Strong agreement with this. The whimsical, fantasy, fun, light hearted things are great until a large enough group of people take them as a serious life motto & then try to push it on everyone else.
Taking the example of the cryptocurrency boom (as a whole) as the guide, the problem is the interaction of two realities: big money on the table; and the self-fulfilling-prophecy (not to say Ponzi) dynamic of needing people to keep clapping for Tinker-bell, in greater and greater numbers, to keep the line going up. It corrupts whimsical fun and community spirit, it corrupts idealism, and it corrupts technical curiosity.
And FOMO stories about missing out on Bitcoin when he knew about it, so he doesn't want you to miss out on this new opportunity to get "filthy rich" as an "investor" while you still can.
This initially sunk my heart, but in all his replies there are like 50 very clearly unintelligent crypto grifters telling him he needs to be killed for scamming them, so I am unsure who to root for at this point. It's depressing he accepted it, but I might partially forgive it due to him making a lot of them lose money.
Why is it hard to criticize people for being part of a scam operation? It's so morally and ethically bankrupt that it's really easy and valid to criticize someone for
Who is being scammed? The only people buying into tokens as obscure as these are degenerate gamblers who know very well that it's not any kind of an investment.
It's absolutely marketed as an investment, and solely used and referenced by people saying it is an investment. This is like saying those cannabis paraphernalia shops are marketed as only for tobacco.
But people do. There are people who genuinely think crypto is an investment. Yes, smart people knows it is just a grift and that it is just about selling it on to the next person before it crashes. But is it moral to make money on stupid people? Many people lose all their money on gambling even if we always known gambling is a loss.
You don't have to be smart to understand they're very, very, very obviously saying it's an investment and using extremely superficial cover. All things like these are exclusively pennystock scams.
You're being bamboozled. Google the name of it. Search it on Twitter and 4chan. Watch any Coffeezilla video.
I'm googling "bags.fm", everything I can find is about money going to creators. Literally nothing suggesting that you're going to get rich by buying these tokens.
Searching for "bags.fm" on X with keywords like "invest" or "rich" or "moon" also does not seem to return any conversations referring to anyone but the creators getting rich.
I can't find any bags.fm references on 4chan, and searching for gas town instead doesn't seem to bring up anything cryptocurrency related in the archive.
> You're being bamboozled
I don't think so. I suspect the world is so full of crypto scams that when someone does something explicitly non-scammy ("Hey, here's a crypto thing you can use to give me free money!") people still incorrectly view it as scammy because of crypto.
How many memecoin "investors" do you think view these as serious investments? I suspect essentially none of them.
How many memecoin "investors" are degenerate gambling addicts who need treatment? Probably most of them.
Taking money from vulnerable gambling addicts is certainly not ideal, but it's far from scammy.
Yegge himself wrote a blog post to his non crypto audience calling it an investment that he hopes makes its investors filthy rich. He pumped it, then he dumped it, and announced he’s walking away from it at that point after taking his profits and crashing its value.
I don’t know why you’re talking about existing hardcore BAGS addicts when the topic is Yegge promoting a crypto grift to his own general audience as an investment and then running the typical pump and dump scam on them.
100% of these things are somewhere on the scam and fraud spectrum. An unscrupulous person creates a token or a platform for creating tokens with the goal of raising the worthless token's price so they can parasitically make millions from something that holds zero value.
The "fund creators" thing is a common ploy. If they actually wanted to do that, they'd make it so you can only donate with dollars or stablecoins.
I don't get crypto - just looked up how a couple of most performant stocks did in the past decade, and I'm pretty sure you could outperform BTC with the same amount of risk tolerance.
The swings on BTC price are absolutely insane, and ETH even more so (which is even more risky, without showing higher gains).
People keep giving him the benefit of the doubt. "He's clearly on to something, I just don't know what". I know what. The hustle of the shill. He has long gone from 'let's use a lot of tokens' to seeking a high score. He disgusts me.
I think ideas from it will probably partially inspire future, simpler systems.