Memecoin Mania, The Jokes On You

2024 is the comeback year; stocks are surging, gold has hit all-time highs, and so has its counterpart in digital gold; Bitcoin has set new all-time highs, and we’re safely in NGU territory.

Whenever Bitcoin makes new highs, it’s a newsworthy moment, and it’s time for the legacy media and social media to punt it to the general public and for that general public to put on your investor hat and start participating!

Here comes Davey Day Trader and the Squad!

Now, you could hop on the Bitcoin train, but man, that’s already at all-time highs with not much alpha left; you missed the bus, so let’s ignore Saylor and look for the second best!

What can you do with a few thousand bucks and a dream? Well, you could pick from the near-endless supply of risky altcoins, or you could skip that phase and go as far out the risk curve as possible and try to pick out the next big meme that captures the imagination.

Memecoin and The Fabled Moonshot

All altcoins’ directional bets on liquidity flowing into Bitcoin, you’re hoping some capital spills over into these obscure coins, and you can make out like a bandit.

But once you hit the opium den that is the altcoin market, make a few gains and losses, you’ll find the larger market cap coins don’t do it for you; they are not going to give you that 10, 100 or 1000x return in a year you need to pay off all your debt or set yourself up to flex on social media.

These L1s or L2s, or whatever they call themselves, don’t give you the dopamine rush or the returns required.

You need something more substantial! Time to speed run this sucker!

This is where meme coins come in; they’re not trying to pretend to do anything but be a vehicle for robbing Peter to pay Paul. In fact, when you click buy, that’s precisely the T&Cs you agree to.

They have very no utility; their killer app can monetise attention in short bursts. If something goes viral, you can bet your arse there will be a meme coin for it, ready to take your money!

Fuelled by memes, mania, and a horde of risk-tolerant investors, meme coins are now worth $127 billion, according to CoinGecko. To put that into perspective, that’s larger than the market cap of household brands like Nike and Sony.

Pandering To Retail

Meme coins will be the vehicle of choice in this cycle, where NFTs were for 2021 and ICOs in 2017; they will be retail-focused, and projects looking to make the most of them will leverage their retail appeal via branding and merchandising.

Monetising people’s ever-shortening attention spans is a dangerous game; the mob is powerful but also fickle!

But the funnel towards meme rugging, too, is powerful.

• You have the media, who make money off ads and ads get served by creating low-brow content like meme coin goes up, meme coin go down, this 6-year-old is a millionaire from meme coins.
• You have social media algorithms that make money from serving ads and, like legacy media, keeping you on their platform looking for meme coins and meme banter, which earns them healthy revenue.
• You have social media influencers who have already bought into the coin, pre-mined it, or received a free allocation to dump on you. What’s truly remarkable is watching self-proclaimed “crypto visionaries” (read: people who discovered Twitter last week) lead their followers into what essentially amounts to a digital game of hot potato – except the potato is radioactive, and the game is being played in a house of mirrors.
• The useful idiots who got into a coin and made some unrealised profits feed into the delusion that there is liquidity to exit these shitcoin honeypots.
• You have the meme coin creators trying to capture lightning in a bottle and issuing a ticker based on a trending topic to dump on you.

Then there’s you, who ends up paying for the entire operation.

The formula is beautifully simple: Take one part dog-themed mascot, add two parts rocket emojis, sprinkle liberally with “TO THE MOON” posts, and voilà – you’ve got yourself a token that makes Beanie Babies look like a stable investment.

These coins don’t just ride Bitcoin’s coattails; they’ve set up a whole tailoring shop back there.

TikTok Brain-rotted Users Make For Perfect Exit Liquidity.

Brain rot is often associated with Gen Z and Alpha lingo and trending topics in their circles, but it happens to everyone who spends enough time online, or is it ‘chronically online.’

When social media is the bulk of your content consumption diet, gateway to the internet and source of trusted information, you are merely a passive consumer, ready to be told what to do.

If enough people who enough people you trust “put you on” something you’re not doing to bother DYOR (Doing Your Own Research), you’re just going to sign up for the app, make your deposit or cook your credit card.

Making cultivating an abundance of social media zombies worthwhile since you have a hoarder of exit liquidity ready and waiting to bail you out of your trade. Why bother selling useless courses, endorsing products, and doing brand deals when you can earn money by selling your followers hope in the form of on-chain metadata?

Gen Z Gooning Over The Gambler’s Fallacy

Now, you’d think that if you were one of the lucky few who struck a fortune in a meme coin and could trade it out, you would be happy and on your merry way, but survivorship bias is a hell of a drug.

People have very little appreciation of how to play the odds and how unlikely it can be to strike it rich in this game, so even when they do, they tend to put the chips back on the table due to the gambler’s fallacy.

Eventually, that money gets recycled!

The real magic happens when you realise these coins are essentially a game of musical chairs where the music is social media trends, and the chairs are made of quicksand.

But hey, at least the memes are funny, right?

Play Stupid Games, But Take Accountability

Meme coins are what you get when you cross a Ponzi scheme with a Reddit thread and feed it nothing but energy drinks and FOMO. They’re the cryptocurrency equivalent of trying to get rich by buying lottery tickets based on your pet’s birthday – except lottery tickets don’t come with Discord servers full of people spamming rocket emojis.

We’re already starting to see the craziness unfold with “crypto moms” bragging about their “I like the puppy” investment thesis, astrology girlies betting on star sign tokens and a new favourite, 15-year-old “devs” and “quants” rug-pulling degens on live streams.  

No shade on Mum; she’s teaching her son how to get rugged early in life; it’s a valuable lesson to learn; we all had to go through it, and the sooner you experience it, the sooner you can take corrective action or just decent into becoming a degenerate gambler!

It really can go either way at this point.

Kid outperforming all of us pic.twitter.com/AO2u5afvCM

— TTI (@TikTokInvestors) November 14, 2024

This is my quant, my quantitive, my math specialist. Notice anything about him? He is 15, and he’s already earned three meme coins; yeah, I’m sure it’s a bubble!

the gen z $quant made me lose 50 $SOL but alteast it was entertaining pic.twitter.com/CvU9ixeqVU

— goob (@goobSOL) November 20, 2024

Cancel the streaming services, stack sats, and watch the fireworks

We’re only getting started. We will have a few local tops along the way, but eventually, we will reach the inevitable Great Meme Coin Massacre™ – coming to a blockchain near you.

As a Bitcoiner watching this circus, you’re essentially that person in a horror movie who knows the teenagers shouldn’t split up and go into the dark basement, but hey, they’re gonna do it anyway.

The best you can do is kick back, stack sats, and prepare your finest collection of “I told you so” GIFs for when the whole house of cards comes tumbling down faster than a Jenga tower in an earthquake.

There’s a certain zen-like peace in accepting that no amount of well-reasoned arguments about monetary policy or store of value principles will convince someone who’s betting their financial future on a token named after Elon Musk’s hamster’s second cousin.

When the music stops, and the liquidity tide goes out, we’ll see who’s been swimming naked while holding bags of worthless tokens – and while it won’t be pretty, at least the memes about the memes will be chef’s kiss magnificent.

Consider it nature’s way of teaching financial literacy, just with more crying Wojak NFTs.