Alt Season: Scamming Noobs Since 2013
Introduction
First, let me warn you: this is going to be a serious article — a departure from my norm.
I feel very strongly about this issue. In fact, I’ve been hitting the weights at the gym every day this week just thinking about it.
Ever since that Spring in 1998, when a traveling gypsy calling himself “Zah-Bow” tricked me into buying 3,109 Bitcoin (BTC) worth of Bit Gold out of the trunk of his Mercedes 600 Pullman Landaulet, I’ve had special feelings for alt season. You could say I’m something of an expert. If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.
If you’re new to Bitcoin, it may take you years to discover all the Easter eggs hidden throughout this article. If you’re a Bitcoin OG, [1] you’ve probably already found three. I did this to make a point: if you’re a Bitcoin noob [2] it is easy to overlook things and fall victim to gypsies, celebrity endorsements, and predators. This is especially true when swindlers operate misleading and fraudulent websites and social media accounts that attach the Bitcoin brand to altcoins, e.g., Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV). It is highly improbable that noobs will get the information they need to avoid altcoins when, for example, the world’s most popular streaming service, Netflix, has full length feature films dedicated to Bitcoin that embrace these gypsies and thieves as leading experts.
It is far more likely that noobs will succumb to altcoins’ promotional hype and quasi-technical gobbledygook. This travesty is compounded by the fact that Crypto Twitter (CT) is riddled with scam artists and promoters pushing the “Alt season is coming” narrative like drug dealers pushing pills. What they really mean is: “Hey noob, buy my bags.”
When self-proclaimed tech gurus shout “Blockchain not Bitcoin,” what’s a noob to think? Even if they’re able to navigate past that bloated bullshit, when r/bitcoin is a BTC subreddit, but r/btc is a BCH subreddit, and @bitcoin [3] is a BCH Twitter handle, but @btc is a BTC Twitter handle, and bitcoin.com is a BCH website, but bitcoin.org is a BTC website, and Satoshi Nakamoto is both an autistic Australian and an illiterate Pakistani masquerading as an American actor from the 1970’s, what’s a noob to do?
I have two goals for this little ditty: (A) for the reader to better understand the term “Alt Season,” and (B) to make the reader think twice before buying altcoins. I hope an ancillary benefit of this article is to give Bitcoiners a few more talking points when educating Precoiners [4] (and a few laughs too).
If you’re not down with those goals, stop reading now.
But if you are curious about what “altcoins” are or what “alt season” is, or if you are debating between buying Bitcoin and buying some altcoins, or perhaps you already own some altcoins and you are questioning your sanity, go bust a grumpy, grab your coffee, and get ready to learn some shit.
About me
They call me Grandpa Bitcoin. They also call me “The Swede.”
They made a movie about me in the 90’s. Perhaps you’ve heard of me? I am a hero to at least one other person besides my son. It’s probably my other son. I hope. But anyway, I digress….
What is an Altcoin?
Before we dive into what alt season is, it is best to have a firm grasp on altcoins.
What exactly is an altcoin?
An altcoin [5] is a digitized piece of feces. Amazing, right? Like Ron Jeremy, ever since Napster blew the ass out of the music industry, it turns out you can digitize anything. It’s a brave new world.
John McAfee eats these things for breakfast. That’s why he can run for President of the United States and you can’t. A word of advice: don’t mess with this guy. If there is one thing my mamma taught me, it’s don’t talk to anyone with a proclivity for coprophagy. They’ve got bad breath.
What is Alt Season?
Alt season is analogous to rotation in the equities markets. As growth slows in one area, traders will rotate from one stock to another, one sector to another, one country to another, or out of stocks and into bonds or cash (or vice versa). Similarly, alt season is where traders rotate out of Bitcoin and into various altcoins. The standard mythology around alt season is that when Bitcoin price consolidates after a move up, traders looking to multiply their profits will rotate from Bitcoin to high market cap (“high-cap”) altcoins, then to mid-caps, then small-caps, and then finally to cash, Tether, or some other stablecoin. However, crypto mythology and crypto reality rarely jibe.
So far in 2019 what we have seen is:
- Bitcoin pumps, altcoins dump.
- Bitcoin does nothing, altcoins dump.
- Bitcoin dumps, altcoins dump harder.
People ask me all the time, “Why haven’t we had an alt season? Will the bleeding ever end?”
The simple answer is “No. Barring vis major, the shitcoin bleeding will never end. Once you start to bleed from your anus, it rarely just clears up on its own.”
