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Speaker A: Are meme coins better or worse than the attempts at legitimacy that scams or accidental frauds have been? Ledger? That's a question to you? Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of Internet money and Internet finance. And today on bankless, we explore the frontier of meme coins. You can't seem to go anywhere in crypto these days without stepping in a meme coin. Whether you're on Twitter and you're seeing Dee's post about book of meme, or you're on Farcaster hearing about Degen, or you're on literally any other chain trying to incubate its own meme coin ecosystem. Meme coins have dominated on chain activity in the last month or so. Is this all the future of finance is good for? Are we destined to discover even more degenerate levels of financial speculation? Is the only thing that we can muster as an industry new types of on chain PvP in hopes of getting rich? Or is there something to celebrate in meme coins? Are meme coins just a bad name and maybe we should call them culture coins instead? Are they a big f you to the man to vc's and a logical reaction to the world of private sales and investor accreditation laws? Is there something to be celebrated in meme coin culture? Most importantly, are meme coins going to be the thing that brings back retail into crypto? So far, things look like they're heading that way. So what's next? Before we answer these questions and talk about who is on the episode today, a message from our friends and sponsors over at today on the show, we have two guests debating the merits and costs of meme coins in crypto. Ledger from the up only podcast thinks that meme coins are financial nihilism that creates room for bad actors and grifters. Steven Cesaro from the Alfalfa podcast think that meme coins are something to appreciate and celebrate. I think there's something to both sides of the debate. I think both have valid points, and both bring some solid wisdom into the conversation. And ultimately, in my opinion, how meme coins will be remembered will be determined by the types of people who create and shepherd them. Which means I personally don't have very high hopes for the optics and conclusions of meme Coin mania. But bankless nation, I'll let you draw your own conclusions after listening to Steven and Ledger hash it out here on the podcast today. But first moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Bankless nation, I'm excited to introduce you to Steven Cesaro from the Alfalfa podcast. For those who aren't familiar with Steven, think of Van Spencer, except replace VC with Degen. And that's about proximate to where Steven is. He's my personal favorite market degen commentator, generally speaking, on the pro meme coin side. Stephen, welcome to Bankless.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me, David.

Speaker C: Cheers.

Speaker A: And of course, Brian Krosgaard, aka Ledger from up only fame. Also ledger cast, also his own project Flip XYZ, and also the only crypto person who lives in the state of Alabama, Ledger. Welcome back to Bankless.

Speaker C: Hey, that's not true, actually. There's. There's pretty strong crowd here.

Speaker A: Name three more.

Speaker C: I'm not doxxing Dox.

Speaker A: Three more.

Speaker C: There's a y'all remember Messi from. He's gone. He's gone private over recent years, but he's in Alabama. And there's several more. But I won't go any deeper.

Speaker A: All right, guys, we're going to talk about meme coins today. Ledger, you were putting out some tweets the last couple of weeks, talking about how you just can't get on board the meme coin train. I was listening to Steven here on his podcast, alfalfa, talking about the merits of meme coin, and I kind of want to just put these two conversations, uh, together on the same podcast. I've got a little preamble that I want to run with to kind of start this thing out. Um, meme coins in crypto are nothing new. They've been a part of the crypto since they were incepted in Dogecoin in 2013. Uh, now, in 2024, we have the members of the dog with hat community crowdsourcing $650,000 to put a dog with hat image on the Vegas sphere. Uh, in 2014, we had Dogecoin funding the travel of the jamaican bobsled team to go to Sochi, Russia, to compete in the Olympic Games with the dogecoin on the bobsled, of course, this was a very heartwarming story. I would say the jamaican two man bobsled team faced financial hurdles in their quest to go to Sochi, Russia, in which they got overwhelming response from $184,000 from Dogecoin supporters in 2014. It was a pretty cool story. The best part of this Dogecoin story, I think, is the story of his founder, Jackson Palmer, who intended to satirize what he saw as the speculative degeneracy in the crypto space. So he abandoned the Dogecoin project, stating that he no longer wants to be associated with cryptocurrencies. And having sold all of his doge long before ascended to what it is known today. So we have a dog themed crypto coin, fundamentally that does nothing unique with a founder that abandoned it and a community that stepped in to support it for the Lulz and is now a top ten crypto asset by market cap, $23.3 billion. Crazily followed enough by Shib at a $17 billion market cap. And so this is kind of where I think meme coins as a whole got incepted into the crypto industry with Dogecoin, Dogecoin, Washington. The first thing in the crypto world is like, hey, we can, we can make financial assets that are also jokes. Uh, and also look at it, it's got like over ten $20 billion market cap. Uh, and so this has spawned many debates about what should we do in this crypto industry with this newfound power that we have, which is the freedom to make financial assets for any reason whatsoever. And so I kind of want to just maybe start this conversation here. Not really even talking about pros, cons, not even bringing, beginning a debate or anything, but make maybe just bring in your own guys perspective about how you see the role of meme coins in the crypto industry. And then maybe we can go into more aside specific conversations. But Ledger, I think you've been in the industry longer than all of us. Just start this conversation off for us about your long arc of relationship with meme coins, speculative coins, shitcoins as it relates to the crypto industry and just what you've been thinking about them over the arc of time.

