Meme coin
Also called: shitcoin, joke coin
A cryptocurrency created from nothing, often as a joke, whose only value is who buys next.
Created out of thin air — frequently literally as a joke, named after an animal, a person, or whatever is trending that week.
Even by the standards of cryptocurrency there is nothing underneath: no technology being built, no problem being solved, no revenue, no claim on anything. The entire proposition is that someone will pay more later.
That makes the structure straightforwardly zero-sum. Money entering is money leaving someone else, minus what the platform takes. For one holder to profit substantially, others must lose, and the ones who lose are almost always the ones who arrived last — which is to say the ones who heard about it from an advert or a stranger online.
The marketing leans hard on urgency and community, and on the story of someone who put in very little and got out with a great deal. That person may well exist. The people on the other side of that trade do not get interviewed.
If a thing has no way of producing value, the only source of your gain is someone else’s loss. Worth knowing before, not after.
Words on this page
- Cryptocurrency — Digital money run by networks of computers rather than a government or bank.
- Broker — The business that buys and sells investments on your behalf — the shop, not the merchandise.
- Option — A contract giving the right to buy or sell something at a set price before a set date.
Related terms
Covered properly in Learn.
This term appears in the glossary of The Quiet Fortune, Volume I.