The more complicated answer is, since Dr. Craig Wright, Chief Scientologist at nChain, patented the process of alt-seasoning, no one can alt-season without a properly executed licensing agreement with nChain. And because Jimmy Nguyen is so wrapped up in the Weather Channel’s acquisition of the BSV Blockchain, no one has been able to get the lawyers to draw up the paperwork. Welcome to law.
Google says the Oxford Dictionary has a literal definition of “alt season” which I think is accurate, but not altogether useful for quantitative analysis. So, at the risk of infringing, I am going to define it mathematically for the purposes of this article.
Alt Season is a period of the market cycle when the difference between the derivatives of total market cap and Bitcoin market cap is positive. This is probably a good time for me to remind you of Rule #1 of Bitcoin. The words you read, the calculations performed, and the numbers propagated could be total bullshit. I could be blowing smoke up your ass. You’ll never know unless you verify the numbers for yourself.
That said, rather than actually perform the math, I’m going to eyeball it. I’ve got pretty good eyes for an old fart, so you can trust me.
Some additional bullshit criteria to be considered alt season are:
1. Altcoin dominance increases.
2. Altcoin dominance must increase by a minimum of 10%.
3. Altcoins must broadly outperform Bitcoin, meaning not just a handful of altcoins outperform Bitcoin.
4. Altcoins must pump at least 1,000% (a 10X ramp).
5. Sleaze Multiple is trending higher (and preferably above 2.4).
Getting down to brass tacks, alt season is a period of time where a modest investment in any random shitcoin could theoretically yield early retirement.
What is Altcoin Dominance and why is it important?
Altcoin Dominance is the ratio of the cumulative market cap valuation for all shitcoins, a.k.a. altcoin market cap, to the market cap of Bitcoin. It’s also the inverse of Bitcoin Dominance. Anyone who spends any time studying it can quickly ascertain that it is a sham, [6] but it’s like crack to shitcoiners. So, when in Rome….
Altcoin dominance can give us a general sense of the shitcoin market sentiment and is positively correlated with the Sleaze Multiple. When the Sleaze Multiple is trending higher and is greater than 1, it is an indication that alt season might be getting underway. When the Sleaze Multiple is greater than 2.4, alt season may be in full swing.
Think of “dominance” in terms of one of Laszlo’s pizzas. If Laszlo orders a half cheese and half pepperoni pizza, and his daughter steals all the pepperonis off one slice (without eating the slice), the cheese dominance rises from 50% to 62.5% (assuming a fourteen-inch large Papa John’s pizza with eight slices). But just like shitcoins, even though the cheese dominance increased, nobody is going to eat that shit because Laszlo’s daughter slobbered all over it.
Historical Alt Seasons
Now that we know what altcoins are, what alt season is, and how we recognize the signs of alt season, let’s examine the alt seasons through crypto’s short history.
First, the disclaimers and rules of the road:
I don’t have good data on altcoin price and market cap prior to April of 2013. That’s o.k. though, because they’re all bullshit anyway.
We are going to examine the altcoin dominance chart sourced from CoinMarketCap.com (“CoinMarketCap”). Unfortunately, a coin’s first appearance in CoinMarketCap data is not necessarily indicative of when that shitcoin was actually launched and thus CoinMarketCap data does not necessarily reflect reality vis-à-vis altcoin dominance. C’est la vie.
There are eleven potential “seasons” of interest.
However, using Swede’s pedagogic criteria for what is and what isn’t an alt season, we can easily eliminate a few “seasons” for not meeting Swede’s Criterion #2.
That leaves us with the following five “seasons” we will examine.
Nov. 2013 — Mar. 2014
The first period extends from late 2013 into early 2014 and turned out to be the first true alt season that met all 5 of Swede’s Criteria for Alt Season.
This ~15.5% dominance ramp in late 2013 into early 2014 was due to broad participation across the existing altcoin universe as well as over 100 new altcoins. It was also the first time altcoins outside of the Top 10 had a sizeable impact on the altcoin market cap, increasing their collective market cap by over 3,800%.
Bitcoin experienced a parabolic move of more than 1,600% during the previous six months. Litecoin, Feathercoin, Megacoin, Quark, and others all experienced thousands of percentage point gains. Even old shitcoins like Namecoin and Peercoin which were on glidepaths to zero had resurgences on the order of thousands of percent. Late entrants like Auroracoin and Counterparty caused spikes in altcoin dominance towards the end of this alt season, but as you can see, like most shitcoins they faded quickly when alt season was over.
