When did the people I have known for thirty years — the ones who once described cryptocurrency as a Ponzi scheme with worse graphic design — quietly become the kind of people who keep a hardware wallet in the drawer with the napkin rings?
I ask because I had dinner at Eliza’s on Sunday, and somewhere between the soup and the second bottle, a man I will only describe as a bipartisan lobbyist mentioned, with the tossed-off ease of a person describing a tennis lesson, that he had taken some of his daughter’s college fund off-exchange. Off-exchange. He said it the way my mother used to say off-Broadway. He examined a cufflink. Nobody asked what he meant. Everyone, somehow, already knew.
Bitcoin closed the year up. I am told the number is historic. I am told this by the same publications that, in 2022, ran cover stories about a man in a Bahamian compound who had stolen everyone’s money, and who was, at the time, described as a generational mind. The number is historic. The memory is short. The cheese plate, on Sunday, was excellent.
What I am trying to say — and I am, as always, just trying to say it — is that there has been a quiet rearrangement of the furniture in this town, and nobody has announced the rearrangement, because announcing it would require naming who used to sit where. The people who spent a decade calling this stuff vulgar are now, in the elegant phrasing of my sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has opinions, “diversifying.” Judy does not have a hardware wallet. Judy, God bless her, still balances a checkbook on a yellow legal pad.
The administration has been candid, at least, in its enthusiasms. The policy environment has been, to use the term of art, generous. A working group has been working. A czar has been czaring. The Treasury, I am reliably told by a friend who used to work there and now consults for a firm whose name is three initials and a number, is “leaning in.” When the Treasury leans in, it is generally because someone in the room has been very patient and very rich for a very long time.
At dinner, a woman whose husband sits on something — I cannot remember which board, only that the board has a Latin motto — asked the bipartisan lobbyist what staking was. He explained staking. He explained it the way men in this town explain things, which is to say with the confidence of a person who learned the concept ninety seconds before the question was asked. Eliza, to her credit, refilled my glass. The lobbyist concluded by saying it was “basically a savings account.” I wrote that down on the corner of my napkin and have been carrying it around since.
I am old enough to remember when the same crowd, at the same table, with the same lamb, used to laugh at the people who held this stuff. Laughed openly. Did impressions. There was a running joke about a cousin in Nevada. The cousin in Nevada, I should mention, is now richer than the lobbyist, which is the part of the story that does not get told, because the part of the story that does not get told is always the part where the people in the room turn out to have been the slow ones.
This is what I keep meaning when I write the phrase civic cowardice, and what I keep failing, apparently, to land. It is not the grand betrayals. It is this. It is the quiet update. It is the people who spent a decade calling a thing dangerous, and then, when the policy environment turned, took a position in it, and did not mention, at dinner, that they had ever held the previous opinion. There was no retraction. There was no “I was wrong.” There was a cufflink. There was the soup.
I asked Eliza, on the way out, whether any of this bothered her. She told me, with the patience she reserves for me and for her aging Labrador, that I was being a scold. She may be right. The Labrador, I should note, was the only one in the room who looked at the lobbyist with anything like skepticism.
The number closed up. The dinner party caught up. The cousin in Nevada was not invited. We had the lamb, and nobody, this time, asked for the recipe.