What’s something you can only say during sex or while perusing Reddit’s “crypto moon shots” community?
Get in quick? HOLD for a life-changing opportunity? We know you like anime asses? Come to think of it, there may actually be some overlap…
Even more absurd: despite the wallet-shaking crash that just shook the crypto market, people are still trying to shill “sh*t coins.”
Though Reddit’s crypto communities have long been disregarded as sources of financial ruin more so than advice, we thought we’d bring you a taste of what’s circulating in them right now as a warning.
That’s right: as the crypto rollercoaster plunged further downwards over the weekend (with benchmark bitcoin falling back near $30,000 and toying with its lowest levels since late January), the alt coin community (from Reddit to Twitter) is still trying to part punters with their cash.
Happy Monday morning from Australia ✌🏻May this market clusterf*** give you plenty of opportunities … and take a bullish turn soon. Hang in there x #xrp #vet #cryptocurrencies #crypto pic.twitter.com/1HPC22neFQ
— Margot_Aces (@margot_aces) May 23, 2021
Case in point? The following thread, posted on Monday morning to the r/CryptoMoonShots community.
The post shows how those who have swallowed the hype try to convince others to – with everything from empathy to realism to a sales pitch – hold on too.
“To say that things have been grim out here in cryptoland has been an understatement,” the post begins. “It has been hard to watch line go down and while every Buffett quote is in full effect, those of us who have bought the dip have felt pretty rekt along the way.”
“So while there’s a bit of a bounce now, it’s understandably hard to get excited. We’re staring down the barrel of a period of consolidation and it’s frightening to think where this can all go after so much money was wiped off the market.”
“But if you think this is the first time a coin has been declared dead, you’re absolutely out of your mind. If you thought a correction was never coming, you’ve lost all touch. And if you don’t expect crypto to come roaring back, especially with EIP-1559 still on the way, you probably just need to be committed.”
“Because you’re not thinking clearly at that point. How many more times will you need to see this story play out to see the forest through the trees?”
Then the kicker: “$SAT offers a unique opportunity to get in with a token at a $5M market cap but with over 50,000 holders. I promise you, these opportunities do not exist elsewhere, and will not exist in a bull market.”
The various communities dedicated to the obscure Saturna coin show yet more holders trying to convince newbies to join the ‘noble’ cause. Or rather, as many have characterised it, bag holders trying to convince another gullible idiot to buy their losses so they can get the hell out.
From the classic: “Buy the dip and hodl folks, stick with it, it WILL be worth it!” (posted six hours ago) to the following ever more worrying post, Reddit is full of armchair advice to those with complaints like: “My investment of 100 is worth 6 dollars now I’m so happy I didn’t yolo 10 grand in.”
“To the community: where are ur balls?!?” – the post doesn’t start shy.
“There are many great Saturnauts out there, but I am so tired of this paper hands, probably seeing the first crypto market DIP in their whole life, behaving like this is the end of the world. Stop spreading FUD or U will go down in history as a weak ass. This is so 2017 guys. We are in 2021. This is Bitcoins Bull Cycle to at least reach status of a deflationary safe haven asset! Bitcoin will lead all Altcoins to an golden Age, so put ur fear aside. IN CODE WE TRUST!!!”
“I am on board, no matter what.”
“If we go to moon, then we moon. If we go down, we DIP.”
“This Project has got my support.”
“I like Saturn. I like her beautiful rings. And all her moons. And the community. And the hardworking dev team.”
“So stand strong 💪🏻 and Hodl like u have never hodled before.”
Other so called projects that have been shilled in the last 24 hours include: $SafePrivacy (“Safe & Reliable Global Transfers and Payments. Techrate Audited. Presale Now”) which one user called “obvious scam and manipulation” and “Safer Shiba” – a riff off the more known Shiba Inu coin.
Not to be outdone, another user took to the platform to share a coin called “MangASS” which is described as a “Hentai & Nft Marketplace” and which captures users attention with the phrase, “We know you like anime asses.”
There are also more legit (sounding) projects like $Green (a coin which claims to be “a combined planet-saving platform with a 2% auto staking reward on every transaction”) being promoted.
Suffice to say, the place is a pit of pump and dumps. But one which people would appear to still be turning too. Scrolling through it one also gets the sense for the idea that many people getting in on these schemes, besides being greedy and naive, also have, to a degree, an ideological basis for their decision making too.
Comments underneath a Market Watch article entitled: “Why is crypto crashing? Will Bitcoin prices ever recover? Here’s what traders and investors say” provide yet more insights into some retail investors’ psyches.
“The article hits the nail on the head,” one commenter wrote. “Wouldn’t it make sense that when there are fears of inflation there would be flight to an asset which cannot be debased? It would, and bitcoin is such an asset but it also, primarily, an object of pure speculation. Investors care little of its positive characteristics and instead are looking to get rich quick from bitcoin.”
“I bought some bitcoin at 33000 today. Did I do it because I wanted to preserve that part of my wealth? Exactly the opposite, it was an act of decadence, like a bet on a roulette wheel with the benefit of some sense of the volatility of the asset providing some comfort. Bitcoin tracks high risk investments for a reason, it is extremely high risk.”
Another commenter chimed in with the following, “The article missed a couple of points,” claiming:
1. China cracks down on crypto at least once a year since 2013, and still 75% of Bitcoin mining takes place there.
2. Coinbase always goes down, so no real effect there.
3. There have been 40-50% pullbacks in Bitcoin mid cycle in both the 2013 and 2018 bull runs
4. Event was caused largely by margin call liquidation of leveraged crypto investors. 832,000 investors were liquidated.
Quartz warns there is a lot of emotional manipulation going on right now. The media outlet on Saturday wrote: “Though both the Ohio vaccine lottery and many bitcoiners are trying to capitalize on people’s fear of leaving money on the table and regretting it, the details of each situation make the ethics very different.”
