One energumen’s deep dive into meme coins

(Unrealistic Meme coin trader – usually charts are mostly going down, generated by ChatGPT)

This article is purely satirical and should not be taken as financial advice. It does not aim to encourage or dissuade trading in crypto markets. If you’re here looking for financial wisdom, then “have fun staying poor”.  

1 – The 47th president of the United States of America

~

The 6th of november will be remembered in the crypto world. In the last few hours of the 5th and early 6th on Wednesday, when Trump swiping victory seemed inevitable, markets reacted gleefully. Trump’s promises of deregulation, tax cuts, and reduced government spending propelled the S&P 500 to all-time highs, gaining over 6% in just a week. Another asset class skyrocketed as a result: Cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin’s price, hovering at $62,000, surged to nearly $100,000 by late November [1] [2]. For the layman – meaning 99% of us, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoins are highly volatile and risky assets, based on a technology – blockchain – that is as comprehensible as quantum computing. Less known, however, is the wild underworld of crypto markets, making Bitcoin appear as stable as gold by comparison. Billions of dollars are being poured daily into this space: a strange and eerie mix of social media virality, meme & incel culture, new and old money. Behold the meme coin market. A redditor described it wittingly: “If cryptocurrencies are casinos, meme coins are the shadowy back alleys where sketchy players gamble on cardboard boxes with incomplete decks of cards and rusted box cutters in their pockets”. Who in their right mind would venture into this?

I always had an interest in finance, mainly as a passive observer and an avid economic news reader. Yet constantly consuming content from reputable newspapers the likes of The Economist or the Financial times have unintentionally skewed my appreciation for cryptocurrencies. Trump’s election motivated me to study the topic beyond this biased media coverage. A few days after the 5th, I had managed to get in touch with a meme coin and NFT trader based in Dubai, to better get a feel of the latest crypto craze. The call was purely improvised, I had not prepared any challenging questions, even if I wanted to. I let him give me his sales pitch, and paint the rosy picture I believed to be untrue. In all fairness, we did agree on a few points: “everyone had this thought at one point in their lives: what if I invested in crypto earlier?” he told me. Guilty of having had that thought, I definitely am. But from the readings I have done, the latest of which being Zeke Faux’s excellent book on the infamous FTX’s crypto exchange collapse, I had developed a strong skepticism towards the crypto movement [3]. These assets simply cannot be sustainable long term, so I believed, though I was willing to listen and be proven wrong. By the end of our chat, he convinced me to study the crypto markets, download a few apps and scrutinize trading websites to start making “mock trades” as training. I was willing to immerse myself fully into this realm, at my own risk. Thus my journey in the meme coin universe began. I was woefully unprepared for what was to come.     

2 – A trader’s glossary

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Understanding this world requires familiarizing oneself with an alternative lexicon, a bizarre jargon of Wall Street, Twitter & Reddit slangs, abbreviations and acronyms, with a hint of machismo sprinkled atop. To make the read more digestible, below is a list of the most essential terms. They will be scattered throughout the following paragraphs, hence learn them as thoroughly as I did [4].

 

Trader’s slang:	Market terms:
Meme coins: shit coinsShit coins: meme coins	MCap (Market Capitalization): total number of shares x price per share
Ape (aping): Herd mentality pushing individuals to buy into the latest crypto craze. First emerged during the NFT cryptopunk fad in 2017	Blockchain: technology behind cryptocurrencies. Is a digital decentralized ledger keeping a record of all transactions into “blocks” that any of its users can access freely.
“When lambo?” (short for Lamborghini): fairly self explanatory	ICO (Initial Coin Offering): crypto equivalent of an IPO (Initial Public Offering) in the stock market. When a new coin is selling on trading platforms
HFSP: Have Fun Staying Poor	TV (Trading Volume): number of transactions -purchases & sales – in a given time frame
HSBAF (Holy Shit Bears Are Fucked): Poking fun at early sellers in a bullish market	Pump & dump: crypto scam whereby a select few inflate the prices of their assets through frenzy and FOMO, to then sell at peaks
Rug pull: literally pulling the rug from under one’s feet. When coin developers get early investors but cash out before the project completion, leaving the investors with a worthless asset. Getting “rugged”	Whales: investor holding a large amount of digital currency. They have the ability to move markets in their favors
Jeets (short for jitters): nervous investors selling early in fear of a sudden market downturn	Bullish: expectation of favorable market conditions and price hikes
Degens (short for degenerates): how meme coin traders call each others	Bearish: timid market and falling share prices
Meme: image, drawing, video of humorous nature copied, repurposed and spread rapidly over the internet	CEX (Cryptocurrency exchange): The most prominent being Binance and Coinbase. A meme
HODL (Hold On for Dear Life): term popularized during the Gamestop saga. HODLing means retaining an asset, no matter what the market fundamentals are showing	ATH (All Time Highs): also described as “mooning”. Expected rise in asset prices
Twitter: known as Twitter, preferably not called XX: formerly called Twitter, preferably called Twitter	KOLs (Key opinion leaders): The whole sphere moves according to the KOLs social media activity, coin promotion, clickbaity FOMO posts
FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out): probably the single most important mentality in this space	Seed phrase: The key to your wallet, to never lose, to never share with anyone otherwise you are done for
DeFi (Decentralized finance): Cutting financial intermediaries and directly transacting in P2P networks through the blockchain

