As always Great work wading throught that treacle thick bullshit to pull out the important points
I am enjoying the bitcoin maxis try argue how this is clearly a scam but BTC is not because... reasons...white paper...it does have utility even if no one is using it.
there's actually an uneasy truce between the bitcoin maxis and the sceptics in The Coinerian Jihad... some of the most effective sceptics at calling out cryptoo bullshit are actually bitcoin maxis (e.g. @pledditor on twitter)
It's not the first time I have found myself in the same side as Maxis. Obviously they detest Tether too, so I have made “friends” with some on that front.
like i said, it's an uneasy truce, likely to fracture at some point in the future. but when it comes to the TrumpCoin battle i have complete faith in my bitcoin maxi comrades.
This is all entirely correct. The only thing I’d add is really the utility of the Trump coin in particular is to create an avenue to bribe Trump. Under normal circumstances, you can’t hand the president cash to push your preferred policy agenda. We call that “bribery.” Here, you can hand the president cash via “buying” a meme coin from him.
Voila! Now they can declare, “I wasn’t bribing Trump, I was investing in Trumpcoins.” Trump wins, I suppose the briber wins, what’s left of civilization loses.
i think i made that pretty clear with the **cough** TikTok **cough** comment but hey it never hurts to just be really explicit for any future readers: the TRUMP memecoin is a vector for bribes, a lot of them from China.
Wildly entertaining. Note 5 however (footnote) I think the word 'write was used whereas 'right' was meant or implied by the context. Can check this. I get the anti-crypto angles and the whole writing but crypto-tech generally might prove important - eventually. Isn't this part of how the economy is working right now? Isn't this part of how the world is now, rather than how we want it to be? I can get the sarcasm but aren't the true believers on to something here? Bad usages (memes with ponzinomics) don't crowd out good usages (aspirational future use cases - e.g tokenisation) ... etc etc. It can't be all bad. Truth is somewhere in the middle. Maybe ... 😎😑
Thanks for the engagement with my comment. I'll follow and learn from your wisdom(s). Programmable trust was meant to be the mantra so requiring simple trust nowadays is setting a high bar. ...
Thanks also for the facts cover and the research that went into writing that piece on Trump's meme-shit-ponzi-coin (depending). Charles Hoskinson (founder of Cardano, sorry) had an angle on Trump's coin which you can catch here: https://youtu.be/4SzcEguTbX8 (ending minutes) if you want to scrub along on the vid (19/20 minutes long).
>maybe for interbank transfers between offshore banks... but not, importantly for anything consumer facing.
... But wasn't that one of the most compelling reasons for existence/use of the tech? Money which people can custody and own directly plus send between each other directly without double-spending or suffering the banks & financial institutions acting as middlemen?
Anyway wanted to be some levels deep here a bit. Finally (thanks for reading I realise it's a long comment).
> ... But wasn't that one of the most compelling reasons for existence/use of the tech? Money which people can custody and own directly plus send between each other directly without double-spending or suffering the banks & financial institutions acting as middlemen?
that was the theory (it's literally the title of the bitcoin whitepaper) but that's not the reality. no one actually wants an irreversible money system where someone who hacks your phone can steal your life's savings. and literally no one uses bitcoin to buy stuff in 2024. it's polled at something like 0.1% of all bitcoin txns.
the use cases that have emerged have pretty much been limited to
1. speculation, which only ever ends one way ("staircase up, elevator down")
2. people who live in high inflation countries buying dollars (e.g. Tether) and, to a lesser extent, bitcoin to protect themselves from the depreciation of their local currency or to get around capital controls (especially rampant in China, see recent WSJ story in my Notes)
3. crime
in the vast majority of cases #2 is also a crime, because countries with high inflation also usually have currency controls, but i would say it's a defensible/moral crime.
This article is a treasure. Absolutely superb writing. Facts, humor, sarcasm...just beautiful.
For the record, however, my money is with the 'Butthole' coin.
Brilliant writing. Clear, funny, horrified and despairing. I'm keeping this to refer to.
As always Great work wading throught that treacle thick bullshit to pull out the important points
I am enjoying the bitcoin maxis try argue how this is clearly a scam but BTC is not because... reasons...white paper...it does have utility even if no one is using it.
there's actually an uneasy truce between the bitcoin maxis and the sceptics in The Coinerian Jihad... some of the most effective sceptics at calling out cryptoo bullshit are actually bitcoin maxis (e.g. @pledditor on twitter)
I don't know if we can fully trusy them…joking.
