Cryptocurrency Lolcows

[DykesDykesChina]

I knew a major bitcoin tard when I was an undergrad. He was one of the Ron Paul people who joined my school's College Republicans in 2011, because they were all 100% certain that Paul was going to win the nomination and the presidency. (They all left in the spring because they were butthurt about the primaries.) Unlike most of them, he seemed pretty normal. This was not the case, however.

It turns out that he had been squatting in an apartment with no water or power for the entire school year. These weren't normal apartments either; they were essentially a series of two-story, barely-insulated shacks with a unit on each floor. (It regularly gets into the mid-90s in Tuscaloosa during the summer, for reference.) He would walk around campus at like 4am, just staring at people .(I saw him when my car was broken down and I had to cut across campus to go to work, and when my girlfriend called me one morning because he was following her and a group of her friends...) He stopped bathing around the middle of 2012, and sperg constantly about Rothbard and voluntaryism. Despite his ideology, he always leeched off of other people, demanding they pay for his food, entertainment, etc. One of the girls he would mooch off of started dating another guy, and this sent him into a rage. When she nearly died in a wreck, he called her in the hospital and told her that he wished that she had because she wouldn't date or sleep with him. I know that by the end of 2012, he had a few warrants out for his arrest for squatting, debt, theft, and things like that. Also by the end of the year, possibly as a result of the warrants, he skipped town and dropped out to become a full-time "bitcoin investor." He would write all kinds of awful articles on how stupid anyone who used traditional currency was, how bitcoin was the wave of the future, how he would abolish government, and so on; he seems to have deleted a lot of his online footprint, otherwise I'd quote some of them. A bunch of us used to get drunk on cheap wine and laugh at his posts.

I kind of suspect that he might have had a mental break or something.

This must be what they call a "Randian Hero".

 

[EruditeName]

There is some kind of strange bimodal phenomenon when it comes to libertarians. Some of the smartest people I've ever met are libertarians, but so are some of the dumbest people I've ever met. I rarely see someone of middling intelligence be a libertarian.

 

[AnOminous]

There is some kind of strange bimodal phenomenon when it comes to libertarians. Some of the smartest people I've ever met are libertarians, but so are some of the dumbest people I've ever met. I rarely see someone of middling intelligence be a libertarian.

I agree on that. I can actually say the same thing about Communists.

Both, however, in my experience have trended toward the total lolcow end of the scale.

 

[Solzhenitsyn]

Spoiler: Long post about the story of Dogecoin. TLDR: Scammers gonna scam

So I have to powerlevel a little bit here, but I think the story is worth sharing: I used to own quite a bit of Dogecoin. This was back in the super early days when everyone knew the coin was just a meme to troll Bitcoin (and at the time, Litecoin, although I don't think that altcoin exists in any real form now). It was cheap, good fun and we used to fund unusual causes like an actual Jamaican bobsled team for the Winter Olympics. Suddenly a bunch of Asian whales took notice of the coin and prices skyrocketed. Within a month the community was filled with people who just started taking the thing way too seriously. They actually believed that a fake currency with a fucking dog meme on it could challenge Bitcoin and become a legitimate form of tender.

On their heels arrived the usual flock of Internet banks and businesses looking to cash on on the idiot born every minute. Among them was Moolah, some sort of currency exchange that also offered an online wallet service. They were also looking for investors for some sort of Dogecoin ATM project. While they were shilling for this, they also seriously infiltrated the Dogecoin community, and I mean seriously. They became the unofficial official Dogecoin bank. They handled the funds for a lot of Dogecoin fundraisers and enterprises, and did some kinda weird shit like dropping 20 grand on the NASCAR fundraiser apparently "by accident". They hired several prominent figures in the Dogecoin subreddit, including a couple of moderators (possibly more, but they didn't admit to it). They were the e-celebs of Dogecoin, the cool kids, etc, etc. (I had cashed out at this point because the joke was long dead.)

