In August 2020 someone bought $8,000 worth of shiba inu coins. It's now worth $5.7 billion

Originally published at: In August 2020 someone bought $8,000 worth of shiba inu coins. It's now worth $5.7 billion | Boing Boing

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Until it’s been sold, it’s worth is exactly this:
Jack. Shit.

If the investor is smart, he/she will decrease his holdings real quick-like and be happy with whatever comes of it. Maybe a few million dollars. Which, frankly, is fucking absurd.

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It seems the reigning principle for cryptocurrency is NOT to be the one left holding the bag

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I sense something super-shady behind this supposed increase in value. Whatever’s going on, the message most people are going to take away from this story will be exactly the wrong one.

That and “get in really early”. Basically the same principles behind MLM schemes.

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I call shenanigans on this. Those shares are worth precisely $0 at the moment. They are worth $5.7B if and only if they can convince enough people to buy their 70 billion coins at the current rate… a chance that is, frankly, zero. One wonders if the fact that this is a story was “leaked” by somebody wanting to pump and dump this lot.

If said person got a sufficient number of people to buy some of their coins, then maybe they could return a few $hundredK and if the shiba inu market grows exponentially as a result of this article, then maybe it could even get into the $million range… but billions? No chance whatsoever.

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Well now if this isn’t proof that anyone can become a billionaire by the sweat of their brow, I don’t know what is!

do I really need to add /sarcasm? probably.

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I’m beginning to feel like I should just buy $1 worth of whatever new cryptocurrency comes along. That’s about as zero-risk as you can get, and if it absurdly appreciates 7 million percent at least there’s a snowball’s chance of selling it without tanking the price.

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You’re onto something there…

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So how/where does one go to collect? like who has $5.7billion just lying around to cash in on crypto? Is this more like having a billion comics worth $5 each in theory, but good luck trying to sell a billion comics.

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Hype up the currency and how people can get $RICH to create demand. Sell in small batches, and get the heck out of crypto.

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maybe they could return a few $hundredK and if the shiba inu market grows exponentially as a result of this article, then maybe it could even get into the $million range… but billions? No chance whatsoever.

One person trying to dump too much too quickly will affect the market, but daily trading volumes have been in the billions for nearly a month now. Someone so inclined could cash out a few million each day, easy.

SHIB Historical Data (coinmarketcap.com)

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This this this.

This is the problem with cryptocurrencies. Nobody is buying it from the people holding. Planet Money did a story on this. Some headline-making holders of other currencies having been trying for years to sell their fake math game money to get real money and they can’t. Nobody, and I mean nobody is giving this person anywhere close to 5 billion for that. They’ll be lucky if anyone buys it at all, never mind “even for a few million”.

There is no intrinsic value store in these fake currencies. They are not backed by anything, they are not useful for anything, and there is no secondary market for them. Headlines like this are deeply misleading.

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Jack. Shit. Bit. Coin.
Jack. Shit. Broke Tooth.
Poor. Jack. Shit.

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The universe is broken.

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This is the sort of thing that people in the future will point at and say “we really should’ve known things were going wrong when that happened”

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Do you already buy lottery tickets?

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Hallmark of a pyramid scheme.

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It’s “worth” $5.7billion in the sense that the moon is worth 23 trillion trillion (2.3x1031) dollars, i.e. not.

But people do sometimes win troubling amounts of money from this sort of crypto nonsense, or gamestonks type shenanigans. The moral is not that it’s smart to be a reddit goldbug weirdo (that is demonstrably untrue). The moral is that the finance industry’s abstract games are every bit as stupid and arbitrary as everyone suspects, as becomes immediately obvious whenever random cranks are allowed to play.

The only reason cryptocurrencies remain legal is that the establishment haven’t yet found a way to explain how bitcoin is fundamentally different to where their own wealth comes from.

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Oh, fuck this timeline. I mean, yes, it’s not actually worth billions, but that this is even theoretically, on paper, true is beyond obscene.

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And yet if you mention paying a retail worker $15/hour, half the country faints from inflation vapors…

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