Speaker C: Yeah, I guess that crypto has been an experiment forever. You know, the vast majority of coins do begin as some form of experiment and sometimes with a degree of pointlessness. However, I think when we've seen the most success with coins, there's been quick, like, community gravitation towards, like, something slightly larger of an idea. So even if you take the dogecoin example, like, it's this general positivity around, like, the dog is cute, and then, like, Jackson kind of codified it by abandoning it, like, kind of a Satoshi esque moment by going away, it turned it into a truly kind of community driven thing. And I'm not against that. I'm against when you can't establish, like, any form of justification for existence beyond dumping on others in a PVP environment. And in 2013 and in 2023 and in 20, 24, 99 plus percent of these are for the purpose of dumping on others. And, you know, nobody's truly standing behind anything with some form of conviction. I'm not like anti community by any means. I think, you know, and people will say like bitcoin itself is a meme coin and that's true, but that's got a mission statement and it's got, there's an understanding, but it does build. I've said this forever, bitcoins value is by network effects between the provenance of time and the network effects. It's not different from a code perspective, from bitcoin cash or bitcoin Sv or whatever, all the thousands of bitcoin forks from the 2010 SDHE. It's not different in that way. It's different because of network effects and because of its idea and because of the story of Satoshi and the early believers and the method of governance that it's taken over those years. And those are the things that you need, and yes you do need to develop them. But there's been very little demand by let's say the customer base, the people that are willing to buy these, to shill these. There's been very little demand for any story, if they think there's any potential for number go up, for them to say like let's put it on our timeline. So that's really where my, my beef comes from is the very PvP nature and kind of this open nihilism more than the idea of a meme coin. So I guess that's why I'm the bad guy today.

Speaker A: Steven, did that Stoke any thoughts on you?

Speaker B: Yeah, a lot of thoughts. I mean, I feel like I used to be like ledger for sure. Like when I first entered this space maybe like eleven years ago now. I guess as an investor I thought my job was to be really smart, right? And like oh my God, there's going to be this stuff that will change the world. And if I just think about the stuff that's actually going to change the world and buy it before other people do, then I will enrich myself with my huge, big, beautiful brain. And then this cycle continued for one or two more cycles where I kept trying to be smart and impose my own idea of what I thought the market should be on the market and sort of ignoring what the market was actually telling me. And now here in cycle number four, I guess I am really, really a self admitted trying to hit myself over the head with a frying pan, lower my iq trader. Im trying to see at what the market is telling me and make money by following the market, not saying what the market should do. The market undeniably loves the memes and I think ledger probably wouldn't even disagree with that. I think the thing he takes exception with is the nihilism, the fact that there's not something deeper going on here, I guess. But I would say that even with something like doge, all the stuff you described about bitcoin, it's not really that different from doge. It's not like bitcoin has any specific utility or cash flows. It is literally, as you said yourself, an idea, a meme. But you're basically like, well, the purpose of this meme is better than the doge meme, but that's just a very subjective sort of thought.

Speaker C: Not entirely. There's a scarcity element to bitcoin, which is part of the idea. And so one element is, it's a better idea, and the market cap proves it. The capitalist environment proves it. When you look at one market cap versus the other, the forever supply or relatively forever supply of dogecoin has been a limiter to some degree on doges potential to usurp bitcoin over the last ten year period, which it had an opportunity to do so for a decade. That's a long time to be able to make up that network effect, and it couldn't. And that's because bitcoins idea was stronger.

Speaker B: I would probably make the exact opposite argument, to be honest. I think one of the downsides of the sort of bitcoin like scarcity thing, I mean, I object to this idea that scarcity just makes something inherently valuable anyway. But even assuming it does, what it does is it creates an incentive for hoarding. People want to buy bitcoin buried in the backyard, give it to their kids, and then not share it with anybody. One of the nice things about having a supply that does inflate a little bit more is that you have distribution. The coin gets into the hands of more people. People want to spend it, use it as money, maybe buy a Tesla with it someday. I think there are a lot of positives to getting the coins in people's hands, and the network effects of that go towards a long term value add, right?

Speaker C: You just made the exact argument of a Fed inflationist for targeting 2% inflation or whatever, like some minimal inflation to encourage capital endeavors essentially to beat inflation. And I don't disagree with that, except for in this scenario, there's not a significant market for dogecoin or other highly inflationary, you know, created assets to create those capitalistic environments, like to create the things on top, and there are some things that can do that. That's the whole point of the dollar, I guess to like, challenge, you know, challenging people through the inflation of the dollar and for the Fed's targets for how the dollar should work to do the same thing. Like if it, if inflation's 2%, figure out a way to go earn seven or eight or 10%, go do something with those dollars. Because if you just hoard them, theyll become inherently less valuable over time. And bitcoin and other deflationary hedges, theyre a counter to that. Now, they can be limited by that, for sure. Creating economic activity on top of something is good. Thats why David and I, for example, really like the Ethereum network, because youre creating economic activity, programmatic activity on top of a blockchain, using the truthfulness of the chain. And in that scenario, thanks to the way eth mechanics work, it both burns ETH and creates an environment for economic activity on top of it. So I think you can make those arguments, but doge, for example, is not exactly going a route of do something on top. It's just inflating. So you just need more people to buy into the idea to outpace the inflation, which is fine, but I just don't think it's as powerful as bitcoins, like certainty of 21 million coins, which does inspire hoarding. And that's why you'll never have just bitcoin. You need the other side of the equation, right? You need the, not deflationary technically, but the known level of inflation and limited, um, limited supply of bitcoin. And then the other side of it is the other stuff. And that's why gambling and coin creation has been so popular for so long. And I'm not, I'm not trying to say it's like, terrible. I'm just saying most of it's going to zero, you know, and people need to understand that. Like, don't marry your bags, even your whiff bags.

Speaker B: Most of everything in this space is going to zero, right? Like, if it's going to zero as a justification for why something is generally a bad idea for you to invest in, then this whole space is going to fall apart. How many of the, even the top 500 altcoins do you want to buy and then go into a coma for 15 years and then wake up with maybe half of your net worth in two?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, that's kind of my point. And that's for things that have a productive component or things that don't, but for things that clearly do not. They don't know what they stand for, other than here's a funny thing that I thought of 15 minutes ago.

Speaker B: Why is that not something that's great to stand for, though? What is better to stand for than memes are amazing. Sure, there are some things that are better to stand for than memes, but memes are a pretty good thing. Like, the Internet freaking loves memes. There's an entire three generations now of people on planet Earth who love memes and communicate in memes and share memes, and memes are a sense of social currency to them, right. There is value in being the first person to find and spread a meme. You get cred amongst your peers. It's an obvious next step that we would sort of financialize that to some degree, because there is a market value there, even though it's not a value that the traditional boomer world of finance can sort of put in some sort of box. It's a new kind of thing, much like crypto is a new kind of thing, much like bitcoin was a new kind of thing, and much like ethereum especially was even like a new kind of thing within crypto. Does that resonate?

