The New Generation Of Meme Coins | Cryptoland

welcome to crypto land i'm krishna undevolu we're talking about the new wild west of altcoins and the traders who invest in them [Music] in the earliest days of crypto there was only bitcoin but the landscape today looks a lot different and that's because of the rise of altcoins cryptocurrencies that range from dog themed meme coins to tokens in the complex and risky realm of decentralized finance and it's changing the way people invest in crypto motherboards edward anguezzo jr went to puerto rico to meet with brandon mancilla a new type of crypto trader who's betting on this highly volatile market [Music] today we're gonna stop at the fort that there's here in old san juan we're gonna walk through the entire alleyways here in san juan we're gonna try some what's that ice cream it's like the little icees they have coco and they have fun flavor it's super good in early 2021 brandon mancilla was a normal 25 year old working as a loan assistance officer in florida a lot of tourists come here today he's living a semi-retired life in puerto rico along with his girlfriend stacy and her son and trying his hand at becoming a youtube influencer thanks to a type of cryptocurrency known as altcoins [Music] i don't know whatever my first one was dogecoin i put in the 20 000 into dogecoin turned it into 50 000 in about 24 48 hours ended up selling moved on to another one called ravencoin that became about 110 000. i get a reddit post about this coin 100 000x potential called safe moon i look into it it has about a 10 million dollar market cap and i said hey you know this is maybe this is the one and i bought in every single penny mancilla bought millions of safe moon coins at a fraction of a penny each and within weeks saw his initial investment balloon to more than 7 million dollars when the price exploded and the coin grew to a more than six billion dollar market cap once more but this time we're gonna take the left side right babe but that price very quickly went down and mancilla's net worth dropped by a whopping 90 percent that still left them with enough of a nest egg to live comfortably in puerto rico where he relocated like many other american crypto investors to take advantage of a zero percent tax on capital [Laughter] gains i mean you're looking at someone who's been wiped out more than once so it's not um it's not a straight path forward if it really was yeah sure i'll be sitting on seven and a half million right now because just as volatile as it is it is on the upside it's also the same on the downside so what point in your investments in crypto did you end up moving here to puerto rico when i was about one or one and a half million dollars once i saw safe moon exploding i'm like okay you know it's time to go from that moment it took about five days just get up and go in florida i pay the minimum tax this is just a 39.6 based on income versus moving to puerto rico which is zero if i make it back to let's say five million we're easily talking over a million dollars saved in taxes what does your daily life look like here i mean are you spending a significant amount of time doing research and you're working on crypto i don't spend a lot of time on crypto 30 minutes maybe doing research at most my day looks like waking up taking our son to school studying exercising just enjoying life a little bit and planning for the future you know i've created a new floor you know i need to have some sort of stability but i'm not necessarily scared when i was done in the work field i was making about 80 000 after tax if i ever had to go back i could start all over again from a really good position [Music] that volatility is kind of the point with meme points they often have little real world value beyond being a hyper-speculative asset they're constantly popping up promising the next big payout because they're so cheap and easy to make it's what earned them the coin moniker and what inspired andrew lewis to try and make his own look at this art though this is amazing this one this is probably my favorite right now some of these coins are outright scams like squid game coin which crashed to zero while its creators took off with millions of dollars others started out as obvious jokes like louis's coin which he called scam thinking no one would take it seriously the whole mean coin season was very interesting to me because when these other coins came around with just no background i was just like man it can't be that complicated and then i took like 30 40 minutes on youtube half a blunt in and i made my own code i just wanted to flex just to say i did it and i i named it scam just to be funny the ticker scam simple cool automatic money skip boom boom and i guess people liked it enough to just buy it for no reason andrew posted about scam coin on social media and it quickly took on a life of its own its market cap reached 70 million dollars not long after he created it some just told me to think you know i wonder if there's a chart for my coin and that's when i see this going digital like digital like it's up there big old green bars just going i'm just like i got paranoid and then i get back on twitter and i got thousands of comments people following me out the wazoo i get calls from like my family i'm the only phone calls i'm answering at this point and like people started calling them harassing them and why why