James: Hey, Tim, do you want to know how to make a small fortune from cryptocurrencies?

Tim: Sure, James, how DO you make a small fortune from cryptocurrencies?

James: Start with a large fortune!

{rim shot}

Tonight, as I'm watching the crypto space continue to do what it has been doing for the entirety of 2018 - - that is, fall in value - - I am reminded of those ads which absolutely flooded the Internet late in 2017. Surely you saw them. There were dozens of flavors of this ad, but they all pretty much looked like these:

The basic come-on, if you followed any of these ads, was roughly along these lines:

James Altucher, the guy with the glasses and crazy hair (suggesting, I assume, that he is, in fact, a genius) got a degree in Computer Science from Cornell;

Based on his computer knowledge, he stumbled upon some code in a cryptocurrency which proved to him that the particular crypto in question was going to explode in value;

He was willing to provide you with hot insights like these so that you, too, could climb aboard the crypto bus to riches. Indeed, for as little as $500, you could build a comfortable retirement nest egg in about six months.

I've got a few decades of computer background myself, so I'm not going to pick apart the entire "computer code' nonsense (setting aside the fact that Cornell is sort of the lame, red-headed stepchild of the Ivy League and is really best known for its Hotel Management undergraduate program, not computer science).

I didn't send this chap any money or sign up for any of his programs, but I was curious to see what others might have had to say about it. It didn't take me long, since I am the Internet Search Genius.