What do you give the man who has everything? I decided on 0.1 Bitcoin. (This was just before MtGox melted.) He’d like it. And for me – I am no tech geek – the purchase would be a fine challenge.

I started googling.

My main concern, after I had wrapped my head round Bitcoin (BTC) basics, was security. A simple way to balance risk against hassle seemed to be:

• Buy offline in person with cash, so as to withhold details from a hacker-minded community
• Generate and print the Bitcoin public and private keys offline, ditto

I found an in-person seller (localbitcoins.com), and offline key generator in a downloadable paper-wallet printing program (bitcoinpaperwallet.com). I mistrusted both. My doubts were assuaged by:

1. Talking to the seller by phone – anyone needing to do a supermarket shop before they can meet you at the local pub is halfway legit – and
2. Observing how many visitors had not flamed Canton Becker for his paper-wallet javascript, openly exhibited for comment on the site.

Trust markers are an interesting topic in themselves.

So, my ‘cold wallet’ was generated and printed offline, folded to hide the private key, and laminated. I ignored the printer files apparently still lurking on my hard drive and in the printer. Whatever. At the pub, the seller and I opened our laptops for trade like a couple of old pros. But as I had no online ‘hot’ wallet, and he couldn’t make my public-key QR code transmit from his phone camera to his laptop, we had to manually enter the alphanumeric string and verify it together. ‘This method will never catch on’, he said as I rechecked. But sure enough the transaction began confirming on the blockchain, I took the slight risk of assuming it would confirm totally, and I paid. Ta-dah!

(I could have uploaded only my public address onto a wallet app or site, keeping the private key in cold storage as shown in coindesk.com/information/paper-wallet-tutorial, but: I didn’t know that could be done, I was in a rush, and I wouldn’t have been sure what software to trust anyway.)

I went back online and sent Canton Becker a few dollars by PayPal for the paper wallet, just to be grateful.

And kept learning. To store Bitcoin offline for long, you have to know it will last: acid-free paper, archival inks, waterproofing – you’re crafting your own banknote. When you spend from it, using the private key online, any leftover will need a new private key and therefore a new offline wallet if you’re security-minded. Not to mention keeping, and backing up, all digital wallets you’ve ever used. With devolved authority comes devolved responsibility, sure, but there’s only a certain amount of technical competence around. In any Bitcoin future, I suspect I and others like me will shunt responsibility for securely storing digital value back to 'Local Crypto Bank'. And so recentralisation begins, under the wise guidance of the geekocracy? Hmm!

MtGox’s recent troubles show that Bitcoin storage problems aren’t only about hacking of hot wallets, but also attacks on record-keeping. MtGox’s accounting system couldn’t deal with transaction ID malleability. Transaction malleability is not the end of Bitcoin but it is a problem for users of ‘poorly written wallets’. Coders, presumably, can judge whether a wallet is well written; for those of us who still think Ruby on Rails sounds like a stripper name, it comes back to trust markers.

By now, I’m resenting Bitcoin a little for being difficult. So it’s slightly gratifying to read that mining it consumes a great deal of electricity, and warps the GPU market. There must be alternatives. I’ve already heard of Litecoin (‘the silver to Bitcoin’s gold’) and Worldcoin. What else?

It turns out there are altcoins galore, altcoins too numerous to mention. Peercoin has the green credentials. Litecoin (among others) has faster transaction times, reducing double-spending risks. Several coins now use a different hash function – Keccak (SHA3) instead of Bitcoin’s SHA256. Ethereum builds contract terms into the blockchain. Namecoins constitute domain names with which to build a parallel internet. Maxcoin: new mining opportunities. Worldcoin: uh, under new management. Dogecoin … Mastercoin … Auroracoin, for bailing out the Icelandic economy by something in Panama calling itself Baldur Odinsson (seriously?) … mapofcoins.com/

I get fascinated by Ripple, an alternative currency model that isn’t even on the map. My googling drifts further and further out, into the chiemgauer, Local Exchange Trading Schemes (LETS), the Riegel Mutual Credit Exchange, Villages.cc and hawala.