were they harassing them about if i know i don't even know how they found that and that even scared me too cause like people in my own life didn't even know i had siblings for the longest how the y'all find them out and then you know you got people being racist in the comments of the discord well ain't nobody harassing who made doge you know everybody harassed the who made safe moon ass do you think you ended up making money on it no i made the least amount of money out of everything from that i made more money around with bitcoin ass than my own coin i spent more money on legal counsel and all this other than i did putting it in my pockets and i think i think the best when it comes to meme coins it's the wild west out there and most investors these coins can be a way to get rich quick that sounds as if what a lot of people are going into crypto for is to to make money versus find something with a purpose some people might be in it just for money which we have those people in the stock market other people might be very passionate about a project if you go into the safem community i mean those people are passionate the only difference i think that crypto has that the stock market doesn't is that crypto is going to change the world the promise of going to the moon that is multiplying your investment in a short period of time has been the inherent sales pitch for all of these meme coins what's going on thank moon family safe moon army today's video i'm going to give you guys the most recent update that's been happening with safe mode we are now sitting at over 450 000 holders and how celebrities like jake paul diplo or lil yachty were boosting the coin right before its meteoric rise one of the selling points of safe moon is that it's a deflationary cryptocurrency meaning the supply of the coin decreases over time through attacks on buying and selling as well as other complicated mechanisms their ceo john kearney says they're more than just another meme coin though he was vague on the specifics you know what is your response to the criticism that you know like coins like safe moon or that other cryptocurrencies while they don't have an immediate use in the world or why use in the world are there mainly to get people rich as opposed to some of the visions that you're laying out well our actions speak louder than our words we don't talk about price action you know we've always talked about the vision what we're doing in terms of safe moon itself our goal is to build the future and applying blockchain properly to different industries how do you feel about being labeled as a meme coin you know people insulted bitcoin and now there's bitcoin etfs people insulted tesla and said oh electric cars will never work you know there's always going to be people that label a new piece of technology or a new company as x or as y but doesn't the name sort of also imply you know that on some level there will be a safe you know trajectory to the moon anybody can imply anything they want to anything yeah safely to the moon is where the name came from but it's it's more than just talking about a store of value which wasn't the focus it's more about building the future and building a safe future and bringing it now those real world applications are mostly theoretical for now but safe moon at least has a real co and a team of developers hell bent on creating value but really anyone can experiment with these coins with little oversight or regulation for these young guns who feel like the old financial system isn't working for them that's exactly the appeal i just came down here because i wanted to see my competition i want to see what these old parts be up to how they living you know what i'm saying all the stock brokers all the regulators i want to see how they regulate how they living so what better place is this to go see that than wall street where they all play like little street racks you know right now i feel like crypto gives the average person a fighting chance to retire because social purity will not exist by the time me or you become 60 years old i'm in this space based off the belief that i can help make that happen you know with a lot of meme coins the most vocal parts of the community seem to be focused on getting the money i think meme coins have a place you know a lot of people won't admit it but those coins taught a lot of people about crypto more than these so-called experts that don't do but just sit there and be smug those coins taught people about market caps those coins taught people about supply whether there's regulation or not there's always going to be people trying to go to the moon that's why you got old windows in the grocery stores buying up all the little scratch off lottery tickets every weekend with their paychecks so like i try not to too much worry about the moon boys because they're going to exist in every facet every department every every market in life they're going to exist so why why you know alienate them in just this market [Music] investing in altcoins can mint new millionaires or leave investors bottomed out these coins can be based on memes that take on a life of their own or they might fit into the new wild west of decentralized finance a flood of highly complex money-making systems that can open investors up to new types of hacks and scams here to talk about this with me are motherboards edward anguisso jr founder of one of