3 – I, crypto skeptic and meme coin trader 

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Well, where to start? Genuinely, this is non-rhetorical, where to actually start? From the onset, one is faced with a tsunami of signups: crypto exchanges websites, wallet search engine extensions, trading websites, media activity trackers, fraud checkers, each to be done in a specific order… While pitfalls abound, following the steps meticulously can get you trading-ready in just a couple of hours. Of all the accounts and passwords incurred by this signup bonanza, one is absolutely crucial: the seed phrase [5]. 

I suspect I am far from the only one who missed it completely at first when opening a Phantom wallet (popular crypto wallet extension). Only a day later I realized that those 12 random words displayed during the account’s creation are the one and only key to my wallet. Luckily, I was able to quickly retrieve them from my settings, and write them down on a page, inside a sturdy notebook. The seed phrase is what gives you access to your wallet. Say for instance that a user loses his computer, the only way to access his wallet again on a new laptop would be to have this seed phrase. It is unrecoverable, so every user is asked to store this phrase carefully. Traders are going to ludicrous lengths to record it safely: from the novices like myself in a notebook, to the amateurs metal-stamping it, to the pros creating multiple copies on stainless steel tags, splitting them into pieces and storing them at relatives’ houses inside sealed safes and burying them. A whole article could be dedicated to seed phrase storage alone, but I need to highlight a few convoluted examples to truly grasp the ridiculousness of the process: one owner used ultraviolet markers to inscribe his wallet key across his house’s walls (clever?). Another shaved his dog, tattooed it on his skin, and let the hairs grow back (I hope he does not run away). But my absolute favorite is the following, quoted straight from Reddit: “Put it wherever you want and get a dog, a BIG one”, to which another user responded in the most serious of tone: “which breed would you recommend”? It would be easy to scoff at those individuals, but when your wallet has potentially hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in it, losing access to it is no laughing matter. So what happens if your seed phrase gets stolen, divulged or simply forgotten? Well, my hope is that your life savings were not all there, because it is highly likely you will never see that money again. Stefan Thomas, an early Bitcoin adopter learned it the hard way by locking himself out of his $321 million wallet after forgetting the phrase [6]. It is estimated that 20% of all Bitcoins are permanently lost due to misplaced keys and wallets (quick math, that is about $381 billion at today’s valuation) [7]. Another case happened on my first day of trading, when an investor was live-streaming on Twitch and inadvertently showed his seed phrase while navigating on his desktop. A viewer caught a glimpse of it and accessed his wallet. The punishment struck one minute later: the content creator’s $100,000 suddenly vanished. Live-streaming one’s exploits and/or criminal activities will be a recurring theme throughout this reporting [8]. Unlike conventional banking, where insurance mechanisms can recover stolen funds, the DeFi world leaves users entirely accountable for their losses.. So, keep your seed phrase offline, tangibly stored on a hard drive and on a physical object – lesson learned. There is one additional caveat: inheritance. What if something were to happen to you? Who would inherit the wallet? How would they access it if only you knew how and where it is stored? Should you write it on your will & testament, bearing in mind that in many countries those documents can become public records after one’s passing? (Again, this topic would deserve a piece of its own) [9][10]. 

