I don’t travel in circles that speak if crypto. I did, just the other day, drive past a mini-casino in Cajun Louisiana whose sign outside said “Magic Money.” But that didn’t look like anywhere anybody had ever made or lost more than a couple hundred dollars. Hard-earned, though, the lost ones. “Woman-waiting-home-with-a-month-old-child dollars. But anyway not billions. Is Crypto ever about real money?

Of course all I know about Louisiana gambling comes from having traveled, journalistically, to Paris with then-governor (not yet incarcerated) Edwin Edwards. That entailed a side trip to Monte Carlo, where I had the occasion to watch Edwards and friends of his play chemin-de-fer. All I know about chemin-de-fer is that when Cajuns play it, they are often moved to shout “Boola-boola!” In this instance, I learned, “Boola-boola” traced back to a joke:

Old boy is captured by [some savage] enemy and they tell him he’s going to die, but he can choose from various forms of execution, all of which sound so horrible that when his captors say (after a spirited discussion among themselves, in which the most ferocious among them sound like they don’t really want to let him off so easy), “Or death by boola-boola.” He leaps at this choice. They are leading him to the killing place when one of them says, “Watch out, don’t step in the Boola-boola.”

Is that a parable about crypto? If choosing crypto as a way of going broke is more appealing than it ought to be . . .