the og altcoins charlie lee and cyber security expert dan guido thank you guys for joining me today we've got a lot to cover because there's kind of a lot of different discrete elements to this whole conversation and the first one is really altcoins right like there was bitcoin and then other cryptos came along charlie i want to start with you because you started an altcoin tell me what that was like why you did it and uh what was the reaction yeah this was in uh 2011 about a year and a half after bitcoin started so litecoin was born from the idea of trying to make everything fair everyone can mine litecoin from the beginning from the get-go there's no um secret mining or anything like that so i think that's one of the reasons why likewise succeeded was because of how fair it was i think the major change was to use uh the script proof of work which made it so that people can use their ordinary computers to mine litecoin from beginning in the beginning miners are your um or the early early adopters and those are people that are out there pushing for um adoption of litecoin so that was the key difference between litecoin and bitcoin um there are other small changes like making the coins four times as plentiful making blocks four times as fast makes it makes like coin feel faster when you're transacting when i started um it was kind of a fun side project i didn't expect really expect much of of litecoin is it your full-time job now it is my full-time job the market cap valuation litecoin is about 15 billion dollars today the crazy thing is when i started litecoin bitcoin's market cap was about 100 to 200 million dollars so that's pretty crazy if you think about it that way and in 2013 there was a huge rise of like a thousand a few thousand different all coins uh actually dogecoin was was created in 2013. it was one of those all coins well so i think dogecoin edward i don't ask you about this because you've covered all of these coins etc but like dogecoin is the one that i know as sort of like a meme coin so in covering this kind of stuff like what is the landscape of all coins yeah there are altcoins that have these the use values utility either because they're offered as another way to build applications or provide services on another blockchain or on another platform but then there are also coins like dogecoin which are largely just memes or ways to kind of speculate and accumulate uh money either because of like organized activity from like a puppet dump or either because it's a joke that people are in on and are interested in you know it's sort of like a knowing nod to the concept that when you create an altcoin that isn't based on really on any new technological advances in the software that what you're doing is kind of a high-tech pump and dump but if we own that by way of its mimification then we're you know doing the honest work of making money it's a collective delusion sure yeah exactly so that's like the meme coin like you meme it into existence yeah i i think it would just like define a mean coin as like a cryptocurrency that doesn't really have any sort of use value and this origin just comes in a meme or it comes from a meme so the dogecoin is a meme coin because the shiba inu image was a meme and then someone was like let's make a coin attached to that meme right exactly yeah i think you know just at its root it's you know there's a meme there and a bunch of people have done it together like like you said in a collective delusion to make money and yeah i think a meme coin is something that it's kind of like a faker team until you make it kind of coin but that it's actually um succeeded right it's actually here to stay right it's people are using it people have a lot of money in it and they're using it for payments um which is which is pretty cool these days like on twitter um i get tens of thousands of people replying to my tweets with trying to pump their main coin right just saying this is the next dogecoin um it's a gambling lottery mentality and how big is this casino i mean at this point yeah yeah i know i don't have specific figures around it but i mean it's hundreds of billions of dollars and these are people who are just trying to make money on the pure arbitrage i'm like buy it low sell it high maybe i you know if you put your chips out there on enough of these little coins that maybe one or two will hit gold and you'll make a whole bunch of money back for the most part yeah i mean the multiples when you do figure something out that's very early in its development and then it gets you know pumped later then yeah you stand to make a lot of money but there's also going to be a lot of people on the other end of that that are going to lose money and where you're going to hear you're going to get the confirmation bias of yeah i got this massive return i'm a millionaire now there are many many more people that have the opposite story that you probably aren't going to hear about as much so a lot of people are being misled by information they don't really understand how to interpret and they're making decisions based on guesswork which means there's going to be a lot of what the crypto community would call bagholders at the end of the day a lot of speculation at the end of the day i mean we see that you know for example with uh tech unicorns right you know some like investors will leave other people holding the bag when uh you