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A kid made $50k dumping crypto he'd created – then came the backlash
- sriram_malhar 2y agoconfederacy of dunces
- dlcarrier 2y agoKids these days, copying what celebrities do.
- _trampeltier 2y agoA lot of people learnd (maybe) something about value.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- notamy 2y agohttp://archive.today/nwYcd http://archive.today/nwYcd
- yosito 2y agoIt seems to me like Pump.Fun should just be called RugPull.Fun, and it blows my mind why anyone is naive enough to buy these memecoins.
- SanjayMehta 2y agoIndeed. They have no intrinsic value, as far as I can tell. I think it’s the adrenaline rush that they’re playing on.
- avmich 2y agoWhen I hear "intrinsic value", I these days want to talk about what exactly this is. Cryptocurrencies are an important invention, and it looks like it needs to go through the period of when many don't know what to do and how to deal with it. Reminds me electricity in XIX century.
- airstrike 2y ago> Cryptocurrencies are an important invention I don't think we know that for sure just yet
- mingus88 2y agoIt’s a novel invention but at this point I still don’t see how it’s anything more than a speculative gamble I stayed away from bitcoin early on because I didn’t understand the fundamentals. I spent too much time reading about P/E ratios and frankly don’t really see what exactly makes one cryptocurrency more or less valuable than any other, aside from the memes and the hype. I guess I could have “made” millions simply by the luck of knowing some folk into mining back in 2013 but I still think all this stuff is pretty worthless unless you can find a greater fool to buy your stake
- tverbeure 2y ago> They have no intrinsic value, ... Which is the case for pretty much all crypto.
- _0ffh 2y agoI think these memecoins are basically just gambling. People hop onto short lived hype trains in the hope of cashing out before they collapse.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sfmz 2y agoA fat middle-schooler used pump.fun to create "Gen-Z Quant" -- this site requires four inputs: coin-name, issuance quantity, animated-gif, deposit of Solana for the tx fee; he then rugged to the tune of $30k and flicked everybody off on the pump.fun's integrated livestream saying "thanks for the bandos" (bando = $1k) The addendum to the story is that the attention it generated caused degens to ape into 'Gen-Z Quant" pumping its market price where for a time that $30k would have been worth millions... and the rest of the story is still more interesting... Since it got so much attention, people started doing crazy things on the livestream to pump their coins -- one guy made something along the lines of crime-spree coin and livestreamed himself stealing cars -- promising to continue doing so until he was arrested in order to pump his coin. This activity caused pump.fun to disable their integrated livestreaming feature. The story was featured on last week's ( nov 30) Bankless Friday roundup. The final point I wonder about is -- won't this degen activity ( ~100 coins are created per minute on pump.fun ) -- clog Solana's network -- their major selling point is that they have a huge number of tx/s, but if you fill it with spam ?? what does that mean for the network?
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoI see words, yet they make no sense. (Not criticising you, but rather me) If anyone cares to enlighten someone who is very far from that scene: I’d appreciate it massively.
- ggm 2y agoA kid made other people give them money for a specious investment based pretty much on the south sea bubble. They then took the money and cashed out. Some of the other people who had bought in, then made the investment temporarily worth many times more than the original, which the kid who took the money had to watch because they had cashed out. Then it went silly. Probably a few people made a lot of profit and most people didn't. Everything about this was vaguely off, criminal and bad, but one person actually made that a feature and was committing other crimes on camera until the website got worried about their liability and shut it down. Also just words. Some of them are terms of art back to the 18th century and before, rigging investment markets.
- epoxia 2y agoRelevant / Recent Darknet diaries podcast is all about the mess that pump fun is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8RNcngdMp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8RNcngdMp4
- AgentOrange1234 2y agoAm I hopelessly naive, thinking all of crypto is a complete BS scam that destroys the environment to boot?
- throwaway314155 2y agoNot at all.
- dumpsterdiver 2y agoIt’s eerie, right? Feeling like the only sane person in the room in crypto discussions.
- avmich 2y agoReminds me that picture of a priest, who'd preach to his people, "machines can't think! machines should drive!" . I suspect he was also feeling like the only sane person in the room...