Now while all this was going on, the price of Dogecoin was steadily declining, because the Asian whales had made their money and dumped all their stock onto the market, and Dogecoin has huge inflationary properties that I don't remember enough to explain. Moolah were still the e-celebs, but a lot of people started growing very suspicious of them and left, thereby proving themselves a cancer on the community because we didn't believe in the new world order, etc, etc. Moolah's ATM investors started getting upset because they were being treated with blatant disrespect that would make Brianna Wu shed a tear of pride. Then a moderator came out with evidence that Moolah was a scam and its proprietor a known con artist. Said proprietor, Alex Green, threw a tantrum of true autistic rage and stormed out, Cartman-style. Reddit admins, who were tangled up in this in ways I don't quite understand, permanently banned the moderator and began shadow-banning anyone else who shit-talked Moolah. Alex Green sidled back in to the cheers of his fan club and the matter was considered settled for several months. During this time, Moolah made a big show about how they bought another company called Mintpal, which is some other online wallet service or something.

Some time later, Dogecoin was in the absolute toilet, and, like so many other companies, Moolah declared bankruptcy. They began claiming that they never owned Mintpal at all, and people suddenly found their money they put into both websites' wallets couldn't be withdrawn. All the money from Mintpal was funneled into Green's personal accounts. The ATM investors lost everything without a single sentence of explanation. And a document was released by the creator of Dogecoin and the ex-moderator who blew the whistle on them that proved that Alex Green was actually a renowned scammer named Ryan Kennedy. After this, lots of people formerly scammed by Kennedy came forth to confirm the documents, and some of his employees, namely a dogecoin moderator, admitted to the public that yep, they were being assfucked.

Green went full tard at this, threatened to resign, decided against it when he realized he could make more money from bankruptcy, fired all his employees, and abandoned his current girlfriend in Japan without a dollar to her name. He started leaking all sorts of fun information about his employees while threatening them with lawsuits, but he was fucked as this point and everyone knew it. I don't know what happened to him, if he actually faced legal action or not. People said they would but I don't know if anything came of it. Anyway, Dogecoin is essentially dead at this point, as everyone finally realized what they should have learned from the start: memes lie, people die.

 

[Rou]

Spoiler: Long post about the story of Dogecoin. TLDR: Scammers gonna scam

So I have to powerlevel a little bit here, but I think the story is worth sharing: I used to own quite a bit of Dogecoin. This was back in the super early days when everyone knew the coin was just a meme to troll Bitcoin (and at the time, Litecoin, although I don't think that altcoin exists in any real form now). It was cheap, good fun and we used to fund unusual causes like an actual Jamaican bobsled team for the Winter Olympics. Suddenly a bunch of Asian whales took notice of the coin and prices skyrocketed. Within a month the community was filled with people who just started taking the thing way too seriously. They actually believed that a fake currency with a fucking dog meme on it could challenge Bitcoin and become a legitimate form of tender.

On their heels arrived the usual flock of Internet banks and businesses looking to cash on on the idiot born every minute. Among them was Moolah, some sort of currency exchange that also offered an online wallet service. They were also looking for investors for some sort of Dogecoin ATM project. While they were shilling for this, they also seriously infiltrated the Dogecoin community, and I mean seriously. They became the unofficial official Dogecoin bank. They handled the funds for a lot of Dogecoin fundraisers and enterprises, and did some kinda weird shit like dropping 20 grand on the NASCAR fundraiser apparently "by accident". They hired several prominent figures in the Dogecoin subreddit, including a couple of moderators (possibly more, but they didn't admit to it). They were the e-celebs of Dogecoin, the cool kids, etc, etc. (I had cashed out at this point because the joke was long dead.)

Now while all this was going on, the price of Dogecoin was steadily declining, because the Asian whales had made their money and dumped all their stock onto the market, and Dogecoin has huge inflationary properties that I don't remember enough to explain. Moolah were still the e-celebs, but a lot of people started growing very suspicious of them and left, thereby proving themselves a cancer on the community because we didn't believe in the new world order, etc, etc. Moolah's ATM investors started getting upset because they were being treated with blatant disrespect that would make Brianna Wu shed a tear of pride. Then a moderator came out with evidence that Moolah was a scam and its proprietor a known con artist. Said proprietor, Alex Green, threw a tantrum of true autistic rage and stormed out, Cartman-style. Reddit admins, who were tangled up in this in ways I don't quite understand, permanently banned the moderator and began shadow-banning anyone else who shit-talked Moolah. Alex Green sidled back in to the cheers of his fan club and the matter was considered settled for several months. During this time, Moolah made a big show about how they bought another company called Mintpal, which is some other online wallet service or something.

