Note: None of this is obviously financial advice, and the only reason I have to put this disclaimer up here is because we live in an impossibly stupid world.
For the uninitiated: a shitcoin is any cryptocurrency that isn’t Bitcoin or Ethereum.
I need to get this take in that’s been percolating in the back of my head before stubbornly high inflation and slowing GDP figures inevitably bring markets back down towards some semblance of reality and wipe this nonsense out of the news cycle with it.
One of my foundational promises to the Splinter audience is never to bore you with dumb crypto stuff, only to entertain you with it. I may fire off a take or two on a slow news day defending some aspects of it (like how the most widespread and effective thing crypto has ever created ironically is something always worth $1), but like I wrote before, it’s not interesting enough to write about regularly anyway.
HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu however, is worth writing about. I have been paying attention to crypto since 2013, and this is some of the most unhinged activity I have ever seen. You thought shitcoins were out of control when Dogecoin put Elon Musk on Saturday Night Live?
That was simply the moment the shitcoin atom was split, and we were introduced to a new kind of hell with a quadrillion different Dogecoin variations, beginning with Shiba Inu (SHIB) in 2021. All of this garbage is making some crypto traders obscene amounts of money. If you bought $100 worth of SHIB at its all-time low, it would have netted you $152,850 if you sold at the all-time high.
To be clear to any folks who don’t want to listen to the disclaimer up top when I reveal even more preposterous shitcoin return figures below: we are speaking about the recent past here. After Bitcoin reached all-time highs last month, returns have turned negative. This garbage is not something you want to be holding on the way down.
There have still been strong shitcoin bounces on this stairway back down towards somewhere resembling whatever fair value means for this shit, especially when compared to the traditional finance world who benchmarks itself against “risk-free” government debt and ten percent average annual market returns, but it sure seems like most if not all of the juice has already been squeezed out of this rally.
If you had gambled $100 on the following one-hundred percent real shitcoins at inception and sold them at their peak, you would have profited about this much money from each one.