It's not the first time I have found myself in the same side as Maxis. Obviously they detest Tether too, so I have made “friends” with some on that front.
like i said, it's an uneasy truce, likely to fracture at some point in the future. but when it comes to the TrumpCoin battle i have complete faith in my bitcoin maxi comrades.
This is all entirely correct. The only thing I’d add is really the utility of the Trump coin in particular is to create an avenue to bribe Trump. Under normal circumstances, you can’t hand the president cash to push your preferred policy agenda. We call that “bribery.” Here, you can hand the president cash via “buying” a meme coin from him.
Voila! Now they can declare, “I wasn’t bribing Trump, I was investing in Trumpcoins.” Trump wins, I suppose the briber wins, what’s left of civilization loses.
i think i made that pretty clear with the **cough** TikTok **cough** comment but hey it never hurts to just be really explicit for any future readers: the TRUMP memecoin is a vector for bribes, a lot of them from China.
Wildly entertaining. Note 5 however (footnote) I think the word 'write was used whereas 'right' was meant or implied by the context. Can check this. I get the anti-crypto angles and the whole writing but crypto-tech generally might prove important - eventually. Isn't this part of how the economy is working right now? Isn't this part of how the world is now, rather than how we want it to be? I can get the sarcasm but aren't the true believers on to something here? Bad usages (memes with ponzinomics) don't crowd out good usages (aspirational future use cases - e.g tokenisation) ... etc etc. It can't be all bad. Truth is somewhere in the middle. Maybe ... 😎😑
thank you for the typo assist.
> but crypto-tech generally might prove important - eventually
maybe for interbank transfers between offshore banks... but not, importantly, for anything consumer facing.
> It can't be all bad.
it's all bad. trust me on this.
Thanks for the engagement with my comment. I'll follow and learn from your wisdom(s). Programmable trust was meant to be the mantra so requiring simple trust nowadays is setting a high bar. ...
Thanks also for the facts cover and the research that went into writing that piece on Trump's meme-shit-ponzi-coin (depending). Charles Hoskinson (founder of Cardano, sorry) had an angle on Trump's coin which you can catch here: https://youtu.be/4SzcEguTbX8 (ending minutes) if you want to scrub along on the vid (19/20 minutes long).
>maybe for interbank transfers between offshore banks... but not, importantly for anything consumer facing.
... But wasn't that one of the most compelling reasons for existence/use of the tech? Money which people can custody and own directly plus send between each other directly without double-spending or suffering the banks & financial institutions acting as middlemen?
Anyway wanted to be some levels deep here a bit. Finally (thanks for reading I realise it's a long comment).
> ... But wasn't that one of the most compelling reasons for existence/use of the tech? Money which people can custody and own directly plus send between each other directly without double-spending or suffering the banks & financial institutions acting as middlemen?
that was the theory (it's literally the title of the bitcoin whitepaper) but that's not the reality. no one actually wants an irreversible money system where someone who hacks your phone can steal your life's savings. and literally no one uses bitcoin to buy stuff in 2024. it's polled at something like 0.1% of all bitcoin txns.
the use cases that have emerged have pretty much been limited to
1. speculation, which only ever ends one way ("staircase up, elevator down")
2. people who live in high inflation countries buying dollars (e.g. Tether) and, to a lesser extent, bitcoin to protect themselves from the depreciation of their local currency or to get around capital controls (especially rampant in China, see recent WSJ story in my Notes)
3. crime
in the vast majority of cases #2 is also a crime, because countries with high inflation also usually have currency controls, but i would say it's a defensible/moral crime.
but so much of what comes under the #3 bucket is sheer horror. things like the reemergence of a bustling slave trade in SE Asia: https://substack.com/@cryptadamus/note/c-88635637
or rampant market manipulation, rugpulls, memecoin scams, wrench attacks, and on and on and on.
This is priceless...
https://x.com/WiseMintApp/status/1883941120037773825
Thanks for this explainer. Next thing will be an index fund for meme coins. A fool and their money are soon parted, indeed. God help us.
there's already a memecoin index fund
https://www.marketvector.com/indexes/digital-assets/marketvector-meme-coin
Of course there is. Yikes.
the 3rd law of cryptodynamics has a lot of predictive power when approaching questions like this
https://substack.com/@cryptadamus/note/c-89033630
I remember the good old days when all we had to worry about were mortgage based securities and derivatives.
i would furthermore bet a lot of money there's a perpetual futures market for MEMECOIN where you can already trade with 25x or 100x leverage.
Just a perfect analysis. KABOOM!
Spectacular, & well done as always..
👏👏👏 Teach! Thank you M for deciphering all this.