Glad no one will read this. One of the three reasons that Charlie Munger cites as his rationale for avoiding cryptocurrency in general is that he stays away from things that make him look like a fool. Unfortunately I am not inhibited by this bias and so here I stand in all my naked ignorance. Upon checking the #swan help pages, I see that they set a fixed minimum of 10 days to clear ACH transfers - for a perfectly legitimate reason. Therefore my panic regarding the initial $10 purchase on their site is a bit premature. I’ll chill and check back next week on how things are going with this. Must say that I find their site well engineered (from a UX perspective) and informative. Still thinking about checking out River as well at some point.

In the meantime, after cursory review on the bitcoin.org site, I have downloaded the Electrum wallet software (I’m on MacOS/iOS platforms) and look forward to checking that out once I have some (very fractional) coins of my own.

One question that I have in general is how the size of individual transactions affect the validation time. Looking forward to learning more about this.

#bitcoin #learningcurve

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Ok - again on the recommendation of L. Alden, I took the plunge and setup an account with Swan to make my first BTC (is that the proper abbreviation?) purchase today. I'm confident that the math works in this whole affair, but it's the trust factor that's hard to gauge. It was a little disconcerting to hand over a shit ton of PII to a vendor that I do not know at all (SSN, photos of drivers license, etc.). Identity management is handled by a third party and I'm sure everybody is a good custodian of this stuff, but I don't have time to do due diligence on all these companies so it is a faith-based transaction.

Once we're over the identity hurdle, it's time to hand over the routing and account numbers for my "real" bank account. I would rather pay with a credit card to provide some security buffer, but what the hell - it doesn't seem to be an option. Now that Swan is hooked into my bank, it's a simple matter to make the purchase. I'm starting with $10. If this doesn't result in bad side effects over the next couple of weeks, I'm prepared to start dollar cost averaging in.

My next goals are to set up and fund a wallet of some sort and to look into self-custody (or whatever is the proper term of art). Apparently Swan is supportive of this capability.