Yes, The Memecoin Phenomenon is Ridiculous, But Here’s Why It’s Worth Supporting

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Tremble in fear, for the age of the Shitcoin is upon mankind!

More than any other time in world history, it is possible for an ordinary person to amass a transcendent amount of wealth, not by founding a major company or rising to the top of a professional hierarchy, but simply by gambling on a purely speculative product, a product that reflects no underlying value and no real economic production.

What’s a shitcoin? As the name implies, it’s a cryptocurrency. Or rather, it’s a cryptocurrency, but dumber.

Think back to what you may know about major cryptos, like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Over the course of a decade, Bitcoin has ballooned from being essentially free to having a market cap of a trillion dollars, making it roughly equal to Tesla in value. In March 2020, Ethereum had a market cap of $15 billion; today it is more than $500 billion and is more valuable than Johnson and Johnson. Bitcoin and Ethereum both represent profound and exciting technological innovations whose underlying potential to fundamentally change society may very well end up justifying these stratospheric market caps, and potentially much more.

Shitcoins are a different animal entirely. Consider the infamous Dogecoin (market cap: $28 billion).

Dogecoin was created as a joke, using the then-current Doge meme to poke fun at the speculative frenzy around crypto assets. Dogecoin has always been a joke and will always be a joke. There is no meaningful development on the coin, like there is for coins like Ethereum or Solana. Its value rises and falls based on memes, fads, and in-jokes. In January 2021, Dogecoin’s market cap rose 800% in a single day, adding $7 billion in value, after it was memed on Reddit.

In the wake of Dogecoin has come one meme coin after another. A spinoff coin created in August 2020, Shiba Inu, went from a market cap of essentially zero on May 6th 2020 to nearly $14 billion on May 9th. In late October its cap peaked at more than $41 billion (an amount roughly equal to Elon Musk’s share of SpaceX). Again, the coin is a joke with no point, even in the highly speculative world of crypto investment. Yet at its peak, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s Shiba holdings were worth more than his stake in Ethereum itself.

Dog coins are the kings of crypto memes, but hardly the only ones. CumRocket (trading code: CUMMIES) peaked at a market cap of over $400 million and even now sits at $37 million. Banano (“a feeless, instant, rich in potassium cryptocurrency disrupting the meme economy”) is at $25 million and peaked above $60 million. JRR Token might have amassed a few million dollars in value simply riding the popularity of Lord of the Rings, but was just quashed by J.R.R. Tolkien’s famously-litigious estate.

Fringe cryptos aren’t the only assets that have seen price run-ups detached from reality. Last January, the world fixated on GameStop’s stock price as a WallStreetBets-driven short squeeze sent the price from barely $12 to a peak of $483.

Most of these coins are well below their peak from earlier this year. But so what? In the past, a fad might come and go a single time, enriching a handful of early holders who were either committed scam artists or essentially just lottery winners. But many shitcoins boom and bust multiple times.

Mere months after its creation, Dogecoin’s market cap surged from scarcely $5 million to nearly $100 million, then crashed back to where it started. But those caught holding the bag who stuck around saw another surge to above $400 million in 2017, followed by a crash, followed by a surge up to nearly $2 billion in 2018. That was followed by another crash, then another surge into the tens of billions.

Dogecoin has given had a half-dozen cycles where it rose in value tenfold before retreating, while those who simply bought and held since 2017 (after the first several boom/bust cycles) have made a thousand-times return on their investment.

The same can happen even with supposedly more rational stocks. After its initial frenzy, GameStop collapsed from above $400 back to just $44. But in March, it rose back to $260, toppled back to $120, then rose again to over $300 in June. Right now, it sits perched at $167, more than ten times above where it started, and who can say if the meme is finished?

What can we make of all of this?

Instead of reflecting a genuine underlying technological innovation, shitcoins such as those profiled above are cryptocurrencies premised on memes, jokes, puns, or sometimes nothing at all. Shitcoins are lottery tickets in a clown casino, opportunities to amass ridiculous wealth based on nothing but memes and speculative fads.

In other words, these so-called shitcoins honestly and accurately reflect the ludicrous and illusory nature of America’s economy at large. Shitcoins are not some absurd deviation from an otherwise sound financial system that is responsibly and discernibly connected to the creation of real value. Quite the contrary — the absurdity of shitcoins does not represent an exception to the overall financial system, but a perfect crystallization of it. Lacking the narrative window dressing that affords other sectors of the financial system a patina of legitimacy, the shitcoin phenomenon affords us a naked and unvarnished glimpse into the scam that is our entire economy.

Is the fact that it is possible to make billions from a “dog coin” any more ridiculous than the fact that a figure such as Elizabeth Holmes was able to ride the Regime-promoted meme of “women in tech” to fool some of the most powerful men in the country (including the disgraced and pathetic General Mattis) into supporting and investing in her biotechnology company Theranos? Which is more absurd and outrageous, the Shiba Inu meme coin or the Elizabeth Holmes meme coin, so to speak?