Speaker A: There was a line from Jacob, from Zora that I resonated with, which was that meme coins will just be called memes in the future, which I think he's just kind of implying, like, the actual instantiation of a token, a financial asset, that goes, you know, alongside an actual meme that we know of, like an Internet JPEG. He's saying that these are actually just becoming the same things. And so the token itself is the meme. And so in the year 2024, in the year of, you know, the crypto age, memes are tokens. Is a take that he. That he had.

Speaker C: I think that's stupid to say, here's token, now let's try to meme it so our bag doesn't go to zero. I'm okay with the idea of, here's a meme that should be tokenized, create a viral event, and then there's an economic value that can be associated to that. I think that's actually very interesting, and I think we will see that's kind of the tokenization of everything. Like, on the flip side of that, trying to create the everythingization of a token is stupid. Tokenize things that exist. Don't try to turn, like, create something to exist because you have a token. It's just stupid. I think you need a baseline idea. You need a baseline concept that you're trying to establish economic value for. Whether it's a meme, whether it's inflationary or deflationary, whether it's utility, have something, then tokenized. Don't say, here's token, let's create something. I think that's just the backwards way of doing it.

Speaker A: Okay, so, so wait, so what you're saying is, like, the doge meme was already a meme on the Internet, and then the doge blockchain came about and you're saying that that is a normal expected area?

Speaker C: Yeah, it was the tokenization of a thing versus. Yeah, the options.

Speaker A: What about geo Bowdoin? Who Joe. Joe Biden already existed and was already, you know, having meme power in of itself. And now there's geo Bowdoin. Like, where does that land on your viability spectrum?

Speaker C: It could be, okay, and there is this, like, the survival of the fittest. There might be 1000 memes based on Joe Biden and Donald Trump or the election, and only one survives because 999 die. And I understand that. And that's where a lot of this, like, everything goes to zero stuff comes from. But still, it's based on an idea, a mockery of our political system. Right? And I can get down with that. That's not what I'm trying to be against. Yeah, I think the vast majority of people, they don't care about any of that. They're just pretending the idea matters. All they want. All they want is the nihilistic idea of, I'm going to take Stephen's money before he takes my money. And I don't really like that idea.

Speaker A: So there's this concept out there that this idea that meme coins are more honest than actual real projects in crypto, because you can talk shit about all the meme coins that you want, but there is just a graveyard of attempted legitimate project that the founders had every intent to rug. At the end of the day, do Kwon, for example, made two or three failed algo stablecoins before he made terra Luna, right? And maybe Terra Luna even was a legitimate attempt at something, but then it's still ending up in the same graveyard right next to all the scams with, like, less than desirable founders who were just coming into crypto, making an alt layer one just to get rich, right? Like, look at, look, I could name so many names with, like, people in this graveyard. So, like, the whole idea here is, like, memes. Meme coins don't pretend to do anything, and they're, like, actually democratizing in terms of just, like, how the retail little guy and their access to information can play in the arena that is crypto. And so like, we can just, like, take off the. The emperor can just take off their clothes, and we can just, like, deal with everything just as totally naked and honest and transparent. Now, I have, like, qualms with that, because I think that's fake transparency, or it can be fake transparency. But, Steven, maybe you can continue this, like, line of reasoning, this thought, and, like, what you see in that corner of the meme world.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, this is my favorite thing about memes, is that they sort of, like, rip the mask off and say, this is what's happening. There's an authenticity about them. There's an honesty about them that's refreshing in the space. First, we created altcoins, and they stole people's bitcoin, and then we created icos, and they stole people's eth. And then we evolved coins with complex ponzi nomics and layers of weird defi elements to lock up your money while people dumped on you, and you couldn't understand what was happening. And then we created pictures and got people to burn thousands of dollars in gas just to mint them. And we raked them over the coals with, like, 10% royalty fees and all sorts of transaction fees, only to completely rug them when they discovered, like, the concept of liquidity and how it works in the opposite direction when you're trying to get out. And then, of course, we have the new favorite scam now, which is like the FDV scam, where you just issue all these tokens to early insiders. You control the float, and then you hire these market makers to brilliantly inflate the price of your token during market euphoria and distribute it on unsuspecting retail, only to have it crash 97% under the weight of all the unsustainable token inflation. This is all nonsense. And I think memes are a reaction to that, much in the same way that the. Every younger generation rebels against some of the ways of the older generation's world. They try to impose this world on them, this set of rules. This is how you have to think. This is how you have to behave. And they go, no, we don't want to do that. Now, oftentimes, a large part of that rebellion is very misguided, and it goes awry. But within that rebellion, there are these amazing seeds that are planted that grow into something great. And I don't think memes are some panacea, and they're all, like, awesome. But there's something good here, right? And I think one of the things people will come to realize is that one of the scarcest things in the world, right? Is attention. Having attention, I think, is more important than building a good product. I think it's actually way more important to get attention first and then build the product. Like, a lot of people build products and they never get used. They never have attention. Worse products gain traction in the world. It happens, like, all the time. So for now, these things are just these kind of weird little idiosyncrasies that we trade back and forth. But I think you're already seeing the seeds of how this can work in the opposite direction. Like, I'm pretty sure this is what Jordy is planning with, like, have you heard of puff? So I'm pretty sure puff is, like, doing the kind of. This is going to be, like, a real project. We're actually going to start it with the meme, and we're going to use the attention to funnel the people into the real product. We're going to use that attention for good, and I think we're going to see memes.

Speaker A: Puff is a meme coin on mantle, and it's being bootstrapped by the mantle community, the mantle thought leaders, people, majority. And then the idea is that actually will turn into something with a. A team with good intentions, with a north Star, and they will build something. But there's just starting with a meme first, is what you're saying.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think it's brilliant, and I look forward to more experimentation in that regard. Using these memes for good.

Speaker C: Yeah. This is an impossible argument for me.

