A generation of the young with dead-end social and economic prospects, calling themselves ‘dirt spoons,’ aimed to strike it rich. They’ve ended up with big losses.
SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Ki-won is keeping a secret from his parents.
It isn’t just that he has bought and sold an immense number of digital coins. Mr. Kim, who is 27 and lives with his parents, once made so much money trading cryptocurrencies that he was spending $1,000 a month on whatever he wanted. He quit his job. He borrowed to buy more. He planned to buy a house.
Today he sits slumped over, at times hiding his eyes behind his hair. Which brings us back to Mr. Kim’s secret: He has lost a lot of money, perhaps tens of thousands of dollars.
“I don’t think it’s fair that people call it gambling,” he said of his cryptocurrency obsession. “But there are elements of truth here and there.”
A generation of young South Koreans like Mr. Kim, looking for a way out of their dead-end prospects, has helped turn the country into a capital of the wild world of cryptocurrencies. Now that the market has virtually collapsed, many people young and old are mired in debt and losses. Still, many young South Koreans continue to see digital money as a way break out.
South Korea remains the third-largest market for virtual currency, behind the United States and Japan. A total of $6.8 billion in cryptocurrencies changed hands in January, according to the data provider Messari. South Korea is a major trading hub for Bitcoin, the best-known cryptocurrency, as well as a wide variety of other virtual currencies that exist without the backing of any country’s central bank.
Cryptocurrencies have become a cultural phenomenon in the country.
Coffee shops print their own digital coins. A national television network made a game show called “Block Battle,” in which contestants — one named “Kimchi Powered” — battled to build a company based on cryptotechnology.
On a recent evening in Seoul, a group of women and men in their 60s and 70s gathered at an event lit by strobe lights for the start of a new digital coin.
But it was millennials like Mr. Kim who led the charge. Many call themselves “dirt spoons,” a reference in South Korea to economic and social status, with gold and silver spoons being the best off and dirt spoons being the worst.
Cryptocurrencies seemed to be a way to disrupt that social order.
“There is no true opportunity in South Korea for the average young person,” said Kim Han-gyeol, 23, who graduated from a vocational school and became a part-time software developer for an e-book company.
She lives with her parents and works part time at Dunkin’ Donuts, studying English online at night.
