Teen creates memecoin, dumps it, earns $50,000
Unsurprisingly, he and his family were doxed by angry traders.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/teen-creates-memecoin-dumps-it-and-earns-50000/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=ownedOpen linkView original on fedia.io297
Comments82
"Earns"
IDK what you want to call it.
It's silly to get mad at the kid for selling a shitty meme coin people were willing to pay for when that's the whole reason they exist.
enough people automatically buy into every coin created, a couple bucks here, a couple bucks there, hoping one will take off, that's where this 50k bump earnings, and the millions in valuation comes from. kid invested $300 buying a stake in his own coin, he could've lost it. he didn't.
Better words to use here:
It's none of those.
There is not, and never was, any reasonable belief or expectation that there was any path to resembling an actual currency. The entire market is shitty gambling hoping you're the one who times their sale correctly.
You clearly don't know what fraud is.
All shitcoins are idiotic gambling. The entire nonsense game is to be the one who sells their bullshit before everyone gets bored of it. Winning against everyone else playing the same stupid game isn't fraud.
You realize what he did is literally the only reason those coins exist?
Nobody was investing. This isn't taking a stock of an actual company and manipulating it to steal from shareholders. The only purpose of these coins is to play this bad game.
Yeah. Everyone who got mad at him is basically like, 'Hey! Fuck you, asshole, for selling before I got a chance to sell! I wanted to do that, but you did it before I could do it! No fair!'
Also: the coins are now with far more than when he sold. So strangely, the folks who got rug pulled ended up with an actually valuable coin and an opportunity to sell at a high price. Which makes zero sense to me. But they apparently have no reason to complain. It worked out great for everyone, somehow.
Very stupid.
Idiots participate in Bigger Idiot scheme, upset to find out they're the Bigger Idiot.
Scammed
Obviously.
The entire purpose of crypto is a scam. People buy it only because they hope it will later be worth more and they can sell it. Even tho the act of selling it lowers the price especially if they have a lot.
You're saying it's right because it's working as intended and legally it's not prohibited.
Other people say it's a scam because they're putting their personal morals over the law. That's textbook antisocial behavior, and not always a bad thing. The French resistance in WW2 were antisocial, MLK was antisocial, Occupy was antisocial.
It can be bad too, like the KKK or the people from 1/6
But when the majority of a society is antisocial (doesn't matter good or bad ways) that society is usually fucked.
And this week just gave a pretty good example that a majority of people put their personal morals above societies laws.
At a certain point, the people change societies to match their morals, the opposite is always temporary.
I see where you're coming from but then you could easily headline this as "Teenage con man scams $50k"
Just because some people are gullible, and even if they're also often shitty people, it doesn't mean they deserve to be scammed
What promises did he make?
Selling something that has no value for money to people who know it has no value isn't a scam.
As someone who has basically come to see "memecoin" and "scam" as synonyms, I have a hard time having any sympathy for anyone who puts money into this shit. Everyone knows that the endgame of every memecoin is for the creator to walk away with all the profit, right? Enough incidental people win a bit of money to keep everyone gambling that they can beat the scam, but everyone has to know that they're feeding the scam when they buy in, right?
Its theft like every other pump and dump
Just "Gets" would be fine
**..."few" million...
if he mined the coins at home, he basically traded electricity his parents paid for. idk where they mine on this platform tho
Isn't this the basis of how all cryptocurrency work?
When you think about it .... isn't this also how all money works?
That’s not how money works. Fiat currency is just IOU’s, literally, which are discharged when the promissory note returns to its originator (in the case of dollars, the US treasury). Check out Debt the First 5000 Years for an anthropological look at the origins of money.
Whereas I would prefer to live in a moneyless (i.e., debtless) post-scarcity anarchist society, which is how small tribes and communities were organized for tens of thousands of years before the rise of nations, fiat currencies are used to maintain the modern (unimaginably huge) marketplace, whose ostensible purpose is to allocate scarce resources.
Dollars represent faith in the power of the US government to extract taxes from its population. Crypto represents nothing. It stands for nothing. “Coins” come and go, and if you’re the last one standing in the zero-sum game of musical chairs, you lose your savings. For that to happen with dollars, the US government would have to implode, which is unlikely.
Crypto is, quite possibly, the purest form of speculative trading (gambling) we have ever concocted. The only reason I don’t think it should be illegal is that I have no interest in saving people from their own cupidity and greed.
For a large portion of time in those small anarchist communities, they'd raid and kill each other.
How would we prevent that?
You’re absolutely right, and I have no idea. Maybe wait another 100,000 years for the 30% of humanity that lacks abstract moral reasoning to exit the gene pool.
I'm convinced the reason we have so much government is to control that portion. And it's not even doing that good of a job.
Exactly. Now they’ve metastasized into our government. Fucking orcs.
Graeber's book (Debt: The First 5000 Years) is so, so good.
Lol, the debt will never be repaid with taxes.
That’s not the point. The US has the power to extract rents; it doesn’t have to use it.
You live in fantasy land if you think the US has that power, any government that tries this would be overthrown.
The thing is… the market disagrees with you. For now. But hey, put your money where your mouth is! I’ll give you a hundred rubles for a hundred dollars. If you really think the US government is impotent and on the verge of collapse…
Haha, which market disagrees? The bond market, the gold market, the bitcoin market, the housing market?
Since we are discussing dollars and not houses, that would be the FOREX market. The dollar is very strong at the moment.
All money is ious? If you walk up to me and try to hand me money and I don't want it.. it's worth nothing.
No one forces you to accept an IOU, but that’s how “money” is created.
