About fifty years ago my wife and I bought a small farm in the hill country of southeastern Ohio and built a home on it to raise our family. There is a small, year-round stream running through the farm and on either side of the stream is twenty-five acres of woods consisting mostly of hardwood trees. About this time last year I decided it was time to harvest some of the trees because they were getting quite mature.
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Two weeks ago one of the loggers stopped by and asked, "What d o you know about bitcoins?"

I told him that I thought I could spell "bitcoins" but that was the extent of my knowledge.

He proceeded to tell me that he had invested $900.00 in bitcoins in March and his account is now over $40.000.

Now I do all right trading hogs but nothing like that so he had my attention.

Here are some of the things he taught me:

- Bitcoins are part of a new asset class known as cyber currency.

- Bitcoins and other cyber currencies can be used to store value and efficiently transfer value from one person to another.

- Bitcoins seemingly took on cash value on May 23, 2010 when Laszlo Hanyecz (who had successfully "Mined" 10,000 bitcoins) traded them to the local Papa John's Pizza store for two large pizzas. As I write this my computer is showing a quote for bitcoins of $9,709.01 giving those bitcoins a present value of $97,090,010.00. May 23 is now celebrated as "Bitcoin Pizza Day" by all bitcoiners except Laszlo.

- In addition to bitcoins there are more than 1,040 other cyber coins in the market place.

- The Chicago Mercantile Exchange is seeking approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to begin trading bitcoin futures and options with the goal of beginning trading during December.

- JP Morgan is considering making bitcoin investments available to their client customers.

- There are many who are saying that bitcoins are a giant bubble that is about to burst.

- Others are saying that bitcoins are the wave of the future and will change the way value is transferred from one individual to another.

- The largest cyber currency exchange in the U.S. is GDAX. It is open 24X7.

Not wanting to be left in the dinosaur-age of currencies, I opened an account at GDAX and transferred $500.00 to the account. Using about half of the money, I bought some bitcoin, some ether coins and some lite coins. I have the rest of the money in reserve to buy more if the price dips. As I write this, my account is valued at $573.71 for a gain of 14.7% in 10-days. Like I say, I do all right trading hogs but I don't do 1.47% a day seven days a week. That would be 538.1% APR.

I suppose it is just beginners luck!

Best wishes,

dhm