We can gain additional insight from the central significance that hype, crowd psychology and online promotion sent shitcoins into the stratosphere, rather than any underlying substantive technical achievement. After all, does this not in large part capture the essence of American power with increasing accuracy? The Globalist American Empire is less and less distinguished by monumental achievements in warfare, architecture, engineering, or innovation. More than anything, the source of the Globalist American Empire (GAE) power is its mastery over communications technology and psychological warfare, or, put more politely “soft power.” With the de facto adoption of wokeness as official Regime ideology, is the GAE memecoin really that much less ridiculous than Shiba Inu?

Apart from the honest and sobering insight it offers into the nature of our economy generally, the shitcoin phenomenon has other, even more attractive advantages.

America is an increasingly unequal country, and across major sectors the economy is essentially a desert. Blue-collar workers whose wages stagnated decades ago struggle with rising costs while enduring humiliations like training foreign-born replacements who will work for even less money. Manufacturing has evaporated. Government-imposed Covid lockdowns have annihilated local retail and small business, already in decline, and “mostly-peaceful protests” have wiped out many of the survivors.

Within this desert, there are a few oases of wealth — elite finance firms, consultancies, tech companies where engineers pull mid-six figures, and so forth. For building true generational wealth, as opposed to collecting a robust upper-middle class salary, the paths are even narrower. Access to these oases is carefully controlled and vetted. One must do all the right things (and adhere to all the correct pieties) in high school, college, and possibly graduate school to get a coveted job or gain access to the money spigots of Silicon Valley or private equity. And even if one does everything right, one may be crushed for having the wrong opinion or the wrong skin color anyway.

For all the failings of the Globalist American Empire, it is remarkably effective at constraining capital flows to ensure that serious capital does not fall into the hands of someone with the brains and courage to seriously challenge and undermine the Regime.

Let’s return to the January short squeeze of GameStop. In an excellent case of nominative determinism, the investment fund Melvin Capital lost half of its assets when its short on GameStop blew up in its face. Yet within days, hedge fund Citadel LLC bailed out Melvin to the tune of $2 billion. In a certain sense, it would seem like $ 2 billion is a tremendous amount of money. However, at the scale of major hedge funds and private equity firms, $2 billion is a much less impressive figure.

But it is not just the amount of money that matters, it is also the context and location of the money. In the context of $2 billion flowing from one hedge fund to another, it simply makes no difference from a systemic view — it’s just shuffling money around “in network,” so to speak. Tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars can flow from one part of the system to another without making any real meaningful difference from the point of view of the broader system or network itself.

This is more or less how we might understand the tens and hundreds of billions shuffled around in major investment bank deals, private equity acquisitions and so forth. Such transactions merely shift capital from one mega conglomerate to another, or make a particular conglomerate even larger. This might result in improved efficiencies and economies of scale, but ultimately the broader financial and political system easily absorbs such flows without any significance.

When we compare this, say, to the effect of placing $2 billion in an organization that is fundamentally critical and subversive of the Regime, we can begin to imagine that not all sums of $2 billion are created equal, and that controlling capital flows is key to Regime stability. While there are various systems the Regime has in place to neutralize growing threats when they appear, its greatest weapon is perhaps the fact that, by constraining capital flows, it prevents serious intergenerational money from flowing to institutions or people who have the brains and guts to “play for keeps” and allocate that capital in order to shake up, expose, and even undermine the Regime.

This controlled access to the sources of wealth is one reason America’s ruling class has become so cowardly. Simply gaining access to wealth in America is a test of how manageable and unthreatening one is.

But how can this corrupt Regime ever be replaced, when it exerts so much control over the pathways to serious wealth? This is where the beauty of cryptocurrency in general, but shitcoins in particular, becomes evident.

The age of cryptocurrency and memecoins introduces new volatility into the American system, with fascinating ramifications. There are thousands of people becoming millionaires, or even deca- and centimillionaires, simply by speculating on the right coin. Cryptocurrency is such a strange, novel, outlier entity that those who invested in it were decidedly not from the established wealth centers of America. Many were young, highly-online original thinkers. Some were little more than criminals or degenerate gamblers, but others were true dissidents in the making as well.

All of a sudden, thanks to cryptocurrency, it is possible for an unvetted person — entirely unnoticed by Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., or the press — to build a fortune worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. And it’s also possible for those unvetted multimillionaires to use their wealth to undermine the current regime.

The present situation in the Globalist American Empire is dire. And in dire circumstances, volatility is your friend. We raise our glasses to the thousands of shitcoin millionaires because one of them just might become the hero this great country needs.

To the moon!

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