Ripple proposes that we all become mini-bankers, offering credit within circles of friends and trusted gateways that interconnect (eventually) to form a flexible, resilient value-transmission network. Like a brain. Or a social network site for how much of what currency we trust each other for. Payments are made by propagating indebtedness fast across the network. Ripple’s own coin acts as transaction-security guarantee and intermediating currency. Transactions are verified by consensus.

A previous pamphleteer on this blog, Wingham Rowan (see his article), discussed the ‘less scrutinised fringes’ of the job market: ‘the world of ad hoc dog walking, odd hours of work in a busy pub … lending small amounts of cash for a week and so on.’ Ripple should supply a kind of connectivity for these work-fringes which LETS have not managed, so far. It would embrace Bitcoins and altcoins. And it could also work in conjunction with big currencies and financial institutions, because the big institutions are, I think, despite recent evidence otherwise, mostly a stabilising force. Surely today’s Bitcoin/USD volatility is docile compared with unpinned exchange rates in 2055 between, say, Memecoin and raw British honey by the gram. (I made up Memecoin, but it turns out to exist already. And I am assuming the bees survive.)

So I open a Ripple account (ripple.com).

Granted, Ripple the currency (XRP) is not ‘ideologically pure’ like Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other cryptocurrencies available to ‘everyone’ to mine [‘everyone’ = has big processors, can use them, understands trading – ie, not everyone]. XRP is pre-mined. Much of it is held, like start-up stock, by the originators, or has been distributed as largesse. Purists dislike the former. And investors, allegedly, didn’t like the latter so the largesse has mostly stopped. Short-termists, I think darkly, clicking around in search of leftover XRP giveaways.

Because to start Rippling, you need XRP, to obtain which you need to extend a trust line, to do which you need XRP. There are good reasons for this but it’s frustrating. I locate a nifty hack from Ripple Union (rippleunion.com), who’ll prime my account with a few XRP in exchange for the emailed code of a ten-Canadian-dollar gift card. (There are other ways to do it.) They take a fee of two dollars, and credit me eight. More precisely, 8 CAD Ripple Union, since who owes you is as important as what the currency is. I have an aha moment about money. Who is what. Currency is trusted debtors.

I start wondering whether my GBPs in one UK bank are worth slightly more than my GBPs in another. I realise that I already behave as if they are.

It’s good to hedge bets, and Litecoin seems nice. It has sober credentials and is years old. Two and a bit, to be exact. I create a Litecoin (LTC) key offline, and register at bitbargain.co.uk to buy. But I’m a newcomer, so no-one trusts me enough to sell me anything. Doh. I validate my mobile number, which lets me buy 0.01 BTC by bank transfer, which makes me trustworthy enough to buy 3 LTC. It’s all sent to a temporary ‘pocket’ assigned me by the site with a warning to shift it out within the week. Blasé, I reallocate the centibit to my boyfriend’s wallet, the LTC to my own. Then I have second thoughts. Could I have put that centibit in my Ripple account? Too late. It’s frozen now.

Huh. Can I convert my few Canadian dollars in Ripple into BTC? I experiment, haplessly, and fail. So I turn all the CAD into Ripples, march onto a trading floor I don’t know how to use, and affirm I want to pay 210 XRP for one centibit. My order is now active, possibly to a harried Canadian bloke who will come online tomorrow and wish I would go somewhere else to learn through play.

Meanwhile I sign up to be paid more XRP via Ripple Labs (computingforgood.org) in exchange for donating processor power to the World Community Grid. Now my 2009 laptop is crunching numbers for projects on AIDs, cancer markers, and new molecules for superefficient solar panels. My kind of mining. It remains to be seen whether, when and how much XRP I’ll actually receive, but hey.

Anyway, it may also indirectly help my mum, who’s got seriously into permaculture and is telling me about a ‘chicken-tractor’ used to prepare ground before planting food-forests – an eighteen-foot-square, mobile, free-range coop/run using solar panels to electrify the outer fencing against foxes.

By the time the superefficient solar panels are in production, I may be able to Ripple the down-payment on a tractor out of the passive income in USD gift vouchers I generate off my own website.

Now for a pension plan.

^{Thanks to Maury Shenk for his participation and helpful comments.}

^{Katharine Scarfe Beckett is a freelance editor and writer based in Sussex and London. Visit her website for more information.}