The thing that traders love about alt season is you don’t have to have any kind of an edge to win at the Shitcoin Casino during alt season.
The players win. The house wins (lots of trading fees collected). Everybody wins. Well, everybody except those left holding the bag(s). You see, alt season is a time in the market cycle where whales come to take your Bitcoin away. During alt season, whales are not accumulating bags of shit. They’re already done accumulating. During alt season, whales pump their scamcoins [7] in social media and chat platforms while dumping their bags of shit on you in exchange for your Bitcoin! This is called shitcoin distribution. Traders, like little remora fish, ride the coattails of the whales, taking a few hundred (or thousand) percent out of the market here and there. But traders never marry their bags. Which brings us to Lesson #1 of Alt Season:
You never, ever HODL shitcoins. [8] The good news is you never need to worry about Lesson #1 of Alt Season provided you don’t violate Rule #2 of Bitcoin.
So, what can we learn about “The Next Bitcoin” from the first alt season? As of this writing:
- Bitcoin’s price appreciated by over 800% from its Nov. 2013 local high of $1,177.19. [9]
- Feathercoin lost 98.999% of its value since its Nov. 2013 all-time high (ATH) of $1.45. It never recovered.
- Megacoin lost 99.9% of its value since its Nov. 2013 ATH of $2.70. It never recovered.
- Quark lost 98.2% of its value since its Dec. 2013 ATH of $0.31. It never recovered.
- Auroracoin lost 99.976% of its value since its Mar. 2014 ATH of $97.84. It never recovered.
- Etcetera.
These coins were all supposed to be better than Bitcoin, and all were birthed on the promise to disrupt the world. Notwithstanding the infrastructure of the time, they were all hyped with the same kind of pseudointellectual flimflammery we see today: better blockchains, more sophisticated algorithms, faster, cheaper, and more reliable transactions — The Next Bitcoin! Which brings us to Lesson #2 of Alt Season:
Aug. 2014 — Dec. 2014
The second dominance ramp (approximately 10%) had two parts in Q3 and Q4 of 2014 — August to October, and then again November to December — and was largely the result of four altcoins. Therefore, this period fails Swede’s Criterion #3 (“altcoins must broadly outperform Bitcoin”) and consequently does not meet the definition of an alt season.
Aug. — Oct.:
- Ripple secretly injected 20 billion additional XRP into the circulating supply on Aug. 26th, going from ~8 billion XRP to 28 billion XRP overnight. This caused a “paper” surge in XRP market cap.
- BitShares (BTS) launched and immediately made it into the Top 10. [10]
Nov. — Dec.:
- XRP price ramped. [11]
- PayCoin (XPY) — a scamcoin launched by a serial crook — entered the market at hyperinflated prices as the №3 coin on CoinMarketCap. [12]
Total market cap during this period declined by 33% while Bitcoin’s market cap declined by over 43%. The altcoin market cap increased by 125%, with the Top 9 altcoins accounting for 99.6% of that increase. By December, the top 4 altcoins, Ripple (XRP), PayCoin (XPY), Litecoin (LTC), and BitShares (BTS) made up 84% of the altcoin market cap. Although Litecoin’s price declined nearly 60%, the additional 20 billion XRP (250% inflation in circulating ripples) and the price ramp following an intensive year-long media blitz caused the XRP market cap to increase 1,850%. Ripple alone made up 61% of the altcoin market cap and over 13% of the total market cap. If you think about shitcoin inflation for just a moment, you’ll begin to realize just how robust the altcoin dominance turd really is.
The top 9 altcoins made up 91% of altcoin market cap and 20% of total market cap. The bottom 506 altcoins barely made up 2% of the total market cap. Although more than 120 additional useless shitcoins were introduced during this period, most had a negligible effect.
A few altcoins had 50–100% pumps, e.g., Dogecoin, and although that is nothing to sneeze at, it is not worthy of being deemed an alt season.
Jan. 2016 — Mar. 2016
The third “season” of interest saw an ~18% dominance ramp from January to mid-March 2016, but it too failed to meet Swede’s Criterion #3.
