@vgr

The fundamental idiocy of memecoins is the belief that trading useless information at warp speed somehow makes it useful. Like there’s some special relativity type law that increases the mass of objects as they approach the speed of light. A dumb joke is not worth a billion dollars simply because you traded a penny 100 billion times in an hour. Or because you took out a million dollar flash loan for 1 minute to participate in it. If you trade it fast enough at sufficient volume it doesn’t magically turn into Nvidia or Google stock. Buy the rumor/sell the news is at least a plausible strategy. Buy the rumor/sell the rumor with nothing ever rising to the level of news is noise. Trading sadly is about the rate at which actually materially new information enters a market and is priced in in some proportion to how it’s actually transforming the world. Not about how fast your clever machine can spin it around. And most information worth trading on is boring and banal, not culturally stimulating. If you want a vivid demonstration of this, go look at Vegas slot machines. The nickel and dime slots often have stimulating “narratives” based on latest licensed Hollywood movies etc. The more serious dollar slots have boring interfaces with less jazz. Nickel/dime/quarter slots are basically slow ways to lose money while being mildly “entertained” by hooks into cultural ephemera. Fast food kid meals with cheap toys. Table games like poker and blackjack and sports betting try to articulate real information markets (about player skills). Still not stuff I’d bet on but at least I can respect it. A sports bettor is at least doing meaningful hard thinking about real information about skilled people doing skilled things. For the same reason, I can respect prediction markets though I don’t play in that casino either. Bullshit “narratives” are a tell of low-stakes gambling dungeons. If you’re going to run a casino economy, at least run a good casino. All this applies to creator coins/writer coins too. I see no mechanisms that elevate those games above the memecoin game.

3 replies

2 recasts

24 reactions