Meme Coins: Are they really Shit Coins?

When anyone wants to diss a currency in the world of crypto trading, one of the biggest slurs that can be used is calling it a Shit Coin. Also, people have often been heard using this term for meme coins.

But, what exactly are Shitcoins and Meme Coins?

The term “shitcoin” refers to cryptocurrency that is both useless and worthless. Shitcoins lack functionality and for this reason they lack longevity in trade too.

These cryptos are designed to be copycat — currencies, ones that are built atop existing currencies and protocols and do not add anything new to the crypto world or technology. They can be considered to be a classic example of Monkey see, Monkey do and people following the trend by creating their own cryptocurrencies.

Whereas when it comes to meme coins; internet memes, current events, online communities, and influencers are inspiration for meme currencies and tokens.

Just like shit coins, they do not have any inherent value or utility and are chiefly built atop existing algorithms and protocols and their rise to prominence or mainstream trade rides solely on them being backed by influential people and current trends.

DOGE coin, the OG meme coin.

Intended to be a satirical take on the wild speculation in cryptocurrencies at the time, DOGE coin was created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer in the year 2013. Dogecoin’s insignia and name are inspired by the Shiba Inu dog from the “Doge” meme. They wanted for their cryptocurrency to reach a wider demographic.

Just as we have discussed a meme coin’s characteristics to be, it too did not have anything to contribute towards the advancement of the cryptocurrency world and technology, no new protocol or algorithm. It was built atop the existing protocols which are used by Litecoin and Luckycoin. It immediately gained popularity because of its namesake the doge meme and the investor community believing it to be a great investment in spite of it being touted as a joke.

Subsequently the coin was championed by Elon Musk through his various tweets which made it’s value rise by 100%, one of the times. Starting from December, 2020 by tweeting just “DOGE” to his latest one where Musk tweeted a link to a reddit thread where users can suggest ways to improve the cryptocurrency, he has certainly been manipulating the DOGE coin market very significantly through his tweets.

Even the meme coin has imitators, the most popular is Shiba Inu (SHIB), an Ethereum-based ERC-20 coin, which briefly rode the wave generated by DOGE coin.

DOGE’s teachings

Something that we can gather from the DOGE coins is anything and everything can be made into cryptocurrency tokens and with the right influence and publicity, they can even attempt to soar to the moon, though they never really get there, just like our poor DOGE; and sometimes even the publicity stunts can go wrong, like when Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, dumped half of all SHIB tokens.

Meme coins are different from shit coins in the sense that some of them do have longevity in trade, like DOGE, SafeMoon and MonaCoin to name a few. When these meme coins are associated with something quite mainstream like a trend or a meme or an influencer talking about them, they gain the attention of wider masses, who invest in them and keep its trade going at the very least.

When it comes to Meme Coins in general, just like their concept, they are trends too. This implies that they are a good trade only when their trends are popular or gaining attention and the span for which that will happen is completely unpredictable. It is never wrong in riding the wave of buying and selling meme currencies when their trade is hot, which is extremely volatile. They must certainly be traded dynamically or intra-day at most, like people who traded swiftly and made profits the last time the Tesla CEO tweeted about DOGE. Whereas, the people who thought of investing “time” in it and waited ended up doing something like this:

People buying trending meme coins thinking it to be an investment be like

Meme coins can easily become shit coins…

which they do mostly because theoretically they are one. But the factors like trends, interest shown by influential personalities and the sway of the trend they are based on, contribute largely to the trade longevity of such coins, whereas general shit coins do not have this backing. Shit coins stay in trade mostly for a short period of time and then die out for the lack of interest.

So to conclude, meme coins are shit coins in theory, but indeterminate factors play a huge role in actually putting the seal of being a shit coin on one. Shit coins are mere copycat currencies whereas meme coins are shit coins with a backing that might skyrocket🚀them to the moon🌕.

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