Letter to a young crypto enthusiast

You were right. It's not a passing fad.

For all of the legal trouble that entrepreneurs like Sam BankmanFried are in and the regulatory mess that companies like Binance find themselves in, people keep buying cryptocurrency.

Even as the price of bitcoin fell precipitously in 2022, the percentage of people in the United States owning crypto grew to 11 per cent from 3 per cent in just a year. It's at 12 per cent this year, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper, and bitcoin's price has risen more than 75 per cent from its 2022 low.

Crypto conviction - or just curiosity is not something that merits condescension from the olds and scolds of personal finance. It just requires you to ask a few questions about who you are and why you find crypto alluring.

It is true that younger adults are more open to this way of putting money to work. If you're younger than 40, you're more likely to own crypto than people older than 60, according to the NBER research. You're also more likely to be male.

The gender split is noteworthy. This year, the Pew Research Centre published an analysis showing that while 41 per cent of men ages 18 to 29 reported having owned or used cryptocurrency, just 16 per cent of women in that age range had done the same.

One possible explanation for the gender skew is chemical. "It's testosterone poisoning," said Dr William Bernstein, 75, a retired neurologist and the author of The Four Pillars Of Investing. "It does wonderful things for muscle mass and reflex speed, but it doesn't do anything at all for judgment." Are you that quick-twitch trader guy? It's not a rhetorical question.

Ask a woman or someone else who may have better or just different - judgment than you do.