know after ipo day or after like some later point where the business model is no longer where it's clear the business model isn't profitable and similarly here you know with speculation uh for you to make money obscene amounts of money a lot of people have to buy in a lot of them way too late to make any real money and then you cash out a lot of people get tricked into buying putting money into these coins thinking that they're going to become millionaires but in reality they're just putting money in at the high and people who got in early um managed to cash out right so in some in that sense that's it's more like a ponzi scheme like what is that how do you go from being a coin to a real coin there's no answer i think i mean it's tough to say yeah it's it's like you know how decentralized is the governance behind it is there just a single person or is it a group is there some kind of decentralized autonomous organization that's making decisions for it uh and a lot of it is just going to be luck of the draw i mean generally by the time that you hear about a memecoin it's like too late your speculation is you you didn't get in early enough you probably shouldn't participate on the other hand the likelihood that a meme coin is going to transition into something that people use on a regular basis like the likelihood of that happening is pretty low well now let's move to like where this kind of all cashes out to me which is like it's let's try to make a decentralized financial system let's try to make decentralized financial instruments smart contracts so dan tell me about that sure yeah since uh litecoin was created and since a lot of these all coins popped up is those are all layer one blockchain protocols people have created a system on top of that called smart contracts where at its core it's kind of like uh think about if you had a spreadsheet on google docs and everybody else did too you all share the same spreadsheet and there was a way to make sure that knowledge of what's on that spreadsheet was consistent across the entire world that's essentially what a lot of these smart contracts are and with them you can create what you call like an automated finance bot and that's a program that lives on top of the blockchain okay now with that you can build ever increasing complexity of financial instruments so pretty much anybody building a blockchain these days is going to also build a smart contract layer on top of it but what you get is the entire financial system intermediated by computers and as we all know computers are wonderful at never crashing never losing your data never getting hacked no they're not just want to make sure from another perspective they're also like finance pinatas where other people can walk up to them and kick them the right way and candy starts to fall out so it's definitely created this extraordinarily high risk industry of financial instruments that people are playing with right now because there's lots of reward but also people don't know how to differentiate between like a a robust finance bot that's constructed with like metal and bolts versus a finance bot built out of cardboard that's got like a pink smiley face on the front i want to ask you charlie are you into this kind of now decentralized financial product stuff because hey it's the natural next step i definitely play around with it with like yo farming and but i don't i honestly don't see it really succeeding um the way people think it's going to succeed it's because it's way too complicated right like the the smart contracts are can be very powerful and people are just not very careful when they're creating them there's their bugs um complicated smart contract interactive with other complicated smart contracts create a lot of edge cases that people take advantage of so every every day you hear about a rug pool or a hack where people lose millions or billions of dollars i think it's going to take a long time before people start like really being serious about creating smart contracts that are that are safe and i mean the problem is people are just throwing way too much money into a beta or even alpha system and everyone's getting hurt um but i guess it's good for experimenting but right now it's kind of a mess the concept of contracts as i understand it are it's a piece of paper that you and i sign that agrees on a certain set of things that you'll do and all do and if you break it there's enforcement mechanisms right i can take you to court like how is a smart contract work if there's no magistrate or third party to adjudicate whether or not someone up and uh enforce the written rules of the contract yeah the idea behind smart contract is um is code is law right so if the code has a bug where someone can steal a lot of money from the from the pool then that's it right because if someone steals a lot of money there's no recourse right so there's that's the problem with with the smart contract is it's that code is law and code as we all know always has bugs in them right nothing is perfect i guess i guess the the best example is the the first kind of big hack in ethereum smart contract this way back in 2016 i believe when the first like large dow was created it's called the the dow hack right so the dao is stands for decentralized autonomous organization the idea is that people can put money into this smart contract system where then they get they can vote