’t trust;

value to society doesn’t breed

insta-millions;

human trust can’t be coded

and doesn’t exist after

all the various wallets have been hacked.

But I want to know:

Did she not like cutting hair?

and what now? – sitting on beaches

for the rest of one’s life?

A modern utopian vision:

reclining on white sand with laptop open,

instantly viewing your net worth,

sweating with hot sun and currency swings.

Why is stupid stupid?

Get-rich mining transactions

burn kilowatt hours of energy,

enough to grow food for planets,

or solve poverty.

Still we’re fooled by open-source virality

with no genuine underlying business,

only evangelism

for what the herd’s bought

and prays will go higher.

Back to hair cutting,

back to listening

to the small problems,

where millions aren’t at stake

but lives are.

Emily Madapusi Pera

Emily Madapusi Pera is a writer based in Providence, Rhode Island. She was nearly duped by the cryptocurrency bubble herself.