``Hauled down a mother of an account today,'' Joe explains. ``We hype cars. We hype computers. We hype athletic shoes. But as of three hours ago, we are hyping a currency.''

``What?'' says his wife Anne.

``Y'know, like dollars or yen. Except this is a new currency.''

``From which country?'' I ask. This is like offering lox to a dog: I've given Joe the chance to enlighten his feckless bro. He hammers back half a flute of Dom Perignon and shifts into full-on Pitch Mode.

``Nowadays we can use it to go shopping in the Metaverse. But it's still in U.S. dollars. Smart people are looking for something better.''

That was for me. I graduated college with a thousand bucks in savings. With inflation at 10% and rising, that buys a lot fewer Leinenkugels than it did a year ago.

``The government's never going to get its act together on the budget,'' Joe says. ``It can't. Inflation will just get worse. People will put their money elsewhere.''

``Inflation would have to get pretty damn high before I'd put my money into some artificial currency,'' I say.

``Hell, they're all artificial,'' Joe says. ``If you think about it, we've been doing this forever. We put our money in stocks, bonds, shares of mutual funds. Those things represent real assets -- factories, ships, bananas, software, gold, whatever. Simoleons is just a new name for those assets. You carry around a smart card and spend it just like cash. Or else you go shopping in the Metaverse and spend the money online, and the goods show up on your doorstep the next morning.''

I say, ``Who's going to fall for that?''

``Everyone,'' he says. ``For our big promo, we're going to give Simoleons away to some average Joes at the Super Bowl. We'll check in with them one, three, six months later, and people will see that this is a safe and stable place to put their money.''

By the time I've punched in the 256th digit ...

``Simoleons? It's the same deal with Simoleons -- everything gets reported to the government.''

``Forget Simoleons. Think CryptoCredits.''

``CryptoCredits? What the hell is a CryptoCredit?'' He stands up and starts pacing back and forth. Now he's convinced I've traded the family cow for a handful of magic beans.

``It's what Simoleons ought to be: E-money that is totally private from the eyes of government.''

``How do you know? Isn't any code crackable?''

``Any kind of E-money consists of numbers moving around on wires,'' I say. ``If you know how to keep your numbers secret, your currency is safe. If you don't, it's not. Keeping numbers secret is a problem of cryptography -- a branch of mathematics. Well, Joe, the crypto-anarchists showed me their math. And it's good math. It's better than the math the government uses. Better than Simoleons' math too. No one can mess with CryptoCredits.''

``Does the First Distributed Republic have a flag?'' Mom asks, out of left field. I tell her these guys look like sewing enthusiasts. So, even before the second half starts, she's sketched out a flag on the back of her program. ``It'll be very colorful,'' she says. ``Like a jar of jelly beans.''