November 20, 2024 | Read Online

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"One thing I want to tell you though is take profits from your crypto and buy real assets and real estate. Buy dirt, because this won't last forever."

— Crypto mason, TikToker

My excursion into Crypto TikTok

Crypto has once again entered silly season, the phase of bull markets when traders who have been there before often advise you to "lower your IQ."

Because how else to catch the wave in something like Fartcoin, which now sports a $250 million market capitalization, up from just $25 million at the start of the month?

Having missed out on that and many similar opportunities for instant riches in recent weeks, I decided to set my IQ as low as possible — by going to TikTok.

There, I hoped to secure the very worst (and therefore best) crypto advice available and, in the process, also catch a glimpse of crypto's future as the asset class of choice for young investors.

"The only thing Zoomers are good at is social media," according to the high priest of memecoins, Murad Mahmudov, who believes that Zoomers are therefore "forcing the creation of a new asset class."

If so, my excursion into crypto TikTok suggests that Zoomers' retirement accounts may be in trouble because the advice there is far lower-IQ than I had hoped/feared — and some of it gets a lot of attention.

TikTok creator 5starr capricornn, for example, recently advised her followers to "go put your money into dogecoin [pronounced "doi-zh" coin] and shiba cuz Trump's talkin' bout centralizin[g] the cryptocurrency for the government and if he do that dogecoin will go to 50 or 60 dollars."

This bit of financial advice got 390,00 views, 31,300 likes, 11,700 bookmarks, and 7,996 forwards.

(Note: at $50 per token, Dogecoin's market cap would be $7.3 trillion.)

Similarly optimistic, Crypto mason (@cryptomasun) told his 1.4 million followers this morning that "mastering the crypto cycle is extremely easy."

I was unfortunately unable to determine where we currently are in his 12-phase market cycle, but I probably just didn't put enough time into it.

"The more time you spend researching and getting involved in crypto, the more money you make," he explained in an earlier post that received 676,000 views.

"Just like the more time you spend at your job, the more money you make — crypto can just pay you $10,000 in an hour, versus $20 at your job."

I did spend about an hour on crypto TikTok, but I'm sorry to report that it did not make me $10,000 (or $20, even).

Most of the tips seem very stale. There was little mention of recent winners like GOAT, PNUT or FWOG — or anything that looked like it could be the next version of any of those.

(Searching $GOAT, for example, returned a bunch of videos about Cristiano Ronaldo and actual goats, and no mentions at all of the GOAT memecoin.)

Instead, there was a lot of Doge, Shib, XRP and, most weirdly, ICP — all things that rose to prominence some years ago.

Theonlybanes told his 512,000 followers that "you can 100% get rich" in Shiba Inu, citing as supportive evidence his success in Dogecoin: "I don't care if dogecoin was used for nothing, I don't care if it was a memecoin, I invested into it and it ended up me getting multiple cribs, multiple vehicles, and, yeah, at the end of the day it was real money."

Real money, indeed, but I can't help thinking his followers will be losing some real money.

His list of "Top 5 cryptos that can make you rich in the next 30 days" included four cryptos and his top 10 list included nine.

Forgetting how to count may be lowering your IQ a little too much, but if that doesn't put you off, he recommends Pepe (pronounced "pay-pay"), Ethereum Classic (pronounced "e-three-um"), and Bitcoin Cash (the best attribute of which is that it's impossible to mispronounce).

In a rare note of caution, Theonlybanes expressed some hesitation on non-classic Ethereum because "it's a little expensive for an average person to get a full coin."

There was much, much more along these lines, often with thousands of views, likes, responses and forwards — far more engagement than you'd see on any other social media platform.

Perhaps more surprisingly, there were a few bits of sage advice to be found, as well.

Crypto Cita (735,000 followers) has one of the better one-sentence explainers on crypto that I've seen: "Sending crypto is like sending a text, but it's money."

Similarly, Level_Up_Lomax (4,425 followers) had one of the better crypto-FOMO explainers I've seen: "A lotta old dudes still mad that they missed out on Amazon back in the day. Don't you be the old dude in twenty years that missed out on this Amazon right now. So, get you some cryptocurrency."

I am one of those old dudes and that's what drove me to seek investment advice on TikTok.

It was mostly a deflating experience and if I had written this newsletter comment yesterday, I'd have ended it on a despairing note.

But that was before I discovered Chill Guy, a TikTok-native memecoin that's up 965% today to a substantial market capitalization of $450 million.

Could that be evidence that Zoomers really are creating a new asset class of their own?

I doubt it.

Chill Guy was first promoted on TikTok, but it was buried in such an avalanche of outdated nonsense that I can't imagine many TikTokers benefited from being early.

I'm sure this really is the lower-your-IQ phase of the crypto bull market — but lowering it to TikTok levels is probably a step too far.

— Byron Gilliam

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