Over the past month, I’ve been helping my father use the Bitcoin Evolution app to make bitcoin trades. He’s one of the latest people to hop onto the bitcoin bandwagon. The idea that he could get rich my simply buying and selling some digital currency really appealed to him, and he wanted me to help him do it because he wasn’t that great at using smartphones or apps. I’m surprised he can even manage to make phone calls or send text messages with this smartphone, given how difficult it is for him to use it.

Setting up the app was pretty simple, and so was buying some bitcoin with it. After buying bitcoin, my father was watching the app like a hawk, waiting for the value of his bitcoin to rise. I told him that he would be better off just letting the bitcoin sit in his wallet and leave it to accrue in value, but he wanted to make some quick trades as if he was some kind of stock broker on the floor of the stock exchange. I had to practically pry the phone out of his hands so that he would stop looking at it.

Every day, my father would ask me how much the bitcoin price was, and when I told him that it was around the same price as the last time he asked, he would get a little disappointed. He was expecting some kind of big price hike to happen, and it doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes the price will stay the same for weeks or months, and other times it will drop or rise in a few minutes. My father has a little bit more patience with his bitcoin now that more time has passed, but he still thinks about those potential price elevations.