If you want a beer and have nothing suitable to offer in exchange, you might give me an IOU, which I then hand off to someone else in exchange for goods and services, until one day someone asks you for goods and services in exchange for the same IOU that you had used to buy a beer months ago.
These things actually happened^
Yeah, a dollar and a crypto currency has no difference but reputation now. It isn't backed by gold. They are both worthless gambles. The odds of variance is all your saying is different... Which is just reputation really
Again, this is incorrect. The reason dollars are not “backed by gold” (an arbitrary metric since gold is kind of useless — guns or bread or even puppies would make more sense) is that the US dollar is a currency, an IOU, not some sort of finite resource.
Dollars represent public trust in the power of the US government to extract taxes from its citizens. That’s tangible.
Bitcoin represents nothing; or if I’m being generous, I could say that bitcoin’s value represents people’s faith that the game of musical chairs won’t end tomorrow.
It's good you dropped the last part, because it disagreed with the first part.
Nah, it didn’t, but I had written it elsewhere. I didn’t think going on and on about how bitcoin represents nothing was helpful.
I have to use USD to pay my taxes, and if I don't pay my taxes i go to jail. Cryptocurrencies aren't used for anything other than financial speculation
Typical anti-blockchain crypto bashing.
Cryptocurrencies have plenty of uses besides speculation. For example, buying drugs and a plethora of scams.
ya got me right there
But some currencies are backed by countries with armies and such deterrents. Not so many countries currently backing crypto I guess.
Where can I exchange my money for a government army?
Ya, it's all about trust.
I trust the EU to manage the Euro, a meme managing a shitcoin not so much 😋
Money is backed by a state with the (legitimate) monopoly on the use of force. Is has a worth because you must pay your taxes in it or else.
As such, money coined by a state has an inherit value as long as the state is stable.
And said state has both an interest in the stability of the currency as well as tools to influence it that are not available to everyone.
technically yes, difference is one is backed by a nation state, the other is backed by a teenager...
None of this is specific to cryptocurrencies or even money, people do this with stocks (esp penny stocks), precious metals (look at all those "Buy Gold!!" videos), and collectibles (I still remember the beanie baby craze of the late 90s).
This is just gambling, betting that you'll cash out before everyone else, but after the price has run up.
But that's not "how all cryptocurrency works." Yes, cryptocurrencies are valued based on supply and demand, but many aren't actively speculated on and are used more as a currency. For example, Monero isn't attractive for speculation because mining is unprofitable and exchanging with fiat is banned or difficult in many areas. It's great as a currency though because transaction fees are low, transactions are fast, and it has a bunch of privacy features. Bitcoin is more attractive, but not as much for gambling because volumes are too high to get crazy spikes. So you end up with longer ye term speculation in Bitcoin like you'd see with individual large cap stocks. Bitcoin isn't going to 10x overnight, but it's also not going to drop 90% overnight either.
Like anything else, pick carefully, and ideally don't gamble.
Even worse, it is unregulated gambling. In normal gambling there are rules. Yes, the house will always win in the long run as the odds are in their favor, but the game is set up in a transparent way and doesn't change half way through.
Also the original idea of cryptocurrency was never speculation and cashing out. But sadly it has turned into that in 99% of the time.
Yup. The good news is that it's really easy to avoid that nonsense. Stick to the more established currencies and you'll be golden.
"My shitty attempt at being a venture capitalist didn't pan out and I'm angry at the guy who took advantage of my desire for a get rich quick scheme"
Slightly relevant:
"huge fan" 🚩🚩🚩
how can you be a fan of "Hawk Tuah"? It's the unfunniest meme like ever
It was a funny thing for a spontaneous drunk girl to joke about with her friends on a night out.
It should have stayed there, it's so overplayed now.
I think it was funny but that’s completely irrelevant.
Who the fuck forks over any money, much less $50k for… what? What does this coin do that any of the thousands of others don’t? Because someone said a funny thing? …. What??
I have zero sympathy for these dipshits. We’re going to have a lot more of this content in the US over the next 4 years.
I think the video and meme itself were dumb but the fact she ran with it and built a memepire from it and is raking it in from gullible simps is hilarious
They may have meant Talk Tuah the podcast.
"my crypto representative... @"
Dudes about to lose his last $2k to a crypto scam "advocate"
Hilarious
Feels too good to be true
For the people in the article complaining:
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Don't invest in meme coins.
They're called shitcoins for a reason. The only reason people buy them is to time the dump.
This is done thousands of times a day on Pumpfun, not sure why this one merits mention except that there was a backlash.
See Darknet Diaries: Stacc Attack episode for an interesting look at meme coin jackassery.
What I've learned from this article is that I should be creating memecoins because people are very gullible.
I've been considering it tbh... And I know what my target audience would be even. I just don't know if I want to actually go through with it + if I do, I have to buy Monero with it or something so I could launder it, then somehow explain to the tax authority that I've suddenly got a bunch of crypto I'm selling... Though the last part might not be too bad, as long as I do TELL them that I'm selling it and want to pay taxes on it.
Yeah, the tax man doesn't care how you got it, just that they get their cut. Just don't be stupid and not declare that income... They will know.
And then internet trolls briefly pumped the coin again so the kid will always feel like he missed out on $3M.
Good for him
Cryptobros and day traders are indistinguishable from compulsive gamblers
"Do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down?"
The Hawk Tuah coin scammed millions to their insiders, and they were rudely unapologetic about it afterward. They lied about everything they promised their "fans". I cant believe such theft is not illegal
Yalls remember squid game coin?