thomas leverett weblog

crypto & the hawk tuah

My more conservative friends would all say crypto is pure gambling; my ex-father-in-law says it's "suicide." My reading about it led me to the story about the Hawk Tuah Girl.

Let's go back a little further. My young sons always called my oldest daughter Josie Doge. We called her Doge igifor so many years that we felt like we owned the name. But, not being tuned in to memes and the online culture, the whole Doge culture came and went and I barely even knew about it. Then there was a Dogecoin, competing with Bitcoin as onne of the more stable kinds of crypto. And now crypto bros are working to make DOGE a government agancy. Appropriation! Travesty!

But back to crypto. Bitcoin is a stable one; Dogecoin is up there; but anyone can start one and see what happens. That's what the Hawk Tuah Girl did. She had a lot of fans on Instagram and she got them all to invest in her personal crypto. Thenn the price crashed and they all lost like millions. And needless to say they're mad and they're going to sue her.

It's not the first time this has happenned (it's called a soft rug-pull) - recently a 14-year-old kid started a crypto, got lots of investors, got out of it, made $20,000 in a day, and his parents got flooded with calls and had to disconnect their phone. It was legal what he did; what Hawk Tuah did was legal too. It's just pure gambling. You invest in crypto, it's only worth what someone will pay for it.

What's interesting is that some people blame the bots. Bots apparently can detect its rising value and buy, and then detect when it goes over the top and sell right away, and thus a $200 catastrophe becomes a 200 million catastrophe. The bots are all in there gambling too, and they're better than we are because they've seen it so much more often. They have it programmed into them.

I was interested in crypto - not so much gambling on one coin or another, but starting my own. It would be cool to have your own crypto. But how could you keep the bots at bay? It seems like a dicey situation, having your coin out there on the open market. As far as I can tell, the Hawk Tuah Girl was trusting some agent to run her whole PR thing. Some agent didn't quite know when to take a bat to the bots. And now she's sorry.

There is already no restriction on crypto, no regulation. At the same time anyone can start a coin, any bot can jump in there and buy one, raising the value. The price has been jumping because people think the Trump era will be the crypto era. Well Hallelujiah. But easy come, easy go. I'm not touching it, at least for now.

Labels: crypto

posted by tom @ 9:21 PM