It is hard to appreciate what these numbers mean without examining them for yourself, but suffice it to say, this period of appreciation in altcoin dominance was largely due to one shitcoin. The altcoin market cap increased by ~220%, and coins’ market caps outside of the Top 10 gained about 100% cumulatively. However, most of the change in the altcoin market cap (86%) was attributable to Ethereum. Total market cap increased by ~17%, while Bitcoin’s market cap declined by ~2%.
During this “season,” Ethereum went from being 1% of the total market cap (12% of altcoin market cap) to being almost 14% of total market cap (nearly 60% of altcoin market cap). Ethereum’s market cap surged 1,400%, becoming the first Shitcoin Unicorn. [13]
Shitcoiners could have made some money on a few altcoins other than Ethereum for sure, e.g., XRP or Factom, but this was not a true alt season.
Ethereum dominated this period of time, gaining significant notoriety, while cultivating the diabolical ideas proposed in the 20th Ethereum Request for Comment (ERC-20).[14] The ideas behind and implementation of the ERC-20 Standard would have a massive impact on the future of crypto.
Jan. 2017 — Jun. 2017
The fourth “season” of interest meets all of Swede’s Criteria for Alt Season with gusto.
It is the standard by which traders should judge the validity of claims of altcoin bullishness, and quite literally the litmus test for alt seasons. It was the beginning of the most epic of all shitcoin bull runs — an alt season for the record books — and dangerously, what every noob expects will happen again when she sees #ALTSEASON trending on Crypto Twitter (CT).
There were a few fits and starts in December as Bitcoin was flirting with all-time highs. Of the top 3 altcoins, Litecoin’s and XRP’s price action had flatlined since October of 2015, and Ethereum’s price dropped 65% between June and December of 2016 due to the fallout from the DAO [15] hack. But by January, the hype was palpable, and Bitcoin finally made a new ATH at 21:30 PST in China on Jan. 3, 2017 after 2 years of hibernation.
Adding additional fuel to the fire, in January and March of 2017, Coinbase obtained the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) BitLicense and was approved to offer trading in Ethereum and Litecoin. Coinbase spent a great deal of time and effort to comply with U.S. regulations and build its reputation as the world’s most user-friendly, compliant, and secure digital currency exchange and fiat onramp. [16] “The Coinbase Effect” entered the crypto lexicon when both coins experienced pumps exceeding 600%, coinapulting both Ethereum and Litecoin to new highs.
Altcoins went completely berserk after Bitcoin found support above its previous ATH around $1,200. From January to June of 2017, Bitcoin nearly tripled and the altcoin market cap increased by nearly 3,000%. Over 100 new shitcoins had entered the market since the previous period, and over 200 more were introduced during this time. By the end of this period, the top 9 altcoins’ cumulative market cap had grown by over 3,200%, and the cumulative market cap of the coins in the 11–20 spots had grown almost 2,200%. In fact, the cumulative market cap of the shitcoins in the 11–20 ranks eclipsed the top 9 altcoins’ cumulative market cap at the beginning of this period by over 180%.
It was the first time in history that ERC-20 tokens occupied the ranks of the top 20 altcoins, e.g., Augur, DigixDAO, Iconomi, and Golem. It was also the first time a shitcoin launched as a Shitcoin Unicorn, when IOTA made its debut in June with a market cap of $1.128 billion.
The whopping 50% dominance ramp for altcoins was an unprecedented period of euphoric risk-taking and everyone was “getting hilariously rich.”[17] In fact it was so “hilarious” that CoinMarketCap thought it was prudent to list Bitconnect (which made it into the top 20 by June).
An investment of $1,000 in the hottest shitcoin at the time, Stratis (STRAT), would have yielded almost $220,000 by June of 2017 and $470,000 by January of 2018 — a nearly 50,000% return on investment.
Acknowledging the aforementioned returns, it is not hard for even the most toxic of Bitcoin plebs to understand why so many noobs decide to throw dice at the Shitcoin Casino. However, if you were like most noobs who violated Rule #2 of Bitcoin and invested in Stratis during the peak any time after April of 2017, you would have turned your $1,000 investment into a steaming pile of $500 shit at today’s prices for a 50% loss (or far worse).
Which brings us to Lesson #3 of Alt Season. You won’t catch the bottom and you won’t catch the top, but if you don’t remember Lesson #1, you will catch a bacterial organism that causes anorectal pathology.
Nov. 2017 — Jan. 2018
The fifth and final “season” of interest also meets all 5 of Swede’s Criteria for Alt Season, but it was really just a continuation of the 4th “season.”
