Madam Shillmister

In the animal kingdom, many species kill or leave to die, the weak whether that be physical or intellectual. In humanity, this applies as well, however, there are some humans who consider this savage and below the species.

This idea has been circling around in my mind for quite some time now. Ever since the PEPE coin started mooning. Now, I can respect the PEPE coin meme, as it is the most powerful and widely used meme in probably all of Web3 and maybe even most of Web2.

That said, the multitude of pointless zero-effort meme coins that rose up around the huge tree that is Pepe has created a forest of shitcoins. I myself even attempted to learn about shitcoins by coding one up, changing some of the features so that it wasn’t a standard generic shitcoin, and launching it. Some people might consider this to be crossing the moral line however I did try my best to keep it as fair as possible. The utility or the special feature of this token was that early people couldn’t buy a large amount — the transfer function is restricted by the number of holders of this token. I do have a video that explains everything, so I won’t get into all the little details here.

One of the things I did learn is that without question shitcoins are a zero-sum game. Andrew Tate believes that all cryptocurrencies are of this nature. I would disagree highly with this statement however there are a lot, a lot, of coins that fall into this category. The people who win from these coins are the people who mint them and provide initial liquidity and the people who buy earlier than the people after them. That’s the exact idea of a ponzi.

Assuming that there is a presale and that the liquidity is added properly the people in the presale generally also win if they sell the pumps. But this is just another way to be early. An airdrop makes it a little more difficult for the project owner to win because in essence when he provides initial liquidity he’s basically giving that to whoever got the airdrop.

In the case of a presale, assuming he has used the funds from the presale to produce that initial liquidity, he is in essence making all the presale money and he can’t lose so it’s really a game of no-risk for the person who creates the shitcoin. This is way there are so many LP rugs.

There are cases where this is not completely true, however even in my coin I took on no risk. The only risk I took on was the gas needed to deploy the contracts and set up the liquidity pool. By using a decentralized exchange that allows that compounding of the trading fees, mitigates this, assuming that there is some trading.

So when you take part in a shitcoin Ponzi trading game your most definitely playing a game of first come first win and the person who deployed it is certain to win. Fair launch or not.

The low effort is also a thing to consider.

I sometimes like to refer to this concept as surfing the tsunami. Some influencers are able to create bigger waves than others and we know who I’m talking about. With some of them, it is inevitable that the tsunami will come. Everyone grabs their surfboard hops on the wave and hopes they get off at an ideal place before the wave folds over and crashes down on the people still there. The last people to get on the wave are more likely to be the ones who get pulled under in the undertow and slammed against the reef. They drown.

This is not something in the vision of what cryptocurrency is supposed to be, at least not my vision. However, it is what it is and it is there and probably here to stay. Casinos are openly rigged for player to lose and they are heavily populated.

I try my best to avoid the noise around these however it gets quite loud. Why? Because everyone, even the people you respect, perhaps not everyone, takes part in them. Everyone thinks they know how to surf and that they can at least catch a little bit of that wave.

To go back to my initial analogy with the animals. Should people be killing off the weak? Should we be taking from the weak-minded, the idiots per se, taking their money into our own bags because perhaps in the future we will do better things with that money? This might be a defense of some people. It might simply be, “I’m anonymous and nobody knows who I am. I’ll just do what’s best for me.” that’s also probably the thoughts of some of the people taking part.

The other day I was on a podcast with some people talking about mev and they talked about the idea that validators are in it for the numbers, and there are very few that would give up profitable blocks because of the morality of such blocks. This idea of taking what I can take and giving nothing back is certainly something that permeates the space.

Almost all projects all tokens suffer under the thumb of madam Shillmister. If a project doesn’t have a dedicated “marketing” outlet, someone who is constantly “suggesting” to people that they buy this token then the token tends to trend on a downward slope. There are mercenary farmers, shorters, pump-and-dumpers, and every project just tries to find a way to stem the selling.

It’s a difficult game to ask people to not sell your tokens. But it’s an even more difficult game to ask people to provide liquidity without giving them tokens at all. There is also the idea that if I mint a token and provide it with a token of value, let’s say ETH, then I’ve in essence, for the time being, doubled my value, doubled my capital. Of course, I cannot sell it all, however, the liquidity pool’s market cap has doubled.

The recent hijinks of certain influencers in the space have caused me some discomfort, to say the least. However, I’m not going anywhere and will continue to do what it is I do to some extent. It is distasteful and slightly despairing to watch idiots give their money to other idiots in the hope of getting on at tsunami early.

If you are reading this you probably already know everything I’ve just said however if you haven’t I would say take care. There’s a reason why investors tend to do well in the long run because they use fundamentals to guide them to use cases.

I do wish that every investment or every token that I purchased was only up. We all do. We all wish that we could get in early, ride the wave, and hop out on top because when you do so you set yourself up in a position where you don’t care anymore, you don’t need to play the game anymore. It’s like an athlete who has a couple of good years, makes a nice fat stack but puts that stack to work, and never has to worry much about the finances of his family and his future. However, it’s difficult to get into this situation. Trust me I have tried.

Recently I saw Andrew Tate tweet out a video saying that he would never do this, he would never shill a shitcoin because of its zero-sum nature then within hours of that tweet he announced that he too will launch a shitcoin and he will give special access to people who have paid him. So if you want to get on Andrew Tate tsunami, which I have very little doubt that it will tsunami, you have to pay him some money to join his club. You can get your surfboard in the water before anyone else.

I did humor the idea that perhaps the people who are in his club don’t actually even know how to use metamask, I did humor the idea that perhaps he might not know that we can watch what he does and perhaps he might use his own money to pump it in an obvious way and we can ridicule him. He is by no means on my level of success. He has definitely achieved a level of financial success far beyond what I even hope to gain.

I do stand by the things I’ve done I do think that what I’ve done in the space has been honest and moral to the extent that I can do so. Have I sold tokens? Of course. We all have to sell tokens. Have I shilled projects and tokens? Of course, I have shield projects and tokens. However, I’ve always believed in the use case of those. And I have always sold well after I spoke of them. Perhaps this is my weakness perhaps this is what I need to work on. Perhaps I need to do more of the greedy selfish shit to get myself into a situation where I no longer care about these petty small things. There are certainly people in the space that can’t be bothered to listen to the noise, that don’t care about the pumping and dumping of shitcoins on left-bell curve idiots and perhaps I should ignore it as well and move on and continue to do stuff that I might one day be proud of perhaps we all should.

These are just my thoughts as I circle around in the grass and allow Google to dictate my rant.