Commentary: With meme coins like $TRUMP, investors trade cash for the concept of cash

Pat Beall, South Florida Sun Sentinel on Jan 28, 2025

Published in Op Eds

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I rushed to my computer to stock up on $TRUMP crypto meme coins but couldn’t find a place that would take my money for nothing.

You might pause at the getting-nothing-for-something scenario, but that just shows how we are all psychological prisoners to dead tree currency, or so our Crypto Edgelords would have us believe.

But nothing for something is the genius at the heart of crypto meme coins!

You buy a coin, or part of one, using your money, which is a Some Thing. In exchange you get a piece of a crypto meme No Thing.

Well, not a real, actual No Thing.

Not a black hole kind of nothing, which can be mathematically measured and verified. More like a concept of a No Thing.

You see, in the beginning, when dairy farmer Bob wanted something other than cereal for breakfast, he and chicken farmer Abe bartered little red hens and fat brown cows. This was awkward. It did not fit into a wallet, or even, eventually, entire barns.

And so there was money. Money represents a Thing. The dollar represents a claim upon the economic resources and credit of the U.S., which is a Very Big Thing, and which, despite the incalculable devastation wreaked by the great egg price horror of 2023, remains alive and kicking. For (checks watch) now.

Your crypto meme coin might be worth $90 million next Tuesday, if investors’ random positive feelings about your No Thing prompts them to part with some of their own Some Things — or 90 cents on Wednesday, if they all get a headache.

Because this is where the smart money is, people! Currency not valued on a nation’s good faith and credit, or goods, or services, or even surplus hens, but the vibes of investors. Whimsical, paradoxical, ketamine-fueled vibes.

Take the PNUT crypto meme coin, created because many, many investors were outraged over Peanut the Squirrel’s arrest and euthanasia by New York City, including noted rodent aficionados Elon Musk and Donald Trump. A meme coin memorialized his furry little legend. On Dec. 12, a PNUT coin was trading at $1.35 and had a market cap of $1.3 billion. Two weeks ago, it traded at 36 cents and had a market cap of $359 million.

See how well that works?

Better yet, it’s all secret. So, your neighbor or a squirrel masseuse or a foreign power seeking malign influence under cover of crypto can surreptitiously funnel money to PNUT without anyone knowing!

I would not want to mix up serious cryptocurrency with a meme coin, and specifically, not with $TRUMP meme coins, described as “an extreme case of sh-tcoinery” by a vice president at Swan, a BItcoin financial services company. But there are similarities.

Let’s talk about tulips!

Back in the 1600s, when Holland was in the grip of Tulipmania, a single bulb of Semper Augustus could command 12 acres of land. Not that there were a lot of physical transactions. The Dutch described tulip contract sales as “wind trade” because the real money was in contracts to buy tulips, more and more paper promises swapped for more and more money, until it all fell apart.

And that, boys and girls, is why we have dykes in Holland today, to hold back the bitter, bitter tears shed by people who had a house and a family and then a vibe and a promise of a bulb and then no house and no family and the concept of a flower.

So when I tell you that there is a serious Washington proposal to back up a truck to the U.S. Mint and unload a whole lot of crypto No Things, for which the U.S. will give crypto sellers billions and billions of taxpayers' Hard Earned Some Things, it’s appropriate to feel a little apprehensive.

This plan, offered by Wyoming Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis, will establish “the federal government’s first National Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” while simultaneously “easing regulations for the sector” or, as Trump called this concept of an idea four short years ago, “potentially a disaster waiting to happen.”

But vibes shift. “I don’t know much about it other than I launched it,” the president said of $TRUMP earlier this month.

Never too soon to start stocking up on little red hens.

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Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer.

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