A few weeks ago, I visited my new favourite financial institution. It’s a Toronto corner store with a big rusted out air conditioner over the front door, and windows plastered with ads for drumstick ice-cream cones and lottery tickets. Near the back door, nestled under old cardboard boxes full of obsolete merchandise, is a cryptocurrency ATM. Most readers will know how this thing works: You feed in cash, and it rewards you with bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, or one of the many other thousands of cryptocurrencies on offer.

There’s no shortage of websites, podcasts, and videos that will educate you about crypto. In fact, I’ve never encountered a subject that so consistently inspires its enthusiasts to endless babble. I was on the receiving end of some of it myself recently, when I tweeted a request for advice about the best way to use bitcoin as a hedge against certain unsettling political developments here in Canada (more on this below). Many of the resulting DMs I got were peppered with incomprehensible acronyms. One self-identified “crypto entrepreneur,” for instance, instructed me to “Buy as much Litecoin LTC as possible. Its the most widely used ALT and the number of new addresses is rising faster than BTC and ETH … The LTC halving is 2023.”

Finally, I found a guy who agreed to step me through the crypto basics in something approaching ordinary English. And it helped that he was a fellow Canadian, as he understood how the domestic news cycle had informed my preferences.