Photo by Cynthia Larsen

What’s in your wallet, Crypto Brain?

By Ed Goldman

This is the final day of 2025, a year that will live in uncertainty. I feel that it’s incumbent upon this column, as a media outlet—well, given our modest readership, as a media inlet—to wrap up the past 12 months. I’m not sure why this is a tradition in the realms of print, broadcast and social media, but perhaps it’s a way we can imply that we were on the case at all times, even when we took the afternoon off to scrapbook, watch geriatric pickleball games or visit our therapists.

Summarily, here are a few of the year’s stories not tinged with tragedy, which you’ve already heard plenty about (i.e., Gaza, Ukraine, fires, shootings, floods and famine):    

– In 2025, we learned that there’s more than an audial connection between the word “crypto,” as in currency, and “cryonics,” as in freeze-dried brains.  

According to a widely reported assessment by Deutsche Bank—which famously kept lending Donald Trump (in his real-estate-genius days) millions and millions of dollars even after he defaulted on loan after loan—“Crypto tokens have lost more than $1 trillion in market value since their October peak.”

I should have known that people would lose more than their cyber underpants in succumbing to the siren’s lure of cryptocurrency. In the 1980s, Tom Goodwin’s Central Valley Press published my first book, “How to Incorporate Your Dog (and Other Solid Business Tips).” It was a collection of snarky columns and stories I’d written around the theme that “One night, average Americans went to sleep and awoke as financial geniuses.” The title chapter of the book, and many of the other pieces therein, were pretty obvious mockeries of amateur investors (including me). But at a book signing, a woman approached my table and said she thought she’d buy my book because, as she said, “I have a dog and could use some passive income.” In one of my few moral moments, I told the lady the title was a gag, there was no financial advice within the book and that my own dog, Camellia, was only “a limited liability corporation.” I said that last part to demonstrate the ridiculousness of the premise. She said, “Not sole proprietor?” as she left with 10 copies of my book. The book store manager, a friend and poet named Patrick Grizzell—who was annoyed that I was trying to talk someone out of buying my book, which was the ostensible purpose of the event—told me a few weeks later that the woman never returned the books for a refund, even after reading one. If she’s still with us here at the Department of Earth, I suspect she’s a devoted crypto-sis (“crypto-bro” is the urban slang expression for guys who embrace the currency du jour, so we just figured…).

– Using a combo ladder/forklift in broad daylight, thieves broke into the Louvre Museum. The world-famous art repository apparently had hired those guards who lost their jobs after failing to keep tabs on Jeffrey Epstein in his prison cell. (Unsubstantiated reports on French television said the guards’ French names were “Moet, Larrée et Curlée.”) The thieves made off with an estimated $100 million in “priceless” jewelry, though you can be sure there are a few fences throughout Europe right now who know the exact price of the hot rocks and are busy breaking it up into enough pieces to warrant a garage sale at Harry Winston’s house.

It’s a story that practically begs to be adapted for Hollywood. I’m thinking Pierce Brosnan in “The Louis the 14th Crown Affair”, Tom Cruise in “Mission: L’Imbecile” and a speculative documentary on whether extraterrestrials landed here thousands of years ago and started a John Deere outlet for stealing jewelry: “Cherrypickers of the Gods.”

-Other major stories this year involved:  

– The stripping of everything but the royal jockstrap of Prince Andrew, the guy who proved that even with good breeding you can become the moral equivalent of the lint in a worm’s navel;  

– The granting of a trillion-dollar salary to Elon Musk, even though he’s yet to display any skill as a Major League Baseball pitcher;