Speaker B: To win, because it's a really good one.

Speaker C: Because your argument is really good. No, it's just, like, there's obviously going to be, you know, good, like, some good things that come out of it, but I don't think that that's a reason to celebrate the overall idea. Right. Like, I think that I'm not going to celebrate, like, this idea that all is futile, so, like, live now, dump on others, you know? You know, kind of this sodom and Gomorrah lifestyle. Like, everything. Everything is pointless, so screw it. I'm gonna. I'm gonna live for the now. That's just not my mindset. Right. So, like, yes, there is. There is. There are things in there. There are, like, little bits of light amongst, you know, fire and darkness. You know, like, there's a little. There's good that can come out of it, but the overwhelming majority just sucks. Right. And, like, I think the intent of man to, like, live and do well should matter, and I'm not. I don't like, a fair distribution is fine, like, what you just talked about with that meme coin and what their purpose is. But for everyone, there's unsuspecting retail that, like, the same people that are behind the high fdv scams are, like, all. Also, I'm sure, creating and doing pump and dump meme coin stuff. And so, like, you have the same victims, essentially, just different methods. And even those are, it's always people trying to figure out a way around whatever exists. And you talked earlier about people being upset. You kind of have the revolution, and then something comes out of that. But there's also just the people in the revolution that just want to take advantage of the revolution, right? There was no real idea. It was, again, that nihilism. And that's what I'm against. I've just. I believe that we live for something, and we can choose to live for something, and I will. I will personally choose to participate in a way that I believe in, like, and so I'm just not going to be the guy shilling $150,000 market cap piece of crap scam coin that just popped up because I bought it early. And now I'm going to tell other people about it because that, you know, it's just unethical behavior in my perspective. And so I think what we're doing is we're excusing whether it's the high FTV scam that's got the suit on, or whether it's the one that comes out of, like, a telegram and you and your buddies, you know, unibot sniped it. It's just unethical behavior. And I think if you fail to call that out, then you're going to burn the whole thing to the ground. And so I think that, like, we need to set a standard for ourselves to live a little bit higher. That's all I'm asking for, is just live a little bit higher. Like, have a little bit of ethics in our, uh, in our lifestyles. And, like, I think, will some people get really, really rich doing unethical things? Sure. But that's, like, that's not all there is to life, I guess.

Speaker A: I think one way to kind of maybe, like, categorize this conversation is there's, like, meme coin theory, and then there's meme coin in practice. Um, and I think Doge, one of the reasons why we talk about Doge and why everyone talks about the potential of doge is that meme coin in theory turned into practice in this very pure, holistic, heartwarming way. Uh, but as we've seen with every single cycle, like, the cycles that Steven was talking about with the icos, like, what was the first ico? Oh, it was ethereum. What was the second ico? Auger? A legitimate project that the product itself didn't work out, but, like, no one really felt scammed about that because it was a good attempt. And then everyone realized that, like, oh, you could do this ICo thing, you can attract a bunch of eth. And then, like, I. The euthanasia roller coaster was kick started, and then we ended up in like, the ICO shitcoin waterfall. That was 2017. And you can repeat that for deci summer. Like, who started Defi summer compound? Robert Leshner. Great governance tokens. We needed all of that kicked off. The governance revolution. How did it end? Like 1000 apy pool twos. And so, like, meme coins are taking kind of the same arc where like, maybe meme coins are taking the same mark where we start with dogecoin, but then we end with this PvP. I just created a meme coin. Now everyone buy it, and I'm going to sell it tomorrow.

Speaker C: And the result has been the same in all of these, pretty much where liquidity gets spread out, like way out to a point to where you kind of have this house of cards on the market that needs to correct and go back to the things that do carry something. Like, they carry some value. And yeah, maybe there are some memes that survive and there's some suit coins that survive, but there's a lot of deaths as well. And I think you're just creating a perpetual cycle. You're just doing a different version of the same crap where you're fracturing liquidity over and over again. And I just don't really buy into the idea that it's purer than before because you're just not pretending anymore because there's very real projects, but it's not the only thing you can get rich in. That's not my point. And I'm all for people having opportunity to elevate themselves in a capitalistic way. I think even in that there's different ways to do it. If you say I'm going to launch a meme coin and I'm going to purposefully pump and dump this thing so I can make a buck because I live in this nihilistic environment, and screw this guy and all these other people, screw them, I'm going to collect mine. Like, that's just as bad, right? But if there's an open market and you're not trying to personally manipulate that market and you're making a trade in that environment, then fine, whatever. You're just one of the market participants. I think that's a truer expression of how to go about this in an honorable way, if you will. And I just refuse to live in a world where we have to throw all that aside and it's just the wild west forever, and there are no morals or ethics or anything. Like, I just. That's not my world. And that's my, that's my whole point about it. And I just see a lot of that as you see this escalation, if you will, of meme coin culture in the same way that you saw it with icos and pre sales and everything else, like, and nfts and all the. All the other, like, as it goes further and further out, like, it gets worse and worse to the degree that it just needs to explode and like, have like a jubilee of the coins, like, just make it all go away and start over again from the phoenix from the ashes type of environment.

Speaker B: I kind of object to this whole painting of everything as this is just financial nihilism, right? We have a meme coin channel in our discord, and nobody in there is nihilist. Everybody's vibing and having an amazingly fun time. And the idea that never before in human history did everybody get together with their friends and try to make a bunch of money and get rich quick like that, that didn't exist. And that's just a product of like a zoomer nihilism or something.

Speaker C: I'm not saying it didn't exist. I'm just saying it's always fun while you're winning and then it's not.

Speaker B: Sure, of course. And like, I think there is a much higher sort of self realization in the people trading memes that what they are doing is like a very zero sum game. I think in previous cycles, people were buying these altcoins. They literally thought they were going to do something and make them money. It's very hard for anybody with an iq above 60 to convince themselves that they're really going to buy bottom and hold it for ten years and become like a be worth like $30 million, right? So there's like a element of, like, self awareness and honesty in what is happening. I would argue that, like, an element of the bitcoin vision is kind of like a little more like nihilistic or like dystopian, right? Like this idea that crypto is going to succeed because we all just buy this coin and it just goes up as, like, the rest of the world buys. We don't even do anything with it. We just watch the number go up. Now. We don't even buy it on chain. We buy it in like an ETF, right?