Now all set up after a couple days of practice, with a starting fund of 25 euros, my “degen”- self was ready to unleash his genius strategies and outsmart the deep-pocketed whales dominating the exchanges. Firstly, where to invest? The tokens (meme coins) i would bet on differ from cryptocurrencies in one major way: whilst cryptocurrencies are their own blockchains, tokens are traded within a specific blockchain using as money the very cryptocurrency of the chain [11]. The major cryptocurrencies are Etherum, Solana, BSC to name a few [12]. Tokens are traded in each one of these blockchains using their parent currency: Solana (blockchain) and its currency the Sol has attracted a lot of attention recently, and seemed to have some of the highest Trading Volume (yes TV) of all the blockchains. Therefore after buying Sols on a major crypto exchange (Coinbase), I proceeded to send those funds to my wallet, then from the wallet to a trading website. Now it is time to involve your imagination and your Buffettian instincts: can you guess the daily Trading Volume (purchases & sales) on the 4th largest blockchain, Solana? I am willing to bet that whatever number you came up with, you underestimated it, by A LOT. For the past week, the average daily sum exchanged amounted to over $8 billions, billions with a “b”. An ungodly amount. Again bear in mind, this is just on the Solana blockchain alone [13] [14]. The total TV on meme coin markets is sitting as of the 24th of November at $28.39b per day [15]. As a striking comparison, that is 10% of NASDAQ’s daily TV  [16]. Those numbers would not be so shocking if it were not for the fact that meme coins have absolutely no underlying value and use cases. Only one aspect makes them more than absurd speculative assets: their virality. Enter Twitter (no not X, Twitter).  

You would be foolish to jump into the first meme coin that pops up on your screen. Tens of thousands are created daily, therefore the most – and only – important metric is the social media presence of the coin’s community. If there is a high activity, major influencers (or KOLs) endorsements, then you might consider investing in it. The “memability” of the coin is crucial, the more absurd and grotesque the better. Exit rationality and embrace with open arms herd mentality, virality and Twitter’s algorithm. As one major KOL puts it candidly: “bet on strong cult and narratives”. Some have indeed argued that the crypto world is a cult in all but name [17]. Before long, to support the token you invested in, you will need to put your ethics aside and share posts from questionable personalities. If you are politically not tilting towards the far right, you would be shocked by how the ultra conservatives have hijacked the platform since Musk’s takeover [18]. Speaking of Musk, he might be with Trump the single most powerful KOL of them all, a true king maker. His deeds are followed closely by the meme coin community, ready to jump on any occasions to tokenize anything he publishes. The DOGE coin saga epitomizes his power: in 2021 after his public support of the token (and the covid crypto super cycle), DOGE price soared by nearly 21,000%, and is now one of the major cryptocurrency with a MCap of over $62 billion [19]. The one “serious” coin I ended up aping was supported by none other than the far-right, misogynistic, alleged sex aggressor and trafficker, Andrew Tate [20]. I still feel sick knowing that I had to react to and share his nauseating content to promote the coin I purchased. But 10 million followers is 10 million followers; my virtue sacrificed on the altar of profit-making was the price I was willing to pay to get the lambo.    

After following the main KOLs, the subsequent step is to be able to spot the few genuine coins in an ocean of fraudulent ones. Luckily, in a market 50 times more volatile than Bitcoin – where roughly 40% of all ICOs (Initial Coin Offering) are pump & dumps, 30% blatant rug pulls and the rest guaranteed to crash within minutes of launch [21] –  tools have been created to identify the frauds from the lesser frauds, the main one being RugCheck (you cannot make it up). Scams are the norm, get used to it. It is not that investors are actively avoiding those risky coins anyway, quite on the contrary. The riskier the asset, the higher the potential yield, anything under a “2x” (or 100% price increase) is not worth it. The Dubai investor told me that a week prior to our chat he bought a few hundred dollars worth of a trendy coin called PEPE and cashed out of his position a day later with nearly $100k , a “1000x” return on investment if you will. This is no exaggeration, those stories happen daily and are widely shared on Twitter. A few winners bask in the media limelight whilst the losing majority is being swept under the rug for no one to see. In this zero-sum game, there can only be success stories. I ended-up investing all my 25 euros into a coin called $Barsik, a popular cat meme. Diversification was never my strong suit [22][23]. The TV on this one single token gave me vertigo: at the time of purchase, the 24h Trading Volume amounted to nearly 200 million dollars – on a single meme coin – sheer madness. All I had to do was sit back, and wait anxiously for the price to move in one direction or another, hoping for a Binance listing to moon the coin’s value.   

