I missed out on Bitcoin. I remember when it was at an early stage, around 2011, a curiosity in technical articles and I was intrigued by the idea. I wasn’t confident enough in computer programming to work it myself and would have had to use a third party to purchase some but I did have an amount of spare money I could risk so I thought of trying. I even discussed the idea with my wife and recall talking of trying out a £500 risk. At the time that would have bought me a fair number of Bitcoin, around 3,000 if I recall correctly. The real problem was the lack of knowledge of how to do that. It functioned on a Windows PC system and my own PC had been getting old by then and I had already migrated to using an Apple device. Traditional routes such as banks were not available to use. The only sellers were unknown to me.
When Bitcoin returned to the news again, such as when I first heard of Laszlo Hanyecz buying a couple of actual pizzas for ₿10,000, I was pleased I hadn’t paid out five hundred quid for the equivalent of a pizza slice, no matter how tasty it may have been. However this was the first purchase of actual, physical goods but Bitcoin had been generally weaving its own path, trading and rising for services amongst reprobates particularly on the dark web and the subsequent value climbed and climbed, fallen then climbed again. I didn’t like the sound of trading with people in the dark with the real potential to become prey to criminals, so once more I didn’t invest.
Had I bought the first coins I considered and then had I kept them, an unlikely probability given their often meteoric rises, my portfolio from such a £500 investment back then would be worth around £127m now. Or over two hundred and thirteen billion per pizza. It seems I may have missed out on this one because of my valid concerns about values going down as well as up.
The same happened on other occasions. For instance, when I read of more technical or specialist news regarding other embryonic cryptocurrencies including the second one issued, Lifecoin in 2011. Again I thought of investing but faltered due to the potential prospect that mainly they were not Bitcoin leaving me wondering whether the market would surely only need just one cryptocurrency. Again I didn’t know who I was dealing with, knew that these markets seemed highly risky and anyway, surely the bubble of growth was about to burst. And have subsequently lost out on every opportunity in this field since.
Even as recent as a few weeks ago, on news of more Bitcoin trading reports going up to record levels once more then settling back down again I was considering perhaps spending a sum on buying a small stake in every known cryptocurrency available in a spread bet on the suspicion that even if most of them faltered the probability was that one or two may rise enough to counter any loss. I would have been risking my investment so would only gamble what I could afford to loose. But I didn’t. However, shortly thereafter there was the situation with GameStop being over egged by early speculators via Reddit which took traction, sending values through the roof and inspiring thousands of small investors clamouring to invest via micro investing stock market Apps, which then encouraged major mainstream traders to join in the stupidly overvalued rising mini bull market. Then, inevitably, the Apps were pulled creating a sudden distrust in the mainstream stock market by all the micro investors and a subsequent rush by some into cryptocurrencies driving these currencies up an average 20% more. I really should trust my instincts. But again caution held me back.
In reality I only want to participate in such a trust based market if I can be in at the beginning, fully understand how it works and where it offers reasonable protection against criminality. I am not educated enough in complex computer programming to start and develop a new cryptocurrency that I can be in at the tier one level so have to think outside the box to come up with something that I could actually make work for me by making it work for you. I think I may have the answer but I will need some time.
Thankfully for me history has already provided this and it has been patiently waiting for me to market it all. After all it has lain unclaimed up to now and I formally stake my claim on it all. Plus because time is limited and only progressing slowly it could become ever more valuable plus it is also easily divisible into commonly recognisable and simple to understand divisions and so become marketable units. Allow me to explain.
Now that I own time, or at least the notion of it as understood by us all, I shall put an initial value on every year since year 1. And to date we have 2021 years since then. If you are not clear on my mathematics here check your calendar. I will value each year at, say, £200 and you are welcome to buy from me as many as you want or can afford until all the years are sold. I will obviously invest in a couple of years myself and give away some more to family members plus a few as gifts for worthy causes or for marketing purposes etc but most will be available to buy. Let’s say 2000 of them. At £200 each I will personally gain £400,000 before tax. Well I did come up with the idea.
So why would you buy these years from me? Well, simply because you might be able to sell them on for more. Which is why we invest after all. To speculate. Just think, all those who own years, including myself, will have great incentive to help drive up their value. All you need to get payback is subdivide your own year and sell the individual components for more overall than you paid upfront. Let’s say you divided your year by, what shall we go for?, I know, days. You have 365 units to sell and could price them howsoever you wished, but lets say you choose to sell your days at £200 each. With a potential gross return of £73,000 at that valuation. For each of the years that you originally bought.
And naturally as momentum builds all those next level day keepers will turn to subdividing their days and selling off their hours. Why? Because by then these will now be recognised off grid trading devices much like cryptocurrency units are now and consequently likely have a market based trading value. Particularly as the price each time is set by the seller and the market now limited in supply.
The great news is that up until this point the majority of the investors would likely be up on their deal. The others may have less potential to make more but will have a trading currency outside of mainstream banking
And then comes 2022. And I will sell that too or issue days in that year all of which could share the same excitement and newsworthiness as finding new bitcoins do now.
The mathematics mean that in truth it is unlikely that each year, day and hour would be fairly equal in value. I used the £200 examples as a guide to represent how each sector would return on the risk. At first I suspect it would be expected that a year would be worth roughly 365 times the value of a day and so on but as interest grew speculators should quickly realise the advantages of getting in early and subsequently drive the market naturally up across each division. With the higher tier levels containing the most lower tier units they would naturally be the most coveted. That year you initially invested in could be worth quite a lot more than you paid for it if you held on to it because there will only initially be 2021 of them.
At present this is just at the idea stage. No business has been set up, no © formally registered. No securing of any trademarks and no website. This will only transpose to an actual thing if enough interest is shown.