“The lottery organizers are looking after the public good, and they’re dangling the slim chance of winning actual cash as the prize. Bitcoiners, on the other hand, stand to personally gain if people listen to them. What’s more, while they may have great faith in bitcoin’s future, their prize is not yet uniformly recognized as a legitimate form of money,” Quartz reported.
In all seriousness, this is the very worst time to sell #bitcoin.
Fear-based selling nearly always leads to future regret.
Just relax and #hodl.
— Dr. Jeff Ross (@VailshireCap) May 17, 2021
“Even if they’re not intentionally trying to manipulate the market, they could have that effect anyway. Although anticipated regret is a byproduct of taking personal responsibility, it could theoretically have an aggregated impact when it prompts enough people to behave the same way,” (Quartz).
“That bitcoiners turn to such emotional arguments is also further proof, if it was required, that buying cryptocurrency is still a relatively irrational act. Arguably, buyers are still essentially gambling. A few institutional investors have joined the fray, but their arrival has not made the market less volatile or unpredictable. In short, bitcoiners weighing their next move should at least be aware of how regret aversion can influence their decisions.”
As The New York Times recently discussed in an interview with Dogecoin millionaire Glauber Contessoto, who came across Dogecoin on Reddit, many people no longer see investments in terms of tangible value, but in terms of hype and cultural significance.
Reflecting on an interview with Contessoto, who put $250,000 earlier in the year into Dogecoin, became a millionaire (on paper) and never cashed out (subsequently seeing a fair chunk of his investment take a hit in recent weeks), The New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose recently told The New York Times journalist Michael Barbaro during The Daily podcast, “In a way, it’s purely speculative. He’s just betting that this thing that is going up will continue to go up. But he also starts developing this bigger idea about Dogecoin and cryptocurrency and what has value in today’s economy.”
“He basically sees that the world of the attention economy of memes and funny videos and shares and retweets, it’s merging with the stock market. And so you have these companies like GameStop or Tesla or something, that people on the internet just decide is a meme. Like a meme stock. And so their goal is just to have fun with it, to push it as high as they can get it, and then hopefully get out before it all comes crashing down. And he sees the cycle happening. And so he sees that if something is capturing people’s attention, it’s probably a good idea to invest in it early.”
“Warren Buffett would scoff at this. The fundamentals of this don’t make any sense. There aren’t sales, there aren’t profits. But the wisdom of crowds says that this is worth more and more and more, and Glauber subscribes to that belief.”
Barbaro replies: “Right. And I think it goes without saying, this is not what a typical financial advisor would recommend doing. But Glauber has this new millennial, Gen Z way of looking at the stock market, which is that it doesn’t really matter what the underlying value of something is. It’s more about attention and momentum and figuring out where the culture is going than it is about the actual soundness of the investment.”
As Glauber told Roose: “No. It didn’t cross my mind, not once, to sell it.”
“I know this is not the best example, but if you could buy into Amazon when it was $10 a share, would you have sold when it hit $20? Or when it hit $200? No, you wouldn’t.”
“I think part of the reason is just he thinks it’s going to keep going up,” Roose told Barbaro. “He doesn’t want to miss out on the gains that he’ll make if Dogecoin goes to $1.00 or $2.00 or $5.00.”
“But he’s also got this ideological motivation.”
As Glauber told Roose: “I look at Dogecoin as the future. I truly believe in the cryptocurrency. I believe Dogecoin is the future of currency.”
“Like a lot of people, he thinks that the old financial system, with all the banks and hedge funds and transaction fees and middlemen, that’s all becoming obsolete,” Roose told Barbaro.
“My generation just woke up, almost. I feel like we woke up and we’re taking this sh*t on our own. We realize the system is rigged. The stock market’s rigged. Wall Street, they all play their game, hedge funds play their game. If they’re winning, it’s all good and fine and dandy. And you can buy and sell all you want, it’s a free trade. As soon as they start losing billions, they change the rules,” (Glauber).
“Cryptocurrency is a new space, it’s the future, there aren’t any hedge funds trying to keep us down. There isn’t any billionaires on the other side that if we win, they lose. So the same way we all pooled around GameStop, we can pool around Dogecoin and actually change the future of currency.”
When asked what he would do if he were wrong and if Dogecoin lost 99% of its value tomorrow, Glauber replied, “I’ll buy the dip.”
Barbaro and Roose come to the following conclusion. Barbaro says: “Kevin, when I think about the story that Glauber has told you, it ultimately feels like a tale of economic frustration and someone looking for a shortcut to the wealth that they’re not finding through traditional work.”
Roose replies: “Yeah. I think, in some way, he represents the attitudes of this cohort of young people who are getting out into the economy, who are trying to make it the old way, climbing the ladder one rung at a time. And they’re realizing, that actually might not work anymore. And so they’re looking for trampolines, basically. They’re looking for big bets that they can take. Maybe it won’t work, but maybe it will. And that’s the kind of return that’s actually going to get them the kind of stability that they’ve been dreaming about.”
Roose then tacks on another warning: “The only time I’ve ever broken a bone… is on a trampoline. So I know that trampolines are risky. They’re not a safe thing to play around on. And even within the speculative mania of cryptocurrency, there are people who think that Dogecoin is the least responsible thing you could invest in. That it’s a joke, people are going to lose everything. Basically, even people who believe in cryptocurrency, some of them, are saying Dogecoin is going to end up going very badly for people. But to Glauber, that risk is not a turnoff.”
More to come as the market develops…