Some time later, Dogecoin was in the absolute toilet, and, like so many other companies, Moolah declared bankruptcy. They began claiming that they never owned Mintpal at all, and people suddenly found their money they put into both websites' wallets couldn't be withdrawn. All the money from Mintpal was funneled into Green's personal accounts. The ATM investors lost everything without a single sentence of explanation. And a document was released by the creator of Dogecoin and the ex-moderator who blew the whistle on them that proved that Alex Green was actually a renowned scammer named Ryan Kennedy. After this, lots of people formerly scammed by Kennedy came forth to confirm the documents, and some of his employees, namely a dogecoin moderator, admitted to the public that yep, they were being assfucked.

Green went full tard at this, threatened to resign, decided against it when he realized he could make more money from bankruptcy, fired all his employees, and abandoned his current girlfriend in Japan without a dollar to her name. He started leaking all sorts of fun information about his employees while threatening them with lawsuits, but he was fucked as this point and everyone knew it. I don't know what happened to him, if he actually faced legal action or not. People said they would but I don't know if anything came of it. Anyway, Dogecoin is essentially dead at this point, as everyone finally realized what they should have learned from the start: memes lie, people die.

I think the lesson here is that taking things too seriously will end in pain. And if you're going to trust a stranger, have a plan ready in case you're screwed.
Edited out an incomplete thought.

 

[Skeletor]

There is some kind of strange bimodal phenomenon when it comes to libertarians. Some of the smartest people I've ever met are libertarians, but so are some of the dumbest people I've ever met. I rarely see someone of middling intelligence be a libertarian.

Libertarianism is a very rigid, axiomatic way of seeing the world. It's logical and self-consistent, but is way too oversimplified to capture how real economies behave. It's the kind of thinking that appeals to people who are smart in a mathematical kind of way. You're not going to see total morons reading through Ayn Rand.

 

[DykesDykesChina]

Spoiler: Long post about the story of Dogecoin. TLDR: Scammers gonna scam

So I have to powerlevel a little bit here, but I think the story is worth sharing: I used to own quite a bit of Dogecoin. This was back in the super early days when everyone knew the coin was just a meme to troll Bitcoin (and at the time, Litecoin, although I don't think that altcoin exists in any real form now). It was cheap, good fun and we used to fund unusual causes like an actual Jamaican bobsled team for the Winter Olympics. Suddenly a bunch of Asian whales took notice of the coin and prices skyrocketed. Within a month the community was filled with people who just started taking the thing way too seriously. They actually believed that a fake currency with a fucking dog meme on it could challenge Bitcoin and become a legitimate form of tender.

On their heels arrived the usual flock of Internet banks and businesses looking to cash on on the idiot born every minute. Among them was Moolah, some sort of currency exchange that also offered an online wallet service. They were also looking for investors for some sort of Dogecoin ATM project. While they were shilling for this, they also seriously infiltrated the Dogecoin community, and I mean seriously. They became the unofficial official Dogecoin bank. They handled the funds for a lot of Dogecoin fundraisers and enterprises, and did some kinda weird shit like dropping 20 grand on the NASCAR fundraiser apparently "by accident". They hired several prominent figures in the Dogecoin subreddit, including a couple of moderators (possibly more, but they didn't admit to it). They were the e-celebs of Dogecoin, the cool kids, etc, etc. (I had cashed out at this point because the joke was long dead.)

Now while all this was going on, the price of Dogecoin was steadily declining, because the Asian whales had made their money and dumped all their stock onto the market, and Dogecoin has huge inflationary properties that I don't remember enough to explain. Moolah were still the e-celebs, but a lot of people started growing very suspicious of them and left, thereby proving themselves a cancer on the community because we didn't believe in the new world order, etc, etc. Moolah's ATM investors started getting upset because they were being treated with blatant disrespect that would make Brianna Wu shed a tear of pride. Then a moderator came out with evidence that Moolah was a scam and its proprietor a known con artist. Said proprietor, Alex Green, threw a tantrum of true autistic rage and stormed out, Cartman-style. Reddit admins, who were tangled up in this in ways I don't quite understand, permanently banned the moderator and began shadow-banning anyone else who shit-talked Moolah. Alex Green sidled back in to the cheers of his fan club and the matter was considered settled for several months. During this time, Moolah made a big show about how they bought another company called Mintpal, which is some other online wallet service or something.