on where the money can be deployed right so what happened with the dow was there's a bug in the code and someone managed to basically deplete the whole dow fund almost 30 of all ethereum uh market cap so it was a lot of money relative to the size of ethereum back then who did that did they catch the criminals who did who did it dan tell me what you do sure why it's important as we're talking about this kind of uh decentralized financial instruments i'm running a cyber security company i consult with some of the largest technology companies on the planet to build secure software and i do research with darpa to advance the field of software verification so we found that there was this incredible opportunity to define the space so today what we're doing is we work with most of the largest defy protocols most of the largest blockchain software companies and we help them write secure software so they don't get hacked like the dow did so then how big is the d5 marketplace like how much money are people is tied up in smart contracts i guess right that's how you think of it um i've seen numbers thrown around in the in the low hundreds of billions so it's not a significant it's not a small amount of money but it's also not going to like tank the economy of the united states if this stuff fails the the big like elephant in the room is that most d5 projects are not decentralized the d part is a misnomer most of them are actually very centralized and there's usually a single person in charge of the private keys that can operate that defy system so what a lot of hackers do is they go and they hack that one person and then use it to manipulate the functionality of the defy system give me an example of when that happened monkey jizz i'm sorry did you say monkey jizz yeah that's that's the one a recent one uh it was just essentially a rug pool right it's um they were trying to get people to trust them so they had one guy who was whose identity was uh de-anonymized right he was doxxed and he was like okay you know i'm the public face of this you can trust me we're going to build all these products we're going to build like this amazing ecosystem it's going to be a jungle for all you monkeys to play in essentially it was the was the marketing pitch um and as soon as uh like you know close to a million dollars got put into it i think they made off with a few hundred thousand dollars and then that's it and then i mean once that's just a basic confidence scam yeah and so when you call it a rug pull you call it a rug pull because the rug gets pulled out from underneath the investors the amazing thing is that um a lot of these hacks are probably performed by the by the team behind it right because no one can tell that it's actually hacked or they just did it themselves a lot of these teams are anonymous i just don't know who they are so you can't really do anything legally about it once you got scammed and it's just amazing how much people trust these anonymous teams i think one of my favorites um is probably the parity wallet which was a system for people to store their cryptocurrency but it all depended on the same smart contract and when somebody found a flaw in it they couldn't exploit it to steal anybody's cryptocurrency but they could exploit it to lock everybody's crypto assets in place so they couldn't withdraw them so that would be a griefing attack that's where you're not actually standing to gain anything you just want to cause a ruckus so this person issued that single transaction that locked everybody's cryptocurrency and then everybody had their their assets stuck and that's another thing that you have to pay attention to is that yes these systems are highly economic in nature but there are some things that you don't need money to motivate you for and griefing is definitely one of them the thing with the parity um attack was that parody was created by gavin wood which is one of the founders of ethereum right so people actually trusted him a lot i mean he's he's a really smart guy they trusted this wallet this multi um signature wallet so much that they put millions of dollars into it so the money is just like locked there and it's sitting there and everyone can see it it's still there um that's that's the worst part right you actually you can see on the blockchain your money is there you just can't access it what is the reaction of investors i mean i think there's an overwhelming consensus and you know charlie's mentioned this and you've mentioned this a little bit is that there's no way to do this right however from an insider's kind of expert perspective i see it as a little bit more nuanced because there are a lot of projects that people depend on in the defy ecosystem that have not suffered these kinds of attacks there's haves and have-nots when it comes to security and what you hear about are you hear about the have-nots and the haves are hard to come by they've invested a great deal in order to reduce the risk of whatever it is that they're working on but uh obviously they want to keep their head down a little bit and not like hold up a flag or rather a big kick me sign that they're doing a good job because they become a target yeah the problem is the halves can become half knots pretty easily right for example the the compound issue they they were doing really well no issues but then they didn't upgrade an upgrade um introduced a bug that let