For today's special episode, we went undercover as normal human beings in the real world and discovered there's no such thing as either anymore.
Chad & El Prof
MARKETS
BITCOIN
$31,726.43 | +7.96%
ETHEREUM
$1,940.45 | -1.07%
CARDANO
$0.6001 | +17.07%
SOLANA
$45.52 | -7.82%
DOGECOIN
$0.0859 | +4.14%
SHIBA INU
$0.00001174 | +1.05%
TEZOS
$2.07 | +2.00%
(Price changes reflect past 7 days as of 5.31.22 @ 4:20 PM EST.)
When the entire market is tens of billions in the shitter, but Cardano is up:
Image: KYM
EFFORT POST
Stock market bf and astrology gf
Image: Warner Bros.
To celebrate our holiday weekend, I ventured out of my work-from-home cave to shake off the Twitter cobwebs, take a break from refreshing Coinbase, and explore (as in Nathan Drake, not the Instagram page) what I once would've called the real world. I found it to be far less real than I remembered.
At a dive bar in D.C. I watched a friend I met on Reddit spin together a mix of avant garde vaporwave while a realization slowly dawned on me: the metaverse is here already. Sure, for once I was interacting not with the communal being we call 'extremely online' but with actual breathing humans. In fact -- between all the trips to the bar to put another one on my Apple-Pay'd-for tab and drunkenly ask the bartender / owner / lone old guy nursing a whiskey neat at the end of the counter how they feel about existing -- I barely spent any time on my phone. But all the while, I couldn't shake how plugged in I still felt. The soundtrack consisted of boss battle music. Interactions ended with exchanged QR codes. Even the meaningful relationships for which I made the trip had been formed in a chatroom.
I was hardly even surprised then, when, upon stumbling up to the rooftop and out onto a group of equally sloshed strangers, all it took was waving around a Patricia Lockwood novel from my manpurse to seamlessly transition into a conversation about the pros and cons of cryptocurrency. I was, however, surprised to find that I, the guy who writes about web3 for a living, was the least bought in out of all of them. It's one thing to giggle at a Discord anon with their life's savings in Dogecoin. It's another to meet one face-to-face. But apparently, the fake money maxis leave their caves, too, and walk among us in the meatspace.
So, in honor of this fading line between the modern and the ancient, the crypto and the fiat, the virtual and reality, I'll turn to our classic h0r_oscopes format to answer my now-burning question:
What does the shitcoin I just invested my life's savings in say about me?
~~~
♈ Aries → Ethereum
You picked it because it's the obvious option -- but not too obvious, like Bitcoin. You cling to the illusion of choice, despite living in a country without a counterculture. Or maybe you're just a contrarian who wants something to argue about, like the nice lady across from me on the bar roof who told me my web3 skepticism invalidated my opinion. She also had significant holdings in ETH. I mean, sure, she's down 50% currently, but it reached $4,000 once, so she'll eventually break even again, surely. Just wait until ETH 2.0 drops, which will totally happen, someday, totally.
♉ Taurus → Dogecoin
You only heard about Dogecoin because some guy in your fantasy football league made a small fortune on the first pump and dump. (Then lost it all on DraftKings over the course of the next month, but I digress.) It was cheap, you're a dog person, and you vaguely remember the meme from your groupchat back in 2014. So why not? You went all in. Since then, you've had to store your phone in a safety deposit box to keep from having a heart attack over all the volatility. But Brad says it'll be the global currency once Elon Musk acquires Twitter, so hope springs eternal yet.
♊ Gemini → Apecoin
I don’t know any Geminis in real life. But, according to the first search result I found on Google, they have a surplus of imagination and love to hear themselves talk. Which, coincidentally, sounds an awful lot like every hexagonally-profile-pictured @Ape6969.eth I’ve ever come across.
♋ Cancer → Luna
Cancer is my moon sign, so I'm doing myself dirty here, too. And yes, sorry as I am to admit it, there's surely a bizarro Chad in a neighboring universe who went all in on the biggest crypto disaster in history. With boundless, unfounded optimism in his own intuition, he kept on believing his favorite DeFi token just had to bounce back, even after the Terra subreddit took a turn for the Heaven's Gate. After all, his modest life's savings was a mere fraction of the $80B total lost in the crash. No way the TELAH messiah Do Kwon would let us all take the L, right? So, without a second thought, he doubled down on Luna 2.0 – which has dropped by 50% after launching days ago.