Some time later, Dogecoin was in the absolute toilet, and, like so many other companies, Moolah declared bankruptcy. They began claiming that they never owned Mintpal at all, and people suddenly found their money they put into both websites' wallets couldn't be withdrawn. All the money from Mintpal was funneled into Green's personal accounts. The ATM investors lost everything without a single sentence of explanation. And a document was released by the creator of Dogecoin and the ex-moderator who blew the whistle on them that proved that Alex Green was actually a renowned scammer named Ryan Kennedy. After this, lots of people formerly scammed by Kennedy came forth to confirm the documents, and some of his employees, namely a dogecoin moderator, admitted to the public that yep, they were being assfucked.

Green went full tard at this, threatened to resign, decided against it when he realized he could make more money from bankruptcy, fired all his employees, and abandoned his current girlfriend in Japan without a dollar to her name. He started leaking all sorts of fun information about his employees while threatening them with lawsuits, but he was fucked as this point and everyone knew it. I don't know what happened to him, if he actually faced legal action or not. People said they would but I don't know if anything came of it. Anyway, Dogecoin is essentially dead at this point, as everyone finally realized what they should have learned from the start: memes lie, people die.

I wonder what makes people take jokes far too seriously.

Spoiler: A semi-offtopic example

In 1984, two German punks, while sitting in some highschool chemistry class, decided to found a joke political party, called the APPD (Anarchistische Pogopartei Deutschlands = Anarchist Pogo Party of Germany). This quickly toke off as a running joke among punks, and the party became organized on a semi-professional basis -- but still with everyone realizing it was a fucking joke. The party agenda proposed dividing Germany into different zones, among them "Anti-social parasite zones" for punks who preferred not to work and rather listen to punk rock, have sex, drink beer and smoke weed; "Secure employment zones" for boring bourgeois who preferred to work nine to five and keep the economy going; and "Violence theme parks" where Neo-Nazis and all sorts of terrorists and criminals could battle each other nonstop with automatic weapons. Party conventions were held, with lots of beer, punk rock, sex and chaos.

Their most famous member was the punk singer Wolfgang "Wölfi" Wendland who was their "chancellor candidate".

But during the 90s some people began taking the joke first semi-seriously, and into the 2000s full-on seriously, with trying to win mandates in parliament and pushing their political agenda in a way to gain votes. This resulted in the so-called "Pogo War" which was mainly battled out on the internet and found its conclusion in the founding of a new party, the Pogo Party, which tried to go along with the plan to do "serious politics" and get into parliament, and a new APPD, which went with the original joke intent and decided to exploit the concept commercially via selling of flags, logos, t-shirts etc. with APPD imagery on them.

Nowadays, the joke is pretty dead, much like Dogecoin. They still exist on a low level though. (The Fraktur font, which is usually associated with Neo-Nazis, has been choosen in order to piss off both right-wing and left-wing people.)

 

[Trilby]

I wonder what makes people take jokes far too seriously.

Spoiler: A semi-offtopic example

In 1984, two German punks, while sitting in some highschool chemistry class, decided to found a joke political party, called the APPD (Anarchistische Pogopartei Deutschlands = Anarchist Pogo Party of Germany). This quickly toke off as a running joke among punks, and the party became organized on a semi-professional basis -- but still with everyone realizing it was a fucking joke. The party agenda proposed dividing Germany into different zones, among them "Anti-social parasite zones" for punks who preferred not to work and rather listen to punk rock, have sex, drink beer and smoke weed; "Secure employment zones" for boring bourgeois who preferred to work nine to five and keep the economy going; and "Violence theme parks" where Neo-Nazis and all sorts of terrorists and criminals could battle each other nonstop with automatic weapons. Party conventions were held, with lots of beer, punk rock, sex and chaos.

Their most famous member was the punk singer Wolfgang "Wölfi" Wendland who was their "chancellor candidate".

But during the 90s some people began taking the joke first semi-seriously, and into the 2000s full-on seriously, with trying to win mandates in parliament and pushing their political agenda in a way to gain votes. This resulted in the so-called "Pogo War" which was mainly battled out on the internet and found its conclusion in the founding of a new party, the Pogo Party, which tried to go along with the plan to do "serious politics" and get into parliament, and a new APPD, which went with the original joke intent and decided to exploit the concept commercially via selling of flags, logos, t-shirts etc. with APPD imagery on them.