Speaker C: I think it's less, I think it is dystopian, but it's not nihilist.

Speaker B: Sure. All right, cool. It's dystopian. You could choose your dystopia, right? I mean. I mean, David, you're a big advocate. You love crypto, right? You think crypto is going to be a thing and change the world. Does crypto become a thing because a bunch of people buy bitcoin in their coinbase account and look at the number go up? Or does crypto become a thing because users start using the chain and using the products? Like, what better way to bootstrap people into this ecosystem? Has there ever been than, like, this meme coin frenzy? Like, people can't go on coinbase and, like, trade popcat or whatever the meme of the day is, right? They have to be like, how do I, how do I use a wallet? How do I use Jupiter? How do I do all these things? Right? And although, yes, a lot of these people are going to get burned in a particular way, I think that five years from now, ten years from now, when crypto is like a big thing, right. And you talk to people, you talk to, like, the next van Spencer, if you will, of like 20 years from now, right, whatever. And you're like, how did you get involved in crypto? Everybody has the same story when they get involved in crypto. They heard about something, they thought it was cool, they bought something, and then they got burned. But in the process, an idea went off in their head and they became hooked. And then they sort of climbed that wall and became a user, an advocate, and get everybody else in the space. I think the same thing is going to happen here.

Speaker A: Yeah. And when I got into crypto, I was very much illusioned by the ico mania. I thought substratum was going to change the face of the Internet. I thought basic attention tokenization was going to meaningfully change our relationship with advertisers. Uh, and it really wasn't until, like, 2018. I was like, oh, I just, like, paid a very expensive lesson. But that's how I thought about it. Like, I paid for a free lesson in, like, real markets and incentives and human behavior and all that kind of stuff. And maybe to Steven's point, to the meme. Coin point. Meme coin point. Uh, is like, you very much are aware of what you are doing when you buy, like, dog, doge with hat. Dog with hat. Like, you know, exactly. Like, you're like, I am not being disillusioned by the founder of substratum who thinks he's going to change the structure of the Internet. I'm literally buying a dog with a hat. So I can appreciate that. But I think there's also inside of this debate between meme coins, good or bad, is also a timeframe difference. I saw this classic bell curve tweet where in the center you have the middle of the curve, and the guy's like, no, you need fundamentals. You can't invest in dogs with hats. Meme coins are too nihilistic. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And then on the left and the right side, it's like, I don't. I'm having fun, and I'm getting rich. Those are the two lines. Like, I'm having fun getting rich. And those two sides of the left and right of the curve work when number goes up, but when number goes down, you really want fundamentals. Like, this whole concept of, like, interest rates is, like, anti. Is an anti meme coin concept. Like, the higher interest rates are in the world, the less meme coins will exist. Because when interest rates are super high, you need systems that produce cash flows that can pay for the interest rates. And so, like, a lot of this stuff, I think, was really contained inside of one cycle, and it only works while people make money. And as soon as people stop making money, as soon as inflation picks up, as soon as we're thinking about, like, okay, what is my, like, retirement plan? What is my ten plus year time horizon thesis? As soon as people think in longer terms and they need to start thinking about fundamentals, and all of a sudden, the air goes out of the meme coin balloon. And so I think that a lot of the debates is, like, our meme coins are good or bad also kind of needs to be framed in, like, the timeframe. Like, meme coins are good in the short term, but can they be good in the long term? I think is where ledger will say, no, they literally cannot. It's structurally impossible for them to be good in the long term.

Speaker C: For the most part, yeah. Like, when you take it holistically, there will be success stories. But, like, I think it's a. Maybe it's a more efficient lottery, right? Like, and I don't really like the lottery. I certainly don't like the concept of a state run lottery. And let's send kids to college because we took money from poor people who had very little hope, so they just did this thing instead. Like, I'm just gonna go buy some scratch offs at the gas station with the last $20 I got, because I have no other hope. And so I'm just gonna do this. And that sends somebody that makes, like, 200 grand a year to the University of Georgia full time. That's highly dystopian, and I don't like that at all. And so a lot of times when people talk about, like, why they're opting in to just gambling on meme coins, it's the same kind of thing. Like, how else are we going to make it, bro? You know? And I get that it's. Maybe it's more efficient than that lottery, and I just don't like it. Like, I'm allowed to just not like something. And that's all I really said when I got trolled for this tweet, is I just don't like it. I don't like the concept of that. I choose. I would rather believe in something both that I'm investing in, trading, whatever else. Like, I've always said this, david, I don't even know how many times I've talked to you personally about this. Like, if I'm going to hold something, I want it to be something. I can sleep at night and realize, like, I'm okay with this. And every now and then, will I go participate in the trade? Like, the overwhelming, like, size of the wave that's crashing? Like, is it just one that I'll tack onto?

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker C: But at the end of the day, I would rather hold something, invest in something where I have some fundamental belief about what that thing is and why I hold it and why I'm participating. And I think for a market to be functional, you need a reasonable number of people and a reasonable volume of dollars that are thinking that way, or else the whole thing's going to look dumber than the tulip bulb mania of the 16 hundreds that everybody makes fun of us for.

Speaker B: Do you invest in art? Do you invest in nfts? Do you believe those things are investment vehicles? To a degree, or at least high probability speculative assets.

Speaker C: High probability. No, I wouldn't do say high probability, but fine.

Speaker B: Art you don't think is if it's.

Speaker C: Already been established, right, but then your upside is lower. It's more of a traditional investment vehicle. The difference between me buying a Picasso and buying a piece of class a real estate, might be pretty much the same type of returns.