On the second day, social media were taken by storm with the latest swindle story, indicative of this back alley’s reckless gambling. A teenager created a coin called $Quant for a few SOLs (1 SOL = $238). Once listed on the Solana blockchain, the coin attracted early investors, to the teen’s surprise, and sold all of his tokens a dozen seconds later for 128 SOLs, cashing in about $30,000, a ludicrous return on investment. How do we know this happened? It was all live-streamed by the teen himself, for all to see (I told you live-streaming would be this piece’s guiding thread). With more money made in 12 seconds than most earn in months of hard labor, one could comfortably assume that this scammer would disappear with his gains. You could not be more wrong: he followed up by creating two more tokens, one mockingly called “Sorry”, which were, you guessed it, both rug-pulled immediately after their ICOs, adding another $20,000 to his wallet. A witch hunt soon followed with bitter investors doxing the kid’s address and parents’ details online. Just an average day on the meme coin space  [24]. 

Investing in those tokens will guarantee you to experience one if not multiple rug pulls weekly, potentially inducing disastrous losses. Wiser investors quickly puzzled out that, instead of risking their money in this degenerate gambling house, they would rather invest in the cryptocurrencies used to trade meme coins, namely Sols and Ethers: owning shovels during a gold rush so to speak. And it is paying off: since January 2024, Sols & Ethers are up 236% and 134% respectively [25][26]. 

I do not have malign intent in solely focusing on the wildest part of the crypto market, to discredit the overall technology. However it is impossible to ignore – no matter what the believers will claim – that cryptocurrencies are riddled with inefficiencies, ubiquitous points of failure, and a general lack of accountability. My aforementioned stories on the Solana blockchain are quite niche and pale in comparison to the massive heists repeatedly occurring on bigger exchanges; the latest being a gang of early 20s halfits managing to steal $240 million worth of Bitcoin from a single wallet on a major CEX. How? By simply conducting a fake phone call impersonating a Google support employee to reset the victim’s Google password. After making him click on a phoney link, the robbers got straight access to his computer and wallet, syphoning out 4,064 Bitcoins. The perfect crime, if not for the fact that those cretins filmed their heist, with their real names displayed on the bottom left of their monitors (what is wrong with youngsters filming themselves?). Regardless, their lavish spending on luxury cars, grape-sized diamond solitaires and Hermès Birkins bag – handed out in nightclubs as if they were Gin&Ts – would have caught the IRS attention before long. Two of them have already been arrested [27][28].

Deceased or vanished, I cannot help but picture the quasar-like speed at which Bitcoin’s creator(s) Satoshi Nakamoto might be spinning in his grave watching his invention being spoiled to this extent. [29][30]. Perhaps having a closer look at the technology’s infancy might help us discern whether it has veered off its original course or if it was programmed from the very beginning to be an unregulated chaotic mess.

4 – From idealism

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“Boy, was that […] a shitty deal”. These infamous words voiced angrily by Senator Levin at Goldman Sachs executives during a 2010 congressional hearing, felt like the only bit of justice in a time when the economic pain of the recession was only being felt by main street. From a leaked internal email, the investment bank’s employee describes a “shitty” mortgage package (MBS) he just sold to an unaware investor, at the same time as having had derivatives (bets) made against that very product – the wonders of unbridled financialization [31]. While foreclosures were displacing Americans by millions and the Eurozone was on the precipice of a sovereign debt crisis, the banks responsible for this recession had managed to secure bailouts in the hundreds of billions of dollars, funded with taxpayers’ money [32][33]. No matter how guilty they were, governments came to their rescue to avoid a financial meltdown. Too big to fail, too big to jail, the settlement costs from civil and criminal lawsuits brought forward simply became for them the cost of doing business [34]. Globally, many economies have not fully recovered from the crisis. One dramatic figure summarizes the impact of the great financial crisis: In Greece, the household gross disposable income – the amount of money a household can spend or save after taxes and mandatory charges are deducted – is still down over 20% from 2008 levels [35][36]. Now open once again a history book, and read it through the lens of near stagnant living standards for the bottom percentile of the population [37][38]. A lot will suddenly make more sense: the rise of political extremes, the yellow vests, Brexit, Donald Trump… Crypto?   

The great financial crisis was the culmination of the erosion of trust between the public on one side and large corporations and governments on the other. The 2011 popular movement Occupy Wall Street embodied that feeling [39]. In light of such injustice, was there a way to rid ourselves of this unfair centralized financial system? What if an alternative system, peer-to-peer, autonomous, trustless, could allow individuals to transact transparently and directly between one another? The Decentralized Finance movement – or DeFi – is at the core of Bitcoin’s whitepaper philosophy. Released in 2008 by one or multiple anonymous author(s) under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, this 8 pages long document was the foundation of the blockchain system and its first modern cryptocurrency, Bitcoin [40]. The blockchain would enable users to access a digital ledger across a worldwide computer network, forever fixing the “double spending” problem for digital transactions. There is an admirable simplistic beauty to this document. I invite anyone to read it. It is no wonder that in the aftermath of the great recession, the whitepaper resonated with many. 