Nowadays, the joke is pretty dead, much like Dogecoin. They still exist on a low level though. (The Fraktur font, which is usually associated with Neo-Nazis, has been choosen in order to piss off both right-wing and left-wing people.)

Quite an interesting read here. The thought of sectioning off land for people to do what they want in those areas sounds like something out of a movie I'd see. Perhaps one about someone from one of those places (say the secure employment zone) being stuck in those other places and experiencing how different and uncomfortable life could be outside his 'shell'.

 

[Marvin]

Libertarianism is a very rigid, axiomatic way of seeing the world. It's logical and self-consistent, but is way too oversimplified to capture how real economies behave. It's the kind of thinking that appeals to people who are smart in a mathematical kind of way. You're not going to see total morons reading through Ayn Rand.

The basic tenets of libertarianism aren't hard to understand. Really, it's the simplicity that attracts people, and you certainly can be a huge dipshit and fall for it.

 

[Sexy Rexxy]

Spoiler: Long post about the story of Dogecoin. TLDR: Scammers gonna scam

So I have to powerlevel a little bit here, but I think the story is worth sharing: I used to own quite a bit of Dogecoin. This was back in the super early days when everyone knew the coin was just a meme to troll Bitcoin (and at the time, Litecoin, although I don't think that altcoin exists in any real form now). It was cheap, good fun and we used to fund unusual causes like an actual Jamaican bobsled team for the Winter Olympics. Suddenly a bunch of Asian whales took notice of the coin and prices skyrocketed. Within a month the community was filled with people who just started taking the thing way too seriously. They actually believed that a fake currency with a fucking dog meme on it could challenge Bitcoin and become a legitimate form of tender.

On their heels arrived the usual flock of Internet banks and businesses looking to cash on on the idiot born every minute. Among them was Moolah, some sort of currency exchange that also offered an online wallet service. They were also looking for investors for some sort of Dogecoin ATM project. While they were shilling for this, they also seriously infiltrated the Dogecoin community, and I mean seriously. They became the unofficial official Dogecoin bank. They handled the funds for a lot of Dogecoin fundraisers and enterprises, and did some kinda weird shit like dropping 20 grand on the NASCAR fundraiser apparently "by accident". They hired several prominent figures in the Dogecoin subreddit, including a couple of moderators (possibly more, but they didn't admit to it). They were the e-celebs of Dogecoin, the cool kids, etc, etc. (I had cashed out at this point because the joke was long dead.)

Now while all this was going on, the price of Dogecoin was steadily declining, because the Asian whales had made their money and dumped all their stock onto the market, and Dogecoin has huge inflationary properties that I don't remember enough to explain. Moolah were still the e-celebs, but a lot of people started growing very suspicious of them and left, thereby proving themselves a cancer on the community because we didn't believe in the new world order, etc, etc. Moolah's ATM investors started getting upset because they were being treated with blatant disrespect that would make Brianna Wu shed a tear of pride. Then a moderator came out with evidence that Moolah was a scam and its proprietor a known con artist. Said proprietor, Alex Green, threw a tantrum of true autistic rage and stormed out, Cartman-style. Reddit admins, who were tangled up in this in ways I don't quite understand, permanently banned the moderator and began shadow-banning anyone else who shit-talked Moolah. Alex Green sidled back in to the cheers of his fan club and the matter was considered settled for several months. During this time, Moolah made a big show about how they bought another company called Mintpal, which is some other online wallet service or something.

Some time later, Dogecoin was in the absolute toilet, and, like so many other companies, Moolah declared bankruptcy. They began claiming that they never owned Mintpal at all, and people suddenly found their money they put into both websites' wallets couldn't be withdrawn. All the money from Mintpal was funneled into Green's personal accounts. The ATM investors lost everything without a single sentence of explanation. And a document was released by the creator of Dogecoin and the ex-moderator who blew the whistle on them that proved that Alex Green was actually a renowned scammer named Ryan Kennedy. After this, lots of people formerly scammed by Kennedy came forth to confirm the documents, and some of his employees, namely a dogecoin moderator, admitted to the public that yep, they were being assfucked.