Speaker B: See, I dont think theres much of a difference at all between buying Dogecoin and buying fine nfts. I dont think theres that much of a difference between buying Dogecoin and buying shares of LVMH. Right? Like, like, sure, LVMH makes widgets and people buy them. Right? But. But like under, underneath all of that is just an idea. Like the thing just has value because, like, it has been memed into value. Like, the population likes it.

Speaker C: I've talked about the network effects of a blockchain forever like that. I'm not disagreeing with you on that.

Speaker B: But if you think that it's like a legitimate investment to invest in brands, like brands like LVMH, for example, is investing in doge not the same thing as investing in any brand? It's an idea that you think has traction that is growing and it is growing at a rate that will let.

Speaker C: You get a return on your thing. Negative about Doge. You keep saying I'm like anti doge. I've never said anything negative.

Speaker B: Sure, but if you accept Doge and you accept the idea of brands, then you have to accept the idea that there won't just be one brand, there will be many downstream brands.

Speaker C: No, that's like saying, well, if you believe in Nike, you should believe in Schmike because I made it.

Speaker B: No, it's not. It's like saying, if you believe in Nike, when Nike made shoes, you had to believe in the idea that somebody would also create, like, adidas shoes and then converse shoes would be like, that's not the same at all.

Speaker C: I think the vast majority of what's created looks a lot more like schmike than Adidas. Like, I don't think very many of the, what? Very many of the things that we see out there and that end up, like, shilled by people with significant followings are truly a different take on a similar concept, and instead they're just like a me too pump and dump.

Speaker B: Of course that's true. But if what you were saying, if the opposite of what you were saying was true, that was like, oh, yeah, I look in the meme space and I see all these really great brands that are the next doge, then there wouldn't be any returns there because the market would already see that. Like, you can't have one without the other. And people acknowledge this. People acknowledge it's a high risk game.

Speaker C: But there's also some purpose, there's some purpose in establishing accountability in that ecosystem that is important. And when there's zero consequence for creating, like, a thousand shmikes, then that's. You're gonna self destruct the thing that was good in the first place.

Speaker B: But that's why I like crypto. We just, like, fast run all the stuff in the real world and just blow everything up, and we learn all the lessons ourselves and redo everything and, like, super, super compressed timeframes. And you're already seeing the market adapt to some of this. We have these token checkers now, for example, where now even people who are amateur crypto people know, okay, there's a meme coin. I got to run through the token checker. I got to see if there's a whitelist. I got to see if the dev minted himself. All the tokens is a liquidity locked. And this was going to keep evolving. This is just a crypto thing. There are no guardrails.

Speaker C: Do you think there should be any accountability, like, for the person who's creating all the ones that are not, like, a real attempt at establishing meme value or whatever?

Speaker B: No, I think if you fair deploy a token with no attempts to defraud people. We have laws in the real world against certain financial crimes. Just because you commit that financial crime in crypto doesn't mean you're not responsible for that financial crime. So I'm all for holding people in the crypto world responsible for committing fraud or anything that could be perceived as fraud, but if everybody is just mass launching memes with fair token distributions.

Speaker C: I.

Speaker B: Don'T have a problem with that. I don't have a problem with people playing that game. I don't.

Speaker C: If I created a coin and I called it, okay, grandma or whatever, somebody's done these with me that's already created.

Speaker B: Now, by the way.

Speaker C: Yeah, I'm sure. But, like, if I create one, essentially memeing myself for being a frickin old boomer, like, let's call it the Bama boomer coin, okay? And so we got the Bama boomer coin, and I say, listen, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna create the Bama boomer coin. It's worthless. But if you guys want to make fun of me, just buy this coin at this contract address and, you know, off we go. Like, but I am disclosing, naturally, that I think it's valueless. But if you think the Bama boomer meme is, you don't think that, like, there's a responsibility that I have to limit the way that I go about things and say things because I'm essentially estab, I'm creating the cliff for someone to jump off of where I know they're going to fall and break their bones, you know, like, that's all that's really happening there. Like, some clever people are going to win off of it and they probably will just because I said that. Like, somebody's going to go create it because they see this podcast, somebody's going to make couple thousand bucks off of it or whatever, and there's gonna be somebody else, like, well, I guess I'm just gonna jump off this cliff. Maybe I'll make it because Bama Boomer is a good coin and this is a funny idea and it's gonna be me. And then they break their legs. Like, am I responsible if I'm the creator of that for establishing that arena where that occurred? Like, I just don't think it doesn't carry real value. And please don't. Somebody will make Bam and Boomer don't buy it. It's stupid. It's stupid.

Speaker B: Okay, so two things there. Like, one, no, of course you're not responsible. And then, I don't know, like, people. Sure, there are people in the world who want, like, they're the Elizabeth Warren types and they think we should throw you in jail for that. Like, I'm not that person. Do it. If you're being transparent and you're saying, like, here's a cliff, but, like, don't jump off of it, and somebody jumps off the cliff, right? Like, that's not your problem, right? The second part is, like, I just view memes in a fundamentally different way than you do. Like, you're, like, there's no purpose, it has no value. But, like, in my mind, these are, these are just speculative marketplaces for attention, right?

Speaker C: Once again, not said memes don't have value.

Speaker B: You said, well, you said Bama Boomer.

Speaker C: Doesn'T have any, has no value, but.

Speaker B: Not a meme value because you as this, like, you've said it with, like, clout on crypto Twitter, you have attention. So stuff you put into the world has attention. And when people are buying meme coins, they're buying a piece of that attention or speculating on how much attention that will actually have. That's what's actually kind of happening here at a base level with meme coins. And I think as more and more people realize that this is just sort of like a speculative attention marketplace, you can kind of view it through maybe a different lens because we all agree that attention is a very valuable thing in this crazy world we live in.

Speaker A: So one of the reasons fundamentals. In a token, for example, Makerdao has had some of the best fundamentals in crypto over the longest amount of time. And it's one of the most ignored, generally speaking, ignored coins until finally just the fundamentals became so strong that even VC's had to pick up on it. And now its revenue is, VC's had.

Speaker C: To pick up on it. The slowest actors in this, always the last one to the party.

Speaker A: Well, on public markets, yeah.