Through late 2017 and into 2018, leveraging the tidal effect of Bitcoin’s new moon, enterprising young minds were discovering a new way to circumvent securities regulators’ rules of raising capital — the Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Billions and billions of dollars were scammed out of little noobie fingers by cunning and ruthless cryptogrifters.
During this time period, a 300% gain on a shitcoin was considered weak. Grandma started making YouTube videos about how Bitconnect’s lending program saved her retirement and could save yours too, while little Billy was shilling his Tron bags on his finsta account, talking about Lambos and moon missions.
But just as quickly as it started, alt season faded. The ICOs, it seems, weren’t the only ones to live on in infamy. For it was Grandma and little Billy who signaled peak shitcoinery, and the altcoin market quickly entered terminal decline.
What about April of 2018? Wasn’t that an alt season?
In April of 2018, Bitcoin experienced an epic short squeeze in what was arguably the nastiest bear trap of Bitcoin’s short history. This did cause another dead shitcoin cat to bounce, but it didn’t quite meet Swede’s Criterion #2.
Although April of 2018 was not an alt season, it was nonetheless a historical moment for shitcoins. You see, the end of April 2018 marked the first time in recorded history that anything was able to rival the plunge at Corbet’s Couloir.
*Poof*, just like that, alt season disappeared into the deep powder of the back country, never to be seen again.
Caveat emptor shitcoiners.
When can we expect the next Alt Season?
If you hold a bag (or bags) of shitcoins, I know what you’re thinking: “As soon as my coin pumps, I’m going to get my money back and buy Bitcoin.” So, when can you reasonably expect that to happen?
Using this almost totally random (and perhaps complete bullshit) pitchfork indicator on TradingView you can clearly see that altcoin enthusiasts and masochistic wags can with near-certainty count on an alt season in the vicinity of death.
Or not.
Who knows?!
To have any hope of offloading those bags you’ve carried with you since 2017, you will have to wait for fresh money to enter the market. Unfortunately for you, fresh retail money is not likely to come into the market until after Bitcoin makes a new ATH. And even then, fresh (smart) money is more likely to gravitate to Bitcoin — the hardest asset known to mankind — and fresh (dumb) money is more likely to be attracted to the fresh new shitcoins being hyped at the time and not the old shitcoin detritus from the past.
Not convinced? Ok, consider this “hypothetical” scenario:
Let’s say you bought Tron in January of 2018 because you believed the hype that it was the next Ethereum (which was the next Bitcoin) and was going to change the internet and somehow streaming services too. Your investment has likely lost 92% of its value. If you hold that Tron bag (because you are a great community member) and hope to make money during the next alt season, understand that it will take a 1,150% pump just to break even! This would be like Namecoin bagholders from the 2013 alt season hoping to make money during the 2017 alt season. Yes, Namecoin pumped 3,500% off the lows in December of 2016. But if Namecoin was purchased during the hype of the 2013 bull run and held in earnest until 2017, bagholders needed it to pump 5,500% just to break even! They were still down 34% even at the manic peak of 2017 and are down over 90% today. Namecoin bagholders waited 4 years for alt season and were painfully disappointed when almost all of the 2,000 new shitcoins created between 2013 and 2017 outperformed their beloved Namecoin bags.
Almost 2 years have passed since you bought into the hype surrounding [insert the name of your favorite shitcoin bag]. Are you going to hang onto those bags only to be disappointed when Bitcoin, Matic, LEO, Algorand, and [insert the name of any new shitcoin to be created in 2020] all outperform [insert the name of your favorite shitcoin bag] and you never break even?
My advice to you is to capitulate. Cut the bullshit. Might your bags pump as soon as you sell? Most likely — that’s how the Shitcoin Casino works. But stop staring at your Blockfolio account, dump those shitcoin bags and buy Bitcoin. Cut your losses, lick your wounds, and make yourself the promise to never buy another shitcoin. Leave the pump-and-dumps to the whales and their remora and secure your piece of the future while Bitcoin is still on sale.
Conclusion
The alt season scam began after the 2013 bull run when shitcoins’ out-performance of Bitcoin was dubbed alt season. The scam has been perpetuated ever since by people who want to take your Bitcoin away.
In another parabolic Bitcoin move, is it possible for your old shitcoin bags to pump enough to make you whole? Sure, it is possible. Is it probable? No. There are far too many shitcoins now and far too many new shitcoins on the horizon to reasonably expect that your specific bag will be the caca du jour. Remember: A 98% loss in value requires a 4,900% gain just to break even.
