The Profane Unaccountability of Social Media

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is Halloween, October 31st, 2024. I'm making a quick video before I go home and hand out candy to mention that social media has this wonderful flavor where they just don't want to take accountability for things. Earlier today, I put on my costume for the XCOM, and I'm going to wear it tonight while handing out candy.

It's a "Where's Waldo" costume, and of course, it's "How's Waldo." It's a play on the joke from Family Guy where Waldo kills himself, and the police chief says, "Well, everybody asks where is Waldo, but no one asks how's Waldo." It's kind of dark humor, but it's a funny one. So anyway, I took a picture in the costume, Chelsea, my EA, took the picture, and I posted it on Twitter. Then, people created a meme coin almost instantly, which is what they do all the time.

I pointed out the meme coin and said, "Degens gonna degen." Predictably, a bunch of people, Moon boys with dollar signs in their eyes, instantly went for the notoriety of the tweet, bought the token, and then they got dumped on by a serial scammer. That's what happens. You stupid [expletive]. It's meme coins; they have no value, they never will have value, and they will never ever have value.

Stop thinking they will, you degenerates. Grow the hell up. You will never make something from nothing. Okay, the prices go up, they go down, and yes, you can have fun with it. At the very best, it's gambling; at the very least, it's degeneracy.

But what do you expect? Honestly, what do you expect? What is the outcome of this game? You buy a token, and the token goes up a little bit, and a whole bunch of other people rush in, and the token goes up, and then what happens? People dump on you.

That's how that game works. It's always worked that way for meme coins and always will work that way for meme coins. "Oh, what about the culture, and what about all this other stuff?" There's no culture behind somebody taking a picture of me and turning it into a meme coin for the purposes of a pump and dump. It's "Degens gonna degen," and then what?

I pointed it out, and you took it as a buy signal. How [expletive] stupid are you? Honestly, I don't endorse meme coins. We have good fun from time to time, like Nike and these types of things, but we all know that these things have no value. There's no utility behind them; nobody wants them.

When they lose their luster, they go to zero. It's the greater idiot theory; that's what it is. That's how meme coins operate. The reason why meme coins have any popularity right now is that people are bored in the bear market. We've gone through three years of a brutal, evil bear market.

It's been horrible, and so people have to do something with all this crypto wealth that they have. They move water from one side of the bathtub to the other side of the bathtub, and some people get very lucky and create a meme coin that goes to the moon, and then it collapses, and they move on to the next thing, and one after another, after another, after another. Why do you expect it to be any different at all? Honestly, why do you think it will magically change? We're going to wake up today on a Thursday, Halloween, and somehow, by some Halloween miracle, meme coins will suddenly behave differently and just all go to the moon and gain value forever, and you're just gonna get rich and drive your Lambo?

Come on, guys. There's nothing world-changing; there's no utility, there's no purpose. The game is the same for all these people; it's always the same. It's to screw people and take their money. That is what these things are about.

It's why Hosy exists as a parody of meme coins, and the founder of it says again and again that the goal is to get to zero because that's the point of meme coins. They're not worth anything; they've never been worth anything. Now, I'm a libertarian; I don't care if you do A, B, C, or D, whatever the hell it is. It's your choice if you want to participate in these things. If you have fun doing it, fine.

People smoke, people drink, people go and watch plays, and they watch musicals and movies, and whatever the hell Gen Z does with their time—who knows? Twitch live streams, I guess. That's your thing; that's your time. But don't for a moment believe that somehow playing around with meme coins has anything other than that use and utility, whether on Cardano or Solana or somewhere else, or whether it's a stable one like Dogecoin or an unstable one like this Waldo madness that occurred. In the long term, it all has the same outcome.

Unless somebody can convert it over into having use and utility, even the founder of Dogecoin didn't think that was possible and left. Yet somehow, this community keeps it alive. Good for them, and perhaps they will one day have utility because they become the plaything of the world's richest man. That's why it has value. But let's be clear here: does it do anything?

Does it solve any problem? Does it have any reason to exist? Is there a reason to invest in it other than the fact that you believe it's going to go up? You look at something like Cardano; there's an on-chain governance, there's a smart contracting stack, there is a network that has...