Speaker C: They'Re so.

Speaker A: Attention grabbing that all of a sudden they showed up in the market price of MKR finally. And so maybe to kind of reframe what meme coins are. They're like, they're not equities, right? They're not trying to produce fundamentals, they're not trying to produce cash flows. They're commodities on attention in a particular flavor, in a particular arena. And so like, I uh, like Doge. Doge with hat is capturing the attention that whatever doge with hat can produce, that one's a little self recursive. There are other meme coins that are like running in parallel to like in real world, like non crypto stuff. And so like as the attention, like I'm like Taylor Swift coin, for example. Uh, Taylor Swift gets big. Taylor Swift coin would also get big because it is this like community supported unofficial commodity that is commoditizing the attention around Taylor Swift. And commodities are inherently zero sum because like oil does not produce dividends, it is a commodity. It gets consumed once. Right? And so there is no cash flows to oil. There is no cash flows to gold. And so like maybe this is why we're talking about when gold is like perhaps inherently nihilistic because you don't think that you can produce anything new out of it. And so maybe this is like reframing of meme coins as like pseudo attention commodities. Uh, does that make you feel any better or worse? Ledger?

Speaker C: I guess I'm indifferent. I mean, I told you I was going to like, this is going to be hard for me to win because it's mostly me saying what I'm not that very willing to participate in. Um, because I don't value many of these segments of the attention market, if you will. And I do believe in the attention market. That's not, that's not my point at all. Um, I don't believe in the gamble ification of that attention market. And there's just many things with regards to gambling and attention, I guess, that I choose not to participate in. It's not to say, I think something should be illegal, necessarily. I just, I wish that there was a little more market accountability for market accountability, meaning by participants choices not to be there. Right. Like, then there is. And I was thinking about this one, like the, have you ever seen that article where it was something like this one guy sends like 15% of the world spam emails or something like that, and somehow he was like, somebody figured out how to block a lot of his stuff and he just, it stopped happening. And so an example is, I'm not saying email is bad. I'm not saying email marketing is bad. I'm saying, can we call this guy bad? Like this douchebag that's sending the same spam to, you know, tens of millions of people every day? Like, that's not, that's, I just don't like that. You know, and there's, and what we're saying is for the, all the people that are creating that we're not, as, we're not, we're not just willing to say that's stupid or that's bad. Like, we're like, well, maybe he's going to make a buck off of it. And I got to receive, you know, 50,000 spam emails every, every month because of it. And like, I don't, I don't like that. That's, that's my point.

Speaker B: I mean, if your point is that memes as a whole are actually really good, and I just, this segment of meme coinery is bad, if you wanted to say fraudster, profit, maxi spammer, sure. I won't argue with you.

Speaker C: And that's been my whole point. But there's a high ratio of that in this current meme coin iteration. It's because we're just like, yolo, everything is fine. We're enabling so much more of that, and we're tolerating, for example, people that I think are making irresponsible decisions, like bro Bama, boomers, the future, you know, you need to invest. I got a frickin bag when it was cheap. I'm up ten x. I'm going to be up ten x more after I shill it to 250,000 people. And a bunch of people that just want the lotto tickets are chasing it. And the next thing you do is dump on their face. Like that person is the one that needs to be held accountable, and it takes human beings to hold them accountable.

Speaker A: I think this is really kind of drilling down into the heart of this whole crux, which is we talked about how, like, shady and terrible crypto has been in its history. The graveyards of scams that have come and gone and made very few people very rich to the cost of retail. Are meme coins better or worse than the attempts at legitimacy that scams or accidental frauds have been ledger? That's a question to you?

Speaker C: I think they're worse, but they're not that much worse than what we've been forced into with real projects, because the government has been been the one that has forced us into non fair distributions of real projects. So I can get back to blaming the government about, like, their approach to regulate regulation. And crypto is what's the real culprit here. Because if we had a cleaner path towards equitable distribution of real projects, and you had a real pathway for bringing real stuff to market, then you could bring real stuff to market to everyday people, and that would be better. So this is the response. It's like a rubber band response. That's the wrong one, in my opinion.

Speaker A: Steven, thoughts?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, my generalized thoughts on this is just that ideas are powerful. Ideas have value. We've been focused a lot on crypto as like, building, quote unquote, projects that. That do things, but ideas and things that have mind share undeniably have value. You can envision an end state of this cycle where virtually every single zoomer who touches crypto has dog with hat in their wallet. What does the world look like where there are just millions upon millions of people who have this coin? The coin is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. We already saw, like yesterday, they raised $650,000 to put the hat on the sphere. Right. What can a coin like that do when it has the attention of 1000 times as many people as it already has, as those people are way wealthier than they are now? There's interesting stuff, I think, that could be done and come of that, and there's undeniably some value there. It's not valueless like every other thing in crypto, right. In the sort of phase one, we take an idea and we run way too far with it, and we jump off the ledge and people fall down and break a leg and get hurt. And yeah, that's obviously going to happen here. Obviously. My position is it's a little more transparent, at least this time around. It's like when you have like a kid and he's like, wants to climb a tree and you know he's going to climb the tree, but you're like, all right, well, you're going to fall and hurt yourself, but you'll learn the hard way that's a better thing for me than pretending there's something there that there's not, and then somebody gets hurt and then they feel very disillusioned, like they were lied to in a way, and that kind of creates lasting impact. So I think it's the same thing we've done over and over again. It's a slightly better version of it, but like the previous experiments we ran, there was a really good nugget of truth to them. And in later cycles, those things blossomed into really, really good projects, really, really good ideas. Same thing's going to happen.

Speaker C: Do you have a good example of one where it turned into something productive? Because I think the instate of what you're saying here is, I hope dog with hat is just like dogecoin again, and same with shiba inu. But have we seen anything really of, like, with any real productivity or like, anything of these creative ideas that blossomed with. Even with doge? And I like doge. And I think if you own doge because you like doge, that's fine. But have we seen economic activity or real stuff happen beyond, I think, or is the maximum of that? Elon Musk brought extra attention to it so that on SNL or whatever, people bought the top of it, or maybe that onboarded some people into crypto and they went and they went deeper down the rabbit hole in some capacity. What else do you think has come of that? When these things have gone to where you want them to previously? We've had things worth tens of billions of dollars. And what have they done so far?

