Bitcoin Is The New Beanie Babies

PCMag Senior Features Editor Chandra Steele got her tech journalism start at CMP/United Business Media. She also writes fiction and has been published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

In the 90s, you had to take your entertainment where you could get it. Sometimes that place was the home shopping channel in the middle of the night. My brother and I would tune in to a fuzzy broadcast to watch a man in a cheap print shirt, who a short time ago had been selling knives, stand in front of a colossal rainbow mound of stuffed animals.

He’d pick up three or four in a fist, shake them at the television, and—in a coked-up sales pitch that left his mustache covered in spittle—yell things like, “You could pay for your kids’ college tuition with these!”

That man was Don West, and he was selling Beanie Babies for hundreds of dollars. Of course, we now know that the former wrestling hype-man was not offering the most solid financial advice. Humphrey the Camel, once worth $2,000, can now be had for $15.99 on eBay. (Call now while supplies last!)