♌ Leo → Shiba Inu
You took the Matt Damon Crypto.com commercial to heart. You believe the pussy cats will have fun staying poor, while the brave lions will one day hodl lamborghinis in their diamond hands. So, naturally, you invested in the most volatile memecoin out there. Sure, you were a millionaire for a couple days back in October. But you held on like all the true believers and now you're back to living in your mother's basement, shitposting in the Lazy Lions Discord. Still, it'll take more than a 1000% loss for you to give up on SHIB. After all, it's a cute dog with lion's heart, just like you.
♍ Virgo → Tezos
Came for the edgelordom, stayed for the #aesthetic. I mean, wasn't Hic Et Nunc, the Yeezy of NFT marketplaces, just so damn cool? Screw cartoon furry PFPs. You'll take pixel art hermeticism any day. Of course, HEN has been inactive for half a year, the token's down 66% since you aped in, and no subsequent viable use cases have emerged. But what can you say? These hoes are loyal.
♎ Libra → Cardano
We H0Rs haven't had much to say on the subject of Cardano, despite it being consistently in the top 10 DeFi tokens by volume. It's an open-source coin designed to 'redistribute power from unaccountable structures to the margins to individuals' -- which, for you harbingers of balance, justice, and peace, seems to be a 1:1 fit. It's cheap, accessible, and genuinely useful. (Albeit in almost painfully wholesome ways, like tracking agricultural produce from farm to table.) I've also never heard of a single Cardano millionaire. A terrible bet for most momentum traders, but ultimately just another selling point in Libra Land. Eat the rich, fuck the 1%, etc, etc.
♏ Scorpio → Bitcoin
You probably heard about crypto before the rest of us, back when Bitcoin really was the be all end all. Or maybe you still haven’t heard about it yet, save for in passing snark on late night cable. Either way, Bitcoin, in your opinion, has been, is, and will remain web3's one and only center of gravity. It is a perspective in which you are unwittingly yet unwaveringly entrenched, a worldview you'll commit to until your dying day, like the last geocentricists scoffing at the concept of the solar system's orbit, despite having adopted it simply because it was the socially acceptable thing to do.
♐ Sagittarius → Tether
You don’t have time or energy for the fugazi/fughazi crypto bullshit. You live in the real world. Still, Tether is a stablecoin owned by a private entity with the 3rd largest market cap of any DeFi token. Seems like a convenient way to funnel your hard-earned savings off shore, and/or a solid store of value if your plan to short the entire U.S. economy actually works. Unfortunately, not having time for crypto also means not realizing Tether has yet to repeg itself after its fellow stablecoin's crash, and may be destined for the same fate if you don't get out ahead of it.
♑ Capricorn → Solana
We H0Rs have said more than enough on the subject of Solana, our personal choice for the go-to 'good person' coin. It has actual utility, isn't actively killing the earth, and even moves mad NFTs. The perfect choice for you stubborn, serious missionaries. Sadly, being a good person is probably the least profitable strategy in this world of rugpulls and degens. What are the chances the last blockchain standing is the one that saves the planet, and not just the biggest Ponzi?
♒ Aquarius → As-Of-Yet Untitled U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency
You’ve resisted the metaverse this long. Maybe you’re a doomer memelord, an anarcho primitivist, an apolitical suburban dad. Whatever the case, you're one-of-a-kind, and so above trend hopping. The only way to get you to ape into crypto would be a paradigm shift in the technology's adoption -- away from libertarian fringe anomaly, toward inescapable inevitability of modern existence. Fortunately, for those of us whose entire identity revolves around web3, that may be sooner than you think. And if foremost economist and first female head of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen ever gets on board, what choice would you have but to follow?
♓ Pisces → Fiat
You are guided by your moral compass and your gut, and both are telling you the blockchain is a steaming pile of Bored Apeshit. They're also telling you the drunk dude who just randomly insinuated himself into your friend group to shill his web3 newsletter is a textbook bullshit artist, which is why you've been staring daggers at him for the whole conversation. Yes, in spite of record interest rates and inflation, you hold nothing but cold, hard cash, and will cling to the unstoppable status quo even after it hits the iceberg. And, in your careful cowardice, you'll go down with the ship, feeling superior to those silly, tippled NFT shillers all the while.
Well, sorry to break it to you, buddy. Little do you know, so will I.
Chad
SLOPPY SECONDS
Apparently there's a crypto dating show now, of which you may soon be subjected to a series review
BITCOIN
ETHEREUM