The real world uses of blockchain and cryptocurrencies could be significant: as simple peer-to-peer payments, reserve currencies or as bulwarks against authoritarian states, only your imagination is the limit. Say for instance that an NGO has had its funding streams cut by a state actor, by cutting access to established financing systems (SWIFT for example), cryptos can enable individuals to bypass those restrictions. Julian Assange’s Wikileaks has benefited greatly from that [41]. Or what about if a country has crippling three digits inflation rates due to government mismanagement? In Argentina, consumer price inflation was sitting at 193% year-on-year in October 2024. How do Argentines hedge against it? Firstly by saving very little in pesos and rather storing value in goods, but also by acquiring assets in dollars (in a 2023 ministerial report, it is estimated that Argentines hold $371 billion worth of assets in dollars, equivalent to $8,000 per citizen) [42]. That was until cryptocurrencies arrived, and are now slowly becoming the reserve currency of choice in the country. In 2023, $84.5 billion worth of crypto transactions were recorded in Argentina [43]. Many local companies are also rolling out crypto debit cards for simple instore purchases [44]. But similarly to nuclear fission, crypo’s technology is a double-edged sword. 

5 – Through troubles

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Beneficial use cases of this technology outlined in the whitepaper turned out to be realistic and applicable: giving back people full ownership of their finances. Without any legislative boundaries however, human nature quickly prevailed.  

When pushing the DeFi/libertarian philosophy to its extreme, i.e advocating for individualism and minimal state involvement in people’s lives, websites such as the Silk Road were inevitably going to sprout. In the pre-blockchain era, one major hurdle for illegal activity to thrive online was payments. The Darkweb, created in the early 2000s, provided anonymity to its users by hiding their IP addresses [45], but payment methods remained mostly done via credit card or paypal, instantly leaving a paper trail. Bitcoin changed that paradigm. Now anonymity could be retained throughout the online experience. Ross Ulbricht’ Silk Road took full advantage of that. What at first started as a way for him to sell his homegrown hallucinogenic mushroom turned within a few years into a gargantuan online black market, recording $192 million in sales between June 2012 and October 2013  [46][47]. Anything could be purchased there, LSD, steroids, ATM machine hacking tutorials, murderers-for-hire… Once again, only your imagination is the limit [48]. The Silk Road example is one in a myriad of cases in the early 2010s when crypto was used for illicit activities. In a Robin Hood-like twist, it was uncovered in 2021 that an individual named James Zhong managed to steal over 50,000 Bitcoins from the Silk Road in the 2010s, now valued at nearly $5 billion [49]. 

Let’s crunch some numbers: At the time of Ulbricht’s arrest in October 2013, there were 11,7 million Bitcoins in circulation. The US government seized 144,000 of it on Silk Road’s accounts [50], plus 70,000 more in 2020 from wallets linked to the defunct website [51]. Add to that the 50,000 from Mr Zhong. The official seized quantity of Bitcoins directly linked to the Silk Road amount to nearly 2,5% of the entire 2013 Bitcoin supply. I said “official” because this website was notorious for security breaches and hacks, a lot more is unaccounted for, on top of all of its 100,000 users’ personal wallets. I suspect, although impossible to prove, that this figure of 2,5% might be in reality much higher, hence the following conclusion: In the early 2010s, the opaque nature of cryptos was a direct enabler of online criminal activity, and not much else. I could have also thrown in the mix the 850,000 Bitcoins stolen and never recovered from Mt.Gox crypto exchange in 2014, but that would be a slight overkill [52]. Vile state actors also have not missed out on the opportunity. To this day, I am still imagining how much more enrichment North Korea was able to do with the billions it stole in crypto over the years [53].

A 05/12/2024 edit: I promised myself not to update the story again but felt compelled to, considering the latest news: UK’s National Crime Agency just uncovered an multibillion dollars money laundering scheme whereby Russian agents were exchanging ill-gotten cryptocurrencies (mainly Tethers) with cash from major European drug cartels. A win-win scenario: cartels get their laundered cryptos while Russian hackers get their cash. The NCA estimates that £100b is laundered in and out of the UK every year, £5b of which is done via cryptocurrencies [63].  