What did we learn? Dominance is a bullshit indicator. But throwing caution to the wind, we also learned:
- Not all altcoin dominance ramps are alt seasons. There have only been two true alt seasons.
- Alt seasons tend to occur after Bitcoin marks a new ATH.
- If you insist on breaking Rule #2 of Bitcoin, never HODL bags of shitcoins. Yes, in alt season even old scams that have long since been declared dead will pump. They just won’t pump hard enough.
Will we have another alt season? Do greed and stupidity still exist in the world?
The real question we need to ask ourselves: is Climate Change real?
The next 18 months will be critical in dealing with the shitcoin cooling crisis. You may only have 12 years left to save the shitcoins.
APPENDIX 1: Rules of Bitcoin
1. Don’t trust, verify.
2. Never buy shitcoins.
APPENDIX 2: Lessons of Alt Season
1. Sell the pump.
2. There is no next Bitcoin.
3. Bagholders get butthurt.
4. Refer to rule #2 of Bitcoin.
APPENDIX 3: An Abbreviated History of Altcoins
“Hey Swede, why did you choose 2013 for the title of your article?” you ask. Although the first bit of crypto-diarrhea to burst onto the scene — Namecoin — squeezed out in April of 2011, trying to find halfway respectable price and exchange data before April of 2013 is a goose I don’t care to chase.
2011
Speaking of Namecoin, did you know that feculence is still around? Good luck dumping your bags if you’ve got any though. It has a daily traded volume of around three and a half thousand dollars, with about 72% of that volume on the Livecoin exchange. Ever heard of the Livecoin exchange? Me either. By the way, Transcodium also trades on Livecoin. Transcodium rhymes with Imodium. Are you sensing a theme here?
2012
Anywho, after Namecoin came Litecoin. Litecoin, like Namecoin, is a codebase fork of Bitcoin with some tweaks. A codebase fork is just a copy of the code of the Bitcoin software. You don’t need to know much about coding or software to create a codebase fork. In fact, I just did it while I was talking to you. I’m calling it Swedecoin (ticker symbol: SUK). There are only three SUKs, so they’re super scarce. I am giving one SUK to each of my sons, but I will sell the last one to any willing SUK’er for any combination of 17,000,000 BSV and Snicker bars. I’m trying to corner the market on faketoshis, and you don’t want to find out what happens to the Swede when he’s hangry. Shoot me an email and let me know if you’re interested (JamesCaan@theBCCI.net).
2013
“Gradually and then suddenly.” — Ernest Hemingway
It was slow at first, but the digital printing presses fired up quickly in 2013. After Litecoin came a string of forked rip-offs: Peercoin, TerraCoin, Devcoin, Novacoin, Feathercoin, Freicoin, and Mincoin. All of which I’m told, are going to overtake Bitcoin any day now. I think Lawrence Blankenship, a Star Trek convention organizer, said it best in 2013 during an interview with Nathanial Popper of the New York Times when he said, “Looking down the road 10 years from now, I definitely see Bitcoin being ousted. Everyone’s going to start switching to other coins, and hopefully Peercoin comes out ahead in that.” [18]
I am also told that if you squint hard enough and tip your head just right, these shitcoins could maybe, possibly be construed as semi-legitimate attempts at making the blockchain more efficient or useful (rather than money-grabs). But I have my doubts.
Then came the age of the obvious scam. It is hard to tell exactly when in 2013 the BBQCoin turd poked its head out, but what is crystal clear is they didn’t know real barbeque. Their supposed mission was: “Barbecue and diet! Enjoy deliciousness, beauty and romance!”
Nothing says “diet” like barbeque, right? And I always take my first dates to the Rib Crib so I can get jiggy with a Tinder bloated with gas, beef stuck between her teeth, and cabbage breath. These charlatans didn’t even have the courtesy to try and fool us into thinking they were up to anything useful or honest.
By December of 2013, Bitcoin was so sick of the cold and feeling a bit hung over from all the partying with Charlie and the Winkelvii, that she decided to head south for warmer weather. Unfortunately, Peter Schiff was obsessed with finding out what was wrong with her and chased her all around the country. Tired of the “creepy old dude,” she staged her death (tragic boating accident), had Donald Trump circulate a bunch of fake news, and went into hiding for 2 years.
