I won’t write the term here, because it contains a common profanity, but you can probably guess what it is.
Featuring the Japanese dog breed that is its name, shiba inu was branded as a “killer” of doge coin, an earlier cryptocurrency based on a meme of that same canine type.
I do not consider that S-H-I term to be an insult, since I see 90 per cent of cryptocurrencies to be such coins.
The uninitiated often think that the different coins, because of their existence as coins, must have something deeply in common with each other.
In one, the first panel shows the traditional evolution picture of ape to human; the next panel is labelled “Bitcoin Twitter” and shows apes and humans, and half-apes and proto-humans, walking together.
The field is new, and thus its people are all themselves new to some degree.
Life had imitated art in that Kanye, as a character in the animated comedy South Park, similarly does not get a joke and kills the comedian responsible.
Then the hype went up in 2017 when the Ethereum platform took off, making it even easier for people to create their own digital assets.
Then there were the actual malicious scams. I remember walking into an event in 2017 in which a promoter quoted Proverbs 3:5, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” That project, iPro Network, would raise US$26 million in a “fraudulent pyramid scheme,” according to the U.S.
The founders had programed the coin to be unsellable for others, and when the value peaked, they sold all they had, tanking the price, and then absconded in a manoeuvre called a “rug pull.” In the words of Mark Twain, history is rhyming.
But when I think of retail investors jumping into them, I always think of a Twitter story I read recently from a crypto journalist.
The coins are easy to buy, the memes are lighthearted, and in the current bull market, as shown in a recent case in Germany, even a hamster randomly picking coins can stumble into gains.
New entrants need to understand that cryptocurrencies are one level into the unknown up from mainstream investing, and within crypto, the meme coins are another level up from the established ones.
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