6 – To adoption

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The tumultuous early years of the technology gave way to a new phase: Institutionalization.

Nowadays, cryptos are virtually everywhere. In 2024, two years after the pandemic boom and bust cycle, It is estimated that 6.8% of the world population are owning some kind of cryptocurrency [54], with higher ownership rates unsurprisingly in places such as Argentina and Turkey. According to Pew research, 17% of adults in the USA claim to have invested in, traded or purchased cryptocurrencies [55], a majority of whom are young males. Even if there is still little confidence in the technology, the march to mass adoption seems unstoppable, no matter how energy hungry it is [56]. And it is not only retail investors jumping onboard the crypto train: every actor is. With the SEC approving the creation of Bitcoin Exchange Trading Funds (ETFs) in January 2024, large institutions are now adding them to their portfolio. To put into perspective the excitement of the SEC announcement, the asset manager behemoth BlackRock created its own Bitcoin ETFs, and within a month after launch, surpassed its 15 years old Gold ETF in valuation ($34b against $32b), with even sovereign wealth fund diversifying in them [57]. Trump and other leaders have proposed creating “strategic Bitcoin reserves”, signaling even wider institutional acceptance [58]. The days when pundits were predicting crypto’s imminent death after the Covid super-cycle and the many exchange scandals (Luna, FTX, Binance) feel like light years away from us [59]. The blockchain technology itself is being tested and slowly implemented in many aspects of our lives: In cybersecurity to secure health records, in manufacturing for supply chain transparency, or in the management of smart city systems [60]. Yet many such projects are facing implementation and regulatory obstacles due to their complexity [61]. Does blockchain truly offer value in every domain [62]? 

Two weeks after the call with my Dubai contact, I attended a Bit2Me conference to meet the crypto enthusiasts I have until then never encountered. The people I ended up chatting with were the perfect illustration of where the technology is standing in December 2024. The meeting was located in an obscure mall in the middle of a video game arcade. Amongst the flashing light, lazer sounds, kids and young couples shouting at each other over Street Fighter battles, 30 investors slowly gathered and discussed anything crypto. One individual stood out in this clique of 40 years old, grey-haired, turtle neck-wearing investors. He was in his mid-30s from Columbia, with a distinct geeky look. He was an early Bitcoin adopter who just like me, happened to stumble upon this event on social media. I sensed nostalgia in his voice when he recalled his first Bitcoin acquisition in the 2010s. To get the token he had to meet the vendor at a local café and pay cash. So sketchy were the early days of crypto that he even brought along a friend in case he would get robbed. Disillusioned about the direction crypto was taking, he was nonetheless still enamoured with its idealistic beginnings.  

In the end, Nakamoto’s creation could be considered a successful failure. A success in that it has gone from shady deals at cafés between tech nerds to being widely adopted by public and private institutions alike, all under a decade. A failure in that the technology has been ironically embraced by the very forces it was trying to fight.

7 – “The only way to win, is not to play” 

~

Three weeks in and I was still HODLing to my cat coin $Barsik. Down 50%, and Twitter having long moved on from the initial hype, the coin seemed to be set for a slow death, unless a miracle listing happens. Yet I was still relentlessly analysing the coin’s price fluctuation on my phone: in public transports, on the streets, in bed, sometimes in the middle of the night. Tell you what, this crypto business is terribly addictive. That redditor was on point when calling it a casino, because it is all but in name. Gambling is a well established industry for a reason, it prints literal metric tons of money, or rather transfers those funds from many pockets to very few ones. To not risk getting my credit card out and placing more bets to recoup my losses, I took the decision to set an automatic sell & buy order at minus 80% and plus 100% of my original position, and let the chips fall where they may.       

My only purpose in this market was being the useful idiot, betting small and losing all, with my money being funneled into the pockets of whales and their armies of unbeatable bot traders. I am looking forward to this part of the crypto world being heavily regulated so people with unstable finances, living pay-check to pay-check are not sucked in by this gambling madness. In the end, no matter how attractive those new markets are, there is no way to get rich quick without considerable risks.

Major cryptos – at least Bitcoins – are here to stay. I cannot recommend anyone not to invest in them, but I surely can suggest to at least keep an eye out and stay informed about their evolutions. But when it comes to the rest of the crypto circus—the meme coins, the pump-and-dumps, and the wild west of DeFi—one timeless truth applies: “The only way to win, is not to play”.

Sources: 

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[16] NASDAQ Trader. (2024). Daily market summary. Retrieved from https://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=DailyMarketSummary

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