8/20/2021

Headline, August 21 2021/ ''' '' IDIOT COIN IDIOT '' '''


''' '' IDIOT COIN

 IDIOT '' '''



I AM THE IDIOT BEHIND IDIOT COIN : And the true believers are bleeding but undaunted. The rise of crypto feels inevitable to them as the perfect rebuke to a banking system they neither like nor trust. Plus, hype coins have elements of spectator sport.

There's a sense that the louder a coin's fans shout - on social media, rather in the stands - the richer they will get. Frantically hyping a coin online is known as ''shilling'' and everyone in the cryptosphere knows people who shilled one night and were shilled and were flush the next morning.

The dream of instant riches has been around for as long as the money. Only the source of the fortune changes. Gold, tulips and mortgage- backed securities have all taken a turn as the surefire investment vehicle of choice for investors in a hurry.

THEY HAVE NAMES THAT MAKE THEM SOUND DELICIOUS, like Cookie Coin. Or headed for outer space, like Pluto Coin. Or space-bound and delicious, like Astro Cake which was described this way : ''Created 5 minutes ago. SAFE.''

Hype coins, as they're known, sit squarely on the flashy, speculative end of the cryptocurrency business. Every day, dozens of them are created around the world by developers promising fortunes to would-be investors. It usually ends poorly. The vast majority of these tokens are worthless within a couple of weeks. The developers, on the other hand, can make tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes a lot more.

Despite track record, hype coins have become the investments of choice for millions of people, most of them men in their 30s, or younger, and convinced that the economy writ large is rigged against them.

Some are the same traders who have been leaping into stocks like GameStop and AMC Entertainment. To them, crypto is both a source of hope [in imminent riches] and fellowship [many coins have chats on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, that can sound like faith-based support groups].

It's hard to think of another financial craze in which so many people poured so much into entities with so little intrinsic value. Few hype coins have any utility as currency. Good luck buying lunch with one. Many are minted in numbers rarely seen outside astronomy books - trillions, quadrillions, - which dooms them to vanishingly tiny prices.

From the outside, the hype coin party is a mystery. To understand it, you have to plan and go join it. Which is surprisingly easy. You may have heard that Bitcoin, the granddaddy of crypto, is ''mined'' by power-gobbling supercomputers, a process that verges on the utterly incomprehensible. Making a hype coin, by contrast, is more like ordering a pizza online. The entire process is automated and speedy. The fixings - in this case, what to call it, how many coins to make and so on - are up to you.

So one day in May, I created my own crytocurrency. I did it on a Zoom call with an excitable 36-year old in Taiwan, Dan Arreola, who had posted a tutorial on YouTube about how to make, and promote, a ''scam coin''. It has more than 240,000 views.

''The lowest cost to launch a token is $8,'' he said during our call.

That's if you use a site for the tech savvy. For everyone else, there is a Cointool. After a few minutes of tweaking, and about $300 in fees, I pressed a button. Instantly, 21 million coins were minted. I christened them Idiot Coins.

The name was the first of many ''do not buy'' signs to potential holders, as crypto investors are called. I didn't actually want this coin to soar in value. I wanted it to flop, spectacularly.

The point was to demonstrate that creating a hype coin doesn't take expertise and that many are flimsy and dangerous. Idiot Coin would be a crash test dummy designed to underscore the wisdom of seatbelts. And while laws provide guardrails for these investments, they are mostly ignored. Developers operate with little oversight.

Their main worry is marketing, the fine art of convincing people that a coin will enrich all comers. There are many pages in the hype coin P.R. playbook, and I copied each one - with a twist.

I had a website built, with a How to Buy section that warned against it. [''Step 1. Do not buy Idiot Coin''] I wrote an announcement for CryptoMoonShots, a Reddit page, where new crypto is unveiled. Usually, the coins are breathlessly flogged for their imminent moonward trajectory. I took a different tack.

''Def NOT going to the moon!'' my announcement read. ''Might not get an inch off the ground!''

On July 2, I activated this modest little promotional contraption. Then I stood back and hoped for the worst. Ideally, the level of enthusiasm would not exceed that of the person who left this message on the CrytoMoonShots announcement :

''My favorite all time Bollywood movie is 3 Idiots. So I'll buy 3 Idiot coins.''

The dream of instant riches has been around for as long as money. Only the source of the fortune changes. Gold, tulips and mortgage-backed securities have all taken a turn as the surefire investment vehicle of choice for investors in a hurry.

Now it's cryptocurrencies. The uninitiated may have the sense that a couple of dozens of them are out there. The actual number is closer to 70,000, according to a site called Token Sniffer. About 100 are created each day.

Most hype coins, though, end in ''rug pulls,'' a manoeuvre in which developers and their allies cash out their tokens as they peak amid a burst of carefully orchestrated advertising. The price plummets; trading ends. On the Coinopsy website, there's a list of few thousand ''dead coins.'' The most common causes of death are ''scam'' and ''abandoned''.

The honor and serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Cryptocurrencies, Social Media, and the World, continues. The World Students Society thanks author David Segal.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society - for every subject in the world- : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

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