2014
In March and April of 2014, Merriam-Webster added “goxxed” to the dictionary, and MaidSafeCoin performed the first atomic flop, transforming perfectly good Bitcoin into a bunch of useless Mastercoins.
And then there was Jedmageddon. What a stellar shit show that was. *wink emoji* Need I say more?
After Ripple there was this NASCAR dog-thing. I have no idea WTF that was about, but like Lindsey Vonn, it went downhill pretty quickly from there.
2015–2016
From the pile of garbage that amassed at the bottom of the hill arose the greatest shitcoinery ever unleashed upon the crypto world: Ethereum. What we all know is Ethereum has gas. Like our BBQCoin date. But what you probably didn’t know is that Ethereum is a World Computer. In fact, with this new mad science I was able to calculate the precise flatness of the earth, I’ve patented a process for digitizing kittens, and I was able to create the Swedecoin Cash token — a fast, cheap and reliable version of Swedecoin more akin to my original vision (check the whitepaper for specs). This was necessary because when I tried to increase the SUK-size, Blockstream hijacked Swedecoin, and they are expelling any developer who opposes them. A warning: Swedecoin Core (as I now call it) has taken over r/Swedecoin. Therefore, I was compelled to create r/SUK for us SUK’ers who want to coordinate increasing the SUK-size and to devise marketing attacks on Swedecoin Core. I also bought Swedecoin.com. Those baby-killers will rue the day they messed with the Swede!
Back to the story. Once upon a time (in 2016) there was a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). The DAO’s mission was twofold: (1) to fund pre-teen toymaker’s fanciful delusions and (2) to invent a process called the “Blockchain Refund.” The toymakers were to build mildly entertaining digi-tchotchkes, and if something happened that Augustus Buterin, Imperator of Constantinople disagreed with, he could use a “smart” contract to transform each Ether into 100 DAO tokens (the “Refund”). This sounded like a great deal, so the citizens of the Ethereum Empire gave the DAO 12.7 million ETH in exchange for the promise of super cool new toys. Unfortunately, the neighboring kingdom’s shrewd magicians were able to trick the smart contract with a game of three-card monte, and the DAO lost its tunic. After Imperator Buterin activated the “Blockchain Refund,” the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) started sniffing around the Village Trilemma.
The Empire’s Royal Army convened a Fur Con and scrambled to prepare a PowerPoint to respond to the SEC’s inquiries, but the project hit a bump in the roadmap when the Lead Magus of the DAO met with the SEC. As he was nervously presenting the DAO’s case, he sharded, causing a big stink with the regulators. He apologized profusely, admitting that he may have put a little too much eWasm in his morning porridge, but the damage was done. The SEC decreed that DAO tokens were evil magic (“securities”) and issuance of any such token was an offense punishable by death (“federal securities laws”). Thus the “virtual organization” and its evil magic were “virtually killed.”
Sadly, what the SEC didn’t realize was that “virtually killing” something is not the same as “fully killing” something, and the DAO’s evil legacy lives on in what we know today as “Utility Tokens.” These vile creatures were able to “virtually” avoid detection by Hangman Howey and caused quite a raucous during what is known in the historical annals as “The ICO uprising.”
2017
Conducting an Initial Coin Offering after the advent of Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard was as easy as Brenna Sparks. Not only did fraudsters not need to worry about any pesky regulators getting in their way, they didn’t have to fork Bitcoin anymore, and they barely even needed to know how to code. Hell, the scumbags didn’t even need a working project anymore to swindle their way into unsuspecting victims’ wallets. Crypto-scammers issued ERC-20 tokens like pedophiles handing out candy. And it worked like a charm. The cryptokiddies wanted that crap so badly they let anyone fondle their little piggy banks for a sugar rush. It was like Crypto Twitter was in a competition with the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury Department to see who could shit cash out faster. By the end of 2017, even your pastor was buying Ethereum to dump into any and every ICO. Like heroin junkies in search of Fentanyl, everyone it seemed was taking outsized risk for their next big fix.
In August of 2017 another forked rip-off of Bitcoin emerged. It must not have been very significant because I’m having a hard time remembering what it was called. Getting old is a BCH.
The details are fuzzy, but at some point the United States Air Force (UASF) bombed the shit out of a crazy bunch of altcoin terrorists that had taken over New York, and by December of 2017, Bitcoin, being the rather private supermodel that she is, decided that she’d had enough of the press tour and opted once again to take some time off the road. As expected, her sudden hiatus had a severe impact on her entourage of shitcoin groupies.