Speaker B: Well, I don't think anything in crypto has really done much so far. If you want to take a step back and think about it, there's a benchmark. Yes. We've created some cool products and Ethereum land. Yeah, bitcoin, get an ET. But the main thing we started crypto for bitcoin is still not doing anything it said it wanted to do. Like it was. It was supposed to be a peer to peer cash thing, right, in the. In the original white paper, and nobody really uses it for that. So doge is kind of like, similar to bitcoin in that regard. Like, it's like this thing that people invest in as a speculative asset. Oh, by the way, it has nfts, right. But, like, I think I can see a world in the not so distant future where doge is transacted with in a day to day currency and used to purchase goods more than bitcoin is. I can definitely see that world, and it won't invalidate bitcoin, but I can for sure see that world on the not so distant horizon.

Speaker C: That would be pretty funny, but I guess I would like to see some evidence of it. It is a little tiresome in crypto to how long? Seven, eight years or whatever in the space. And you're just. You keep saying, okay, when is some of this stuff going to come into fruition? And at some point I think the industry, you do need to shit or get off the pot a little bit and do something, or else this nihilistic view of meme coins does end up being the final hurrah and crypto just gets sent to a corner of the world where there's not that much economic impact. I don't actually think that's true. I think there are things that are being created. There's real stuff happening, there's real things. And then as a result you have this massively long tail of speculative me too stuff. And that's just part of it. But I would like to see some of these things make their way to the real world. For example, I got interested in NFTs, not because I love the dog pictures or monkey pigs or whatever, but I think that the inherent underlying technology of a non fungible token has the opportunity to have incredible utility in the world. I think a lot of the things, we're going to put it all on the blockchain, they are possible to put those things, real world things on the blockchain because they are singular, they're identifiable, versus the interchangeable parts of your doge. And my doge are the same doge. They're all just the ERC 20, the tradable token versus the independent one of, like this is my pudgy penguin or whatever, but not just, this is my pudgy penguin, but this is how title in real estate works. And let's put it on the blockchain. I'm ready for that, I guess, is my point. I'm kind of stubbornly waiting for these real world applications. I think it's ridiculous that we still do things the way we do in the real world and crypto helps solve those. But, like, how do we get there? And I want to funnel some of these billions and billions of dollars that come into the ecosystem to like, let's finally make some of that happen. Like, that's the better world kind of mentality that I would. I think we can, we can do. Um, but it's not easy. It's way harder than buying dog with hat.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, much like in the early days of the Internet, like the Internet didn't become a thing because people invested in Shopify and PayPal. The Internet became a thing because a lot of people started using it and they started using it in the early days for mostly, I dont know, mostly, but very numerous illicit purposes. The same thing was with bitcoin. Satoshi created bitcoin and then everyone was like, oh cool, I could buy drugs with it.

Speaker C: Now.

Speaker B: This is just the natural adoption cycle of these things to an extent. To expect that it's going to be any different this time around is silly. And yeah, of course I want to get to that end state.

Speaker C: I actually think crypto is going significantly slower in its true adoption cycle than the Internet did.

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree with you, I agree with you.

Speaker C: But truly the crypto adoption cycle has been very slow in my opinion, and very fast on the speculative front, in the same way that the Internet was, but very slow on the adoption side of things. And I think that's partly because it's really hard. Right. Like there's a financialization aspect that was less, less a part of the Internet where the Internet was just computers.

Speaker B: Well, I mean, I think the Internet ultimately gained a lot of adoption because people used it to entertain themselves. And I think in early crypto, like, you know, it was, it's kind of hard to entertain yourselves. And then all coin speculation became entertainment. And now this is just like another form of further and further entertainment. And I think from all that entertainment, bootstrapping, we will end up with tons of users. And then I think once you have tons of users, then people actually can look at this and go like, oh, there's actually like a network effect here. There's people who have wallets on their phone, there's the infrastructure laid out, and now I can come in and build stuff because the users are there. That's the most important thing. Are the users there? Not are people investing in the infrastructure layer that doesn't actually bootstrap all of the future growth.

Speaker C: I agree with that. And if people figure out ways to lose money all the time, but if that's what it costs to get hundreds of millions of people with crypto wallets on their phone, that's the core of the crypto experience that's missing. And it's really hard. By the way, talk about things that need addressing. Apple and Google and the way that they treat crypto transactions and crypto apps, the monopolization of app stores, that's one that if the government wanted to focus on something, they could focus on that Apple's monopoly on what you can do in an app and how the app store is controlled in terms of purchasing and what can be done there sucks. And the route for crypto apps has been, like, progressive web apps, which is really hard. It's a really hard user experience. And I think some of the regulation going on there or some of the court battles going on in Europe right now, for example, are really interesting. But if the result of all of this is that somehow we have access, like, more people have access to crypto infrastructure through their phones, that would be a nice win. And I do think you can establish some real utility and, like, some of the actual purposes of crypto can be exposed through that. And if their way to do it is to buy these. Safemoon is a good example of one total scam onboard. A lot of people to crypto, I guess, and it's at the cost. I guess if your argument is that it's worth the cost, then I guess that's one thing. I'd rather do it with something other than safemoon or this cycle, whatever the memes of this cycle are. But nobody's talking about safemoon anymore. Right.

Speaker A: Probably going to jail. That's why.

Speaker B: I mean, that was like an outright financial fraud. And I think important to distinguish from, like, the.

Speaker C: I don't even, like, was it not launched fairly or like, what was there.

Speaker B: Was like a really great, like, they got six hour breakdown on this. It is such a scam, like, literal throw people in jail scam. Right. So they have. We should put it off to the side, for sure.

Speaker A: Not a meme coin.

Speaker B: Not a meme.

Speaker C: Actually, it wasn't a meme.