I should set out a way to show how I envisage it would all work in principle, which would basically amount to these few rules shown below. Please note these are guide lines and have not been legally checked to ensure the correct phrasing so must be considered proposals at this time issued with good intent.
• It shall be known as Thyme [a working title for the purposes of this idea] or a similar name registered as a legal business and chosen to facilitate an easily discovered url where initial transactions take place, a name reserved for a future App if that is wanted and various social media sites
• It must be a legal system. I do not want to create an underclass system that people are afraid to deal in. It should be transparent and open within reason yet subject to privacy plus any tax due on any gains must be paid by the seller
• Any investment can be a risk and no recompense will be made due to not meeting expectations of performance. Caveat emptor
• Thyme units shall be known as Years, for the top tier, then Days and Hours. The subdivision of which would match common understanding, i.e. a Year would consist of 365 Days or 366 in the case of a leap Year and a Day would be 24 Hours
• The common place to go to check values and to confirm ownership, would be the Thyme url, initially maintained by me or the company I form to administer this, subsequently known as the Top Level Administrator and would have sole ownership rights of and control over issue or sale of the original top level Year time periods
• Year zero or any negative year such as 1 BCE will never be issued which would ensure a limited supply of time units available
• The minimal divisible unit will initially be the Hour, again to limit the supply of units available
• Thyme units shall be fixed and only be traded whole or broken into their constituent parts. For example if you own a Day it can be traded whole with another person but once part of that Day, i.e. an Hour, is sold then it becomes a collective number of the Hours remaining, no longer a Day
• Thyme units can be collated to form larger values only if the specific Thyme unit values are concurrent. For example you could purchase 24 separate Hours from up to 24 different sources but that will not become a Day unless each of those Hours are consecutive and from the same day
• There is no maximum or minimal value limit on any unit of Thyme
• The value of any one unit at any given level shall not automatically alter the value of any other units of the same or any other level. This is a purely market driven system
• There is no maximum limit to how many units of Thyme of any level that can be held by any individual, group of individuals or businesses
• Administration costs at the year level will be borne by the Top Level Administrator. There shall be no fee in addition to the sell price for purchasing any original Year unit transaction. However, subsequent transactions of any Years will attract a 1% of traded value commission fee or a minimum of £25, whichever is greater, plus relevant taxes payable to the Top Level Administrator to cover database maintenance costs
• Administration costs at the lower tier levels such as individual Years or Days will be borne by the original purchaser, who shall become a Level Administrator and they must be administered in accordance with the way described directly above. At the discretion of the Level Administrator similar updating fees may be applied on an individual basis. Any Year or Day Level Administrator should choose and declare such processing fees, as has been done in the paragraph above, in advance of selling
• Owners of Hours are not Level Administrators
• Level Administrators shall be responsible for maintaining accurate records of their units and subsequent sales until such time as they are fully dispersed of and then must maintain their transaction records for a minimum of seven years afterwards. This way buyers will only trust sellers if clear and accurate, historically traceable information is available
• Subsequent years from year 2022 onwards will only become included in the system as they occur at 00:00 on 1st January of each year and shall immediately become owned by the Top Level Administrator. They can then be sold, gifted or broken into constituent Thyme parts at the discretion of the Top Level Administrator at the time of his choosing and in the manner in which he shall decide
• The value of any Thyme unit and when it will be available will be soley market driven, either set by the seller and subsequently accepted or auctioned however-so the seller wished it to occur. For example, I, as the Top Level Administrator, shall decide when I will issue my Thyme Years for sale and at what price. As a result each buyer can then choose what their subsequent sell price is and when to sell
• Ownership changes should be reported back to the Level Administrator for the particular unit level for verification to ensure records of ownership can be maintained
So how do I propose administration should work? As stated earlier my skills are not rounded enough to run a fully safe encrypted database, which would be needed if this took off due to its potential value and susceptibility to interference by computer savvy near do wells. So I have come up with a neat solution to recording legitimate ownership using readily available equipment which anyone could use. I will simply hand write the data down then scan it to distribute as a record, subject to data protection limitations.
I recognise your first thought may be that this method is fallible. After all scans can be manipulated by photo editing software. But this is the solution, the scan would be an oversized image with the scan data resting on a unique background, for instance a random newspaper sheet, then cropped to fit thus hiding the background. If there were any subsequent disputes in the data record the Level Administrator would be able to cross reference any disputed scans with the original.
The scanning idea came from the fact that when I scan a document with my smart phone it photographs the general area then automatically zooms in on the document. All very smart but never quite perfect. If I save it unedited the over scan may include some of the table I have placed it on and possibly my feet. Actually, usually, my overhanging belly but this is a detail you didn’t need to know and I really must fix. I can correct the zoom more perfectly myself by dragging the scan perimeters more precisely and save it in a more cropped way but the original still retains the outermost details. This is the security needed to verify originality. In fact it is a common way of identifying expensive art copies. If a good fake is painted it can be made to look very much like the original but it would not have the same details that are wrapped around the framing rails and hidden by the outer frame.
Obviously there are other things that would need to be addressed such as data privacy issues but full legal compliance would be set in place to take care of this.
So are you interested? If so what are you going to offer me for a year of my Thyme? And which years would you choose to buy? Hint, leap years may be fractionally more valuable. And in case you are wondering I am keeping year one, my birth year and the year 2021 for myself, plus a handful of significant date years. See, the supply limitation is already happening so helping drive the value up.
I welcome any comments you have and if you wish to get this thing off the ground with me please make contact. If there is sufficient interest I’ll update on this website after I set it up. So it could be a wise move for you to keep checking back for future updates.
Why not take the Thyme and get onboard now?
This article was first published on my website at vinceunlimited.co.uk on 1 February 2021 (version 5.320)
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