Delingpole on Friday: My Litecoin Hell: or Why the Geeks will Inherit the Earth

This is the story of how I lost £100,000. Or £250,000. Or £1,000,000. Or God only knows the way Bitcoin and Litecoin are behaving at the moment. But whatever: I wanted to buy into Bitcoin and Litecoin much earlier than I managed and had I done so, I would have been able to buy a lot more of them for much, much less, and thus ended up a lot, lot richer….

And the reason I didn’t? Well have you ever tried buying XBT or LTC when you’re a) not a geek, b) you’ve never done it before and c) you live in a world where the entire banking regulatory system is perfectly useless at actually protecting you from bad shit but utterly ingenious at devising ever more complex ways to deny you access to the money in your bank account?

As a card-carrying member of all three categories I can tell you. It sucks.

Problem #1. My bank. Lloyds.

So there I am: good to go. Money in the account, gagging to be transferred into XBT or LTC as soon as possible. But there’s a problem: my home phone number has changed and I haven’t yet updated it on my online banking facility. So I can’t do a bank transfer because when the bank does an automatic ring back to check it’s me, I won’t be there to type in the confirmation code.

Still, should be easy enough to fix, right? Just type in my new phone number and….

Nope. Turns out if you want to change your phone number you have to wait THREE days before the bank can register it.

But this is stupid. I’m me. I’ve definitely got money in my account. I definitely, definitely want to buy some Bitcoin now. There’s bound to be a way round this – and there is, claims the online website. I just ring up telephone banking.

So I ring up telephone banking. They ask for my telephone banking code. “You mean my password, that I’ve been using for years?” No. My telephone banking code. “What telephone banking code? What’s wrong with my old password?” Sorry without my telephone banking code they can’t process any payments on the telephone. But it’s OK, if I put in my request now, they’ll have my code sent to me within three days.

Problem #2 Technology. So I go to the Litecoin website and download the software for my Litecoin Wallet but up comes the error message telling me it can’t be opened because it is from an “unidentified developer.” This, of course, means nothing to me. I am not a techie. That’s why I ring my tech guy for support.

My tech guy tries to explain: something to do with security settings. But I still don’t understand so he arranges to do a screenshare. Unfortunately there are some glitches with his laptop and I have to go out. Now it’s the weekend and I don’t want to hassle him over the weekend. It will have to wait till Monday.

Later I will work out that the money I have lost in this delay is far greater than the several thousands of pounds I have paid the tech guy in the last two years to be my tech guy. Grrr.

Problem #3 (I’m giving you the abbreviated version here. There are many more problems than just these three). How do you buy Litecoin by bank transfer? Answer: with enormous difficulty, as I find when I go on to some Litecoin forum or other, with lots of retro-looking typed communication (no fancy design) like in the old days before the internet properly took off. “What is this place? Is it like the Dark Web?” I type in. Someone else types: “Think we’ve got us a troll.” “No. I’m not a troll. I’m an English Literature graduate. I know this is hard for you techies to believe but there are actually people out in the real world who find this computery stuff very difficult.”

Anyway, I’m referred to a site called www.kraken.com – which claims to be able to sell Bitcoin and Litecoin for cash, until you read the small print and realise you have to “Get Verified.” This involves submitting bank statements, passport copies and such like, then waiting for hell to freeze over. (Which hell doesn’t by the way: that’s the whole point of the phrase. And so it is with Kraken’s verification procedure. One week on my application is still “processing.”

In the end I buy my LTC from Sef at Clickshop.com. It’s a bit scary, doing a bank transfer, to an internet address in exchange for magical fairy money. But Sef is as good as his word – and I’d recommend him. Within minutes of the bank transfer, my LTC are in my wallet. The next day I order a few more. Annoyingly – or perhaps vindicatingly if you’re a glass half full kind of person – the price has already gone up by 50 per cent.

What does all this mean?

1. Bitcoin and Litecoin and the other crypto-currencies have the potential to go a lot, lot higher once they become useable by and comprehensible to people outside the world of tech, Austrian economics and survivalist nutcasery.

2. The geeks shall inherit the earth. (Not that we hadn’t guessed this already)

3. Cryptocurrencies are the inevitable, honest response to a world so crippled by red tape and rigged markets that it has all but ceased to function. If your bank won’t let you use your own money to pay the people you want when you want; if you can’t use gold or silver as a hedge against the inflation you know is being caused by money-printing; if you’re feeling increasingly over-surveilled by a grasping State which you know, one day, is going to punish you for its decades of overspending by finding one way or another to confiscate your assets; then what other option do you have but make the financial equivalent of moving off the grid?

This is why, of course, Big Brother will eventually find a way of destroying this nice little thing we techies, Austrian economics buffs and survivalist nutcases have got going. But, hey, it will be fun while it lasts…