Green went full tard at this, threatened to resign, decided against it when he realized he could make more money from bankruptcy, fired all his employees, and abandoned his current girlfriend in Japan without a dollar to her name. He started leaking all sorts of fun information about his employees while threatening them with lawsuits, but he was fucked as this point and everyone knew it. I don't know what happened to him, if he actually faced legal action or not. People said they would but I don't know if anything came of it. Anyway, Dogecoin is essentially dead at this point, as everyone finally realized what they should have learned from the start: memes lie, people die.

IIRC they (fans of the coin) sponsored a nascar driver at one point in doge's name, too.

 

[AnOminous]

The basic tenets of libertarianism aren't hard to understand. Really, it's the simplicity that attracts people, and you certainly can be a huge dipshit and fall for it.

The foundational idea of libertarianism is actually pretty good, and is the Non-Coercion Principle. The idea that people should not be forced to do things against their will is reasonably good, at least taken on its face.

The problem is that every society has to deal with people who do not share that principle, so how do you deal with them? Murderers. Thieves. Lolcows. Well, anyway, whatever. Ultimately, you need force to deal with them.

 

[TowinKarz]

I've said it before, Libertarianism would work great, if there were 10 people in the world. The problem is, it utterly fails to scale up, it can't deal with societies of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, let alone millions. Every choice made, no matter how objectively it was made, is going to piss someone else off. The trick to finding a working societal ethos is to find one that doesn't keep pissing off the same person all the time and spread the piss around a bit so that ultimately, there's a net gain for all.

 

[smellymarine]

Thrill! As some Youtube Bitcoin nerd bothers a friendly clerk and makes everyone else's day that little bit harder because he got caught doing 40 in a 30 zone.

 

[Skeletor]

Thrill! As some Youtube Bitcoin nerd bothers a friendly clerk and makes everyone else's day that little bit harder because he got caught doing 40 in a 30 zone.

My favorite part is how he spraypaints the buckets matte black for tactical night-ops work. Great work spending your abundant free time in your parents' expansive basement crafting creative ways to ruin some wageslave's day.

Also, it should be noted that businesses/organizations can refuse to accept certain forms of payment, such as mountains of pennies. Judging by the phone call at the end where they inform the guy that he can come pick up his change, it's clear that he's going to have to come back and pay his ticket like a normal grown-up.

 

[Trilby]

My favorite part is how he spraypaints the buckets matte black for tactical night-ops work. Great work spending your abundant free time in your parents' expansive basement crafting creative ways to ruin some wageslave's day.

Also, it should be noted that businesses/organizations can refuse to accept certain forms of payment, such as mountains of pennies. Judging by the phone call at the end where they inform the guy that he can come pick up his change, it's clear that he's going to have to come back and pay his ticket like a normal grown-up.

Good to know, that was the most immature thing I ever saw!

 

[TowinKarz]

Working in a car impound, I see the occasional person try to do this.

They are uniformly told that their payment won't be accepted, and if that's all the money they have, there's a bank down the street where they can exchange it.

If they refuse that and demand it be taken, they're told the labor cost of counting it will be added to their fees, and it will be counted when there's time, but, with that line behind you, we obviously don't have that time now, try again later.

That's when the credit card comes out.

In the end, you're only making life harder for you and annoying everyone in line behind you, the entity you're TRYING to piss off just doesn't care. After a week behind the glass, you've heard every possible insult/excuse there is, there's nothing you can do that's going to make me feel bad as I take your money. I just, don't care.

 

[DykesDykesChina]

Thrill! As some Youtube Bitcoin nerd bothers a friendly clerk and makes everyone else's day that little bit harder because he got caught doing 40 in a 30 zone.

He could team up with SJWs who move girls' toys to the boys' toy aisle and euphorics who bother bookstore clerks that the bible should be moved to the fiction section.

 

[WWWWolf]

Whoa, mini-necroing, sorry. Anyway:

Found one of the greatest music videos of all time.

This is incredible. Sublime. Beautiful. It has everything that you can possibly expect from music videos that come from the Internet. It has everything that you can possibly expect from music videos that come from the Bitcoin community.
The Internet will change things. This is the great sort of activism that is only possible in the Internet. Country X is under financial distress and will adopt Bitcoin, because this is the only logical step according to their rational interest. You may be detecting a hint of sarcasm here.

Just remember to keep the ear bleach ready if you are overly sensitive to this sort of euphoria.