people withdraw coins that they didn't own people were drawing coins that were owned by other people and they were just taking out and cashing them out right then the compound ceo was just begging everyone to return the coins and but it's just an example of something that is just so complicated that even someone who was even like compound who is known to be really solid can introduce a bug that really destroys the system so there are two places on the internet that you can go and find the extraordinary number of uh hacked smart contracts or stolen private keys or essentially failed blockchain projects due to security issues there's one called the blockchain graveyard which has lots of tombstones and then there's the wrecked leaderboard so that leads to i think the inevitable question when you talk about this stuff which is regulation so let's talk through the concept of regulation here is it too early does it even make sense or is this the wild west and if you play in the arena good luck i think you know the i think it was the currency comptroller who you know two months ago or three months ago was saying that they're looking at regulation of decentralized finance specifically exchanges i think the question then is like what type of regulation and how to make sure it's actually good regulation i guess from the perspective of like if you want to preserve the technology if you want to preserve potential to provide some sort of financial services to people then how do you do that in a way where the regulation doesn't undermine it or do you do it like an overhaul of the whole entire system yeah and of itself yeah the real problem is um you can't really regulate d5 right so you can only regulate the on and off ramps but once people get into like once you have ether you can interact with d5 protocols to exchange it for any tokens you want and do loans and do anything in the device space no one can really stop you right in that sense it's decentralized it's freaking really regulated so i think i'm in the same boat as charlie here where the thumb the place that the countries are going to press very hard is going to be the on and off ramps once you're actually on the chain it's hard to figure out what's going on but what i do anticipate is i do anticipate certain countries throwing their weight around with network level attacks on layer one blockchains that's not something we've ever seen before but i think i could see that sort of thing coming for instance uh china has a lot of regulation now where they really don't want people to use certain blockchains they've done that from a regulatory standpoint but they could also do that from a technical standpoint sort of the same way the great firewall of china works for browsing the internet there's an analogous system that could be created for uh how blockchains operate that's like regulating with a sledgehammer yes so there are plenty of opportunities that are creative that are innovative that the government can employ to make sure that its will gets expressed on the blockchain it's not just a lost cause you really think uh countries would attack launch attacks yeah i mean 100 china is going to do it and like uh i mean one thing we didn't even get into another really big user is somebody who's found a lot of value in cryptocurrency north korea oh interesting right like that's the that's the vice story there it's like well they're funding their goddamn nuclear program with cryptocurrency because they keep hacking exchanges and cashing out that way it's to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars which to them their gdp is 25 billion dollars which means 1 billion stolen in cryptocurrencies 125th of their entire country's revenue for the whole year insane that's crazy um but like intelligence agencies the world over are applying lots of really interesting effort to make sure that they know where that currency is going these kinds of government agencies they can they can buy the help right like other people can collaborate with them to produce the sophisticated guidance or rules that they need and uh there's a lot of service providers out there like one thing about the blockchain is that it never forgets if you want to go back and bought people on the head for not paying their taxes at some future date that bill might come due damn because there are services like uh channelis or other kinds of investigative services that are very easy to de-anonymize people that are using cryptocurrency for things i don't think that government here is as toothless or as you know inept or as incapable of approaching this problem as maybe people believe well thank you guys for joining me today and thank you all of you out there for watching that's it for us we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: VICE News

Views: 138,344

Keywords: VICE News, VICE News Tonight, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, VICE on SHOWTIME, vice news 2022

Id: Kho5vUI0muQ

Length: 31min 37sec (1897 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/thewaybaseballgo]

For those who don’t watch it all, he turned $20k into $50k with Doge, $50k into $110k with Raven, YOLO’d it all into Safemoon, got up to $7M, and then sold at a 90% loss from the top.

[u/alexanderi96]

Old video, don't know why they uploaded it again

[u/queenoftarts]

OMG WAGMI!! Topping my bag now at these ridiculously low prices! /s