2018
Müllcontainer Feuer: the ICO bubble popped, and like that crocodile guy, those shitcoins were dundee.
Almost overnight, paper millionaires worldwide were indoctrinated into the salty ranks of “the Community.” As a result, when it came time for mid-terms, distraught voters elected Igor and Grichka as Chancellors of the Community’s Heraldic Authority.
But unbeknownst to the electorate, the Bogs were in cahoots with Brian Armstrong. Thus, the Community had no healthcare, minimum wage was low, and everyone was issued KYC notices and IRS letters. Everyone was getting hilariously poor, forced to beg for their familia, and a famous trader named Pinekone publicly melted down (thrice).
Outraged, tweens and boomers alike traded in their James Altucher posters for ones of Pepe the Frog.
The Community did, however, find solace in cartoons, and consequently the ratings on The Simpsons went through the roof.
2019
Which brings us to the present.
2019 reminds me of Mt. Gox: Feast or Famine. Well, famine mostly. Unless of course you were smart enough to buy Bitcoin and avoid buying the “hot new” initial exchange offerings (IEOs) when they were dumped into the market.
Refreshed and rejuvenated by some amazing new skincare elixir people are calling “Lightning” in a bottle, Bitcoin splashed back onto the scene with style. Joe Kernen, Nouriel Roubini, and Charlie Munger were all flabbergasted by how gorgeous and resilient she was. It turns out squaring the dose of rat poison is really good for the epidermis.
Besides the ABCBSVBCH alphabet soup spork and Binance adding margin trading to their repertoire of shitcoinery, the most shitcoiny thing that happened this year was when Justin Sun ghosted Warren Buffett, giving shitcoiners around the world the reputation they deserve. Vaporous.
I’m going to be honest with you. It doesn’t look good for shitcoins.
But the night is young, and the fat lady doesn’t go on until the witching hour.
It is inconceivable to me to think that we won’t have another alt season like 2017.
Inconceivable. Get it?
[1] OG is the acronym for Original Gangster and means “old school” or someone who has been in the Bitcoin space for a long time.
[2] Noob is a term of endearment, meaning someone new to something, especially as it relates to technical issues surrounding the use of computers or internet.
[3] The @bitcoin Twitter handle may be back in the hands of a real Bitcoiner as of the writing of this article. I’m still skeptical. You should be too.
[4] Precoiners are future Bitcoiners.
[5] Colloquially, “shitcoin.”
[6] Yes, you heard me correctly. Altcoin Dominance is a sham. Dominance implies that something has “power or influence over something else,” or the in the case of Bitcoin, the “predominance of one or more shitcoins in the cryto asset space” over Bitcoin. An increasing Altcoin Dominance implies that the power or influence of shitcoins over Bitcoin is growing. This has never happened and likely won’t ever happen, except on paper. The transaction value, network value and security of Bitcoin far exceeds that of any other so-called cryptocurrency. Add to that forked coins, pre-mined coins, faked exchange volumes for blockchain vaporware with no real use cases, and the ability of shitcoiners to infinitely inflate their cryptocrap, and you get the picture.
[7] Scamcoin is another word for altcoin (a.k.a. shitcoin).
[9] Data was taken from the BraveNewCoin Liquid Index for Bitcoin (BLX).
[10] BitShares (BTS) was launched by Dan Larimer, the creator of several other useless shitcoins, including BitShares 2.0, Steem, and EOS.
[11] Ripple Labs undertook a massive marketing campaign, ensuring coverage in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Bloomberg Businessweek, CNBC, USA Today, Fox Business, The Financial Times, Fortune, Institutional Investor, Forbes, Business Insider, International Business Times, Entrepreneur, VentureBeat, American Banker, and TechCrunch.
[12] PayCoin subsequently bled out until the founder was thrown in jail for what turned out to be the first crypto Ponzi scheme to be prosecuted by the SEC.
[13] A Unicorn is a privately held company valued at over a billion dollars. Here I use the term Shitcoin Unicorn to refer to altcoins that achieve over a billion-dollar market capitalization.
[14] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-20
[15] The DAO was Ethereum’s Decentralized Autonomous Organization. See Appendix 3 for more information.
[16] Unfortunately, Brian Armstrong turned out to be a shitcoiny cryptogrifter.
[17] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/style/Bitcoin-millionaires.html
[18] https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/in-Bitcoins-orbit-rival-virtual-currencies-vie-for-acceptance/