 

[Jaimas]

Spoiler: Long post about the story of Dogecoin. TLDR: Scammers gonna scam

So I have to powerlevel a little bit here, but I think the story is worth sharing: I used to own quite a bit of Dogecoin. This was back in the super early days when everyone knew the coin was just a meme to troll Bitcoin (and at the time, Litecoin, although I don't think that altcoin exists in any real form now). It was cheap, good fun and we used to fund unusual causes like an actual Jamaican bobsled team for the Winter Olympics. Suddenly a bunch of Asian whales took notice of the coin and prices skyrocketed. Within a month the community was filled with people who just started taking the thing way too seriously. They actually believed that a fake currency with a fucking dog meme on it could challenge Bitcoin and become a legitimate form of tender.

On their heels arrived the usual flock of Internet banks and businesses looking to cash on on the idiot born every minute. Among them was Moolah, some sort of currency exchange that also offered an online wallet service. They were also looking for investors for some sort of Dogecoin ATM project. While they were shilling for this, they also seriously infiltrated the Dogecoin community, and I mean seriously. They became the unofficial official Dogecoin bank. They handled the funds for a lot of Dogecoin fundraisers and enterprises, and did some kinda weird shit like dropping 20 grand on the NASCAR fundraiser apparently "by accident". They hired several prominent figures in the Dogecoin subreddit, including a couple of moderators (possibly more, but they didn't admit to it). They were the e-celebs of Dogecoin, the cool kids, etc, etc. (I had cashed out at this point because the joke was long dead.)

Now while all this was going on, the price of Dogecoin was steadily declining, because the Asian whales had made their money and dumped all their stock onto the market, and Dogecoin has huge inflationary properties that I don't remember enough to explain. Moolah were still the e-celebs, but a lot of people started growing very suspicious of them and left, thereby proving themselves a cancer on the community because we didn't believe in the new world order, etc, etc. Moolah's ATM investors started getting upset because they were being treated with blatant disrespect that would make Brianna Wu shed a tear of pride. Then a moderator came out with evidence that Moolah was a scam and its proprietor a known con artist. Said proprietor, Alex Green, threw a tantrum of true autistic rage and stormed out, Cartman-style. Reddit admins, who were tangled up in this in ways I don't quite understand, permanently banned the moderator and began shadow-banning anyone else who shit-talked Moolah. Alex Green sidled back in to the cheers of his fan club and the matter was considered settled for several months. During this time, Moolah made a big show about how they bought another company called Mintpal, which is some other online wallet service or something.

Some time later, Dogecoin was in the absolute toilet, and, like so many other companies, Moolah declared bankruptcy. They began claiming that they never owned Mintpal at all, and people suddenly found their money they put into both websites' wallets couldn't be withdrawn. All the money from Mintpal was funneled into Green's personal accounts. The ATM investors lost everything without a single sentence of explanation. And a document was released by the creator of Dogecoin and the ex-moderator who blew the whistle on them that proved that Alex Green was actually a renowned scammer named Ryan Kennedy. After this, lots of people formerly scammed by Kennedy came forth to confirm the documents, and some of his employees, namely a dogecoin moderator, admitted to the public that yep, they were being assfucked.

Green went full tard at this, threatened to resign, decided against it when he realized he could make more money from bankruptcy, fired all his employees, and abandoned his current girlfriend in Japan without a dollar to her name. He started leaking all sorts of fun information about his employees while threatening them with lawsuits, but he was fucked as this point and everyone knew it. I don't know what happened to him, if he actually faced legal action or not. People said they would but I don't know if anything came of it. Anyway, Dogecoin is essentially dead at this point, as everyone finally realized what they should have learned from the start: memes lie, people die.

What's fascinating about this is that whilst the entire shit-storm went down, a goodly portion of the Dogecoin userbase (I.E. those that used it to make sarcasm donations) never fucking noticed. To them, Dogecoin just had a series of bizarre, inexplicable fluctuations, gained a lot of value out of nowhere, lost a lot of it overnight, settled down still bigger than it started, and left a whole lot of people fucking confused.

I wonder how many attributed it to dank memes.

 

[AnOminous]

I wonder how many attributed it to dank memes.

Lots of altcoins with nothing whatsoever better about them, in fact, outright identical, have come into existence and blown away like dust.

Dogecoin is only a thing because of that doge. That's all that separates it from those other technically identical coins.