"Sadly, nope, things have hit an all-new bottom with 2024: racist, sexist, and other shitheaded memecoins which are merely a vehicle to transfer wealth from the many to the most obnoxious people on the planet." I think most people might not even notice that if they're buying a nazi memecoin, they're financially supporting people who spread nazi ideas. And that incentivizes even more people to launch similar coins, which probably triggered this race to the bottom. All in all, good post. I know it must be hard to keep speaking up but I wish Polynya kept writing. In moments of total madness, rational, balanced voices are needed the most.
Yes, I agree Mac, but just yesterday, e.g. I was bullied out by „builders“ on Farcaster for suggesting to build in a memecoin‘s token gated channel and so for me this post from Polynya really hits home. Fundamentally, the space has attracted a type of financial nihilist, ever-sarcastic memecoin trader. They don‘t contribute actively with work to the space, unless you call 24/7 speculation a meaningful contribution. Tbh, I‘ve even come around to them somewhat: What makes you money, makes you money. Might makes right. The issue with this is, however, clearly that Nazi and racist coins have a high profit potential for these people as calling someone the N word is a very popular meme that many don‘t get to act out in their real life. Goes without saying that it is wrong, but to me if we fight the symptoms and we say: „oh now with N word coin, they crossed a line,“ then I think as a space we will not permanently address this issue. That is because we have enabled these people in the first place. All tools perfectly exist to launch these coins. All of DeFi works like a charm. The exchanges are uncensorable etc. And on top of that, there is a real lifelyhood to be made from asking if devs can do something. As someone who can outright create these projects for those who pay millions to speculate, I live like a poor person. I have money, but it‘d bet that many anon TG traders make more money than me as they‘re capturing the residual value on the novel tech. Kiwi News, for example, although many will say this is braindead, has non transferrable tokens and there is non financially speculative aspect to it. Ask yourselves: is that because I as the dev Am too stupid to do that? Is it because I don‘t have the resources? No, it is because I‘m fundamentally not aligned with these people and because, for over a decade, I have researched this technology, and I‘ve seen what its true potential is. Spoiler alert: nazi memecoins are not it! All of this said, the highest leverage contribution is to continue building Kiwi and implementing what we stand for fundamentally, which is to highlight the really great and novel aspects of crypto culture. Let‘s hope we succeed.
I wish I could upvote Tim's comment. yes, I am a degenerate. yes, I believe that IRL degeneracy has its place. We don't have our quality of life without some 19th century chemist licking their fingers (gross, does not generalize, but I hope the vibe translates). In other words, it would be as much a mistake to claim refuge in risklessness when, philosophically, there needs to be crazy people (sometimes outcasts) who yearn to explore and discover at all costs. Marie Curie & Rosalind Franklin are just a couple of pioneers who irradiated themselves to death, but we get to experience nuclear technology & gene therapy, despite their realized dangers. memecoins are not this kind of degeneracy. They are mass prompt engineering on centralized, mutable databases leading to very rudimentary onchain constructs. airdrops are effectively aperiodic proof of work w/o consistent protocol. They're barely approximate to the goose forks (https://github.com/goosedefi/) of 2021. One can confidently claim that any derived public good is at least n + 1 degrees of association away from the market, and irrationally so (the benevolence outside family + friends is a fluke). the lamentable fact is that humanity loves an epic. finance uses survivorship bias to narrate a human condition of shrewdness, willpower, and speed, but the underlying value creation (being at least n + 1 away) is a sacrificial meatgrinder of a billion failures. we have a hard time entertaining, much less believing, that the greatest potential is worthwhile because it is the (ultimately commodified) product of the many nameless, faceless ideators and implementors, far more than any finfluencer who can inorganically afford the audience. in crypto, there's a "regen" philosophy of some Schelling point, a credibly neutral contract where all forms of capital can coalesce and pathfind autonomously. with the distribution of attention on social networks, I wonder sometimes how true this really can be. but this is not to say that you'll see me on Farcaster, handwaving about the hyperstitional praxis of boosting the proselytism of a ticker. I think such trends evaporate as the cost of capital or user acquisition makes them illegitimate. what will remain are incentive systems for real value creation. perhaps some good will come from grants percolating through DAOs like Purple. perhaps some good will come from bounties denominated in some token that represents a lively community. ultimately, as a degenerate, I think there are worthwhile risks. there are no technological gains without the risk of time spent, the sleepless nights, the anxieties of failure modes in production. things break down & blow up. it would be just as foolish to imply our lives are naturally sterile & "within the garden", than to say that everything is a PVP jungle. these idiosyncrasies of a permissionless financial market are not profane exceptions, they are the risks that should be accounted for. one of my favorite phrases is "sunlight is the best disinfectant [or medicine]". I think crypto is a bit of a Plato's cave, where enough exposure to the tech will result in the uncomfortable dissonance of watching others cast some facsimile inside the cave. we should be uncomfortable. we should risk building the tech out further. this, too, shall pass.
I agree with the above points and the content of the article. However, as I said on X, I'm not entirely sure why Polynya is taking a step back from social media. One could argue that it is mentally straining to see "the bad type" of content but it's possible to curate one's feed or simply post on a blog and not read the rest. I thought about leaving the space more than once, because I don't like this abandon-ethics-to-make-money, but decided to stay since what is being built at the core fascinates me. I also chose to start being more active, launched a Twitch channel 2 weeks ago, and am sharing my thoughts and ideas more than before. I am still consuming content though, so can't avoid seeing memecoin discussion, but that is up to me and I could decide to not see that again. For example, I see no TA content whatsoever, it just depends on where I put the limit. I 100% understand why many people see crypto as a scam and don't want to come, but it's our job to make it more appealing and show what we really care about.
Maybe we should invite Polynya to use Kiwi instead of X :)