- boogerlad 2y agoNot monero. It is the only useful cryptocurrency in my opinion, and it is easy to understand that it is private digital cash.
- polotics 2y agoYou have to define what you mean by "useful"? Monero's fungibility is excellent, but the transactions-per-second ain't that great right? Also Proof of stake is inherently more sustainable in a resource-constrained world: you don't want to replace banks by something more wasteful thank banks... For my money's worth, and clearly talking my own book here, the decidedly zero-hype Algorand is the useful crypto at 20k TPS, this is the Visa/Mastercard territory where things get interesting. As for fungibility, it will have to be some democratically controlled thing I think...
- boogerlad 2y ago
- thrance 2y agoFun site to check from time to time: https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
- jrib 2y agohttps://rekt.news/ https://rekt.news/ is a similar one that is fun to read
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoReport from Decrypt also covered on The Verge weeks ago: https://decrypt.co/292594/this-child-made-30k-rugging-a-solana-meme-coin-then-crypto-degens-got-revenge https://decrypt.co/292594/this-child-made-30k-rugging-a-sola...
- _yb2s 2y agoCrazy that people are mad at this kid, what did they expect him to do? Seems they paid a fair price for a lesson they needed to learn and signed up for themselves.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoRelated: Newly launched memecoin HAWK crashes from $500M to $60M market cap in 20 mins https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42334116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42334116
- jsheard 2y agoApparently someone traded $1.4 million worth of Moo Deng coins for Hawk Tuah coins and got wiped out. None of these words are in the Bible. https://x.com/bostonrob__/status/1864494571947757839 https://x.com/bostonrob__/status/1864494571947757839
- namaria 2y ago> None of these words are in the Bible. Exodus 32:1-5
- thot_experiment 2y agoI love that we're at the stage of crypto where we are commoditizing rug pulling. Pump.fun is literally the pickaxe store. The creators saw a lot of people making money with rugpulls and thought to themselves: "the real money is in selling the rugs"
- cypherpunks01 2y agoSo all Wednesday stories about Bitcoin reaching 100k/2T market cap were flagged immediately off frontpage for not being relevant, yet this story is considered interesting content? I'm sure I'll get down voted, but it's sad that the topic is widely considered off-limits for actual conversation here, except for stories where the stupidest stuff like this is shown. HN is where many folks originally learned about bitcoin because of its extremely niche tech audience at the time.
- ronsor 2y agoCrypto threads are only allowed in HN if there's a good opportunity to shit on crypto. I jest, but there's a significant number of users here who would agree.
- mingus88 2y agoI’ll play devils advocate Bitcoin hitting some arbitrary new high is not newsworthy or interesting. It’s the same story we’ve read for a decade. Some kid making 50k exploiting a crypto service with some social engineering via memes is actually hacking and what should HN be about?
- MadnessASAP 2y agoDid they get flagged and removed? Or were they just not interesting/newsworthy?
- cypherpunks01 2y agoFlagged and removed, within minutes
- jongjong 2y agoWhen people invest in a scam, they 100% deserve to lose all the money they invested. People should suck it up. They have no one to blame but themselves. I joined a project which was legitimate at first and founders essentially gave up (bribed?) and the project turned into a scam. OK I blame them, I think about taking it to court sometimes but I definitely blame myself too for having trusted them. I wasted 3 years of work on this. I should have seen the warning signs. I wasn't cynical enough. Later I launched my own project. I barely raised any money at all. But I'm still running it 4 years later. Nobody gives a crap. Nobody thinks this track record matters. I also have a solid 10+ years track record in open source. So f*** them. I love it when people lose their money in scams because they need to be schooled about LIFE and the value of TRUST. We're talking about BARE BASICS for being a functioning adult here. Just look at the people's track records you morons. Verify that the identities match up. Any serious person who values $10K+ WILL MAKE TIME to talk to you one-on-one to earn your investment. You can see their track record at various companies, you can contact colleagues, you can see open source contributions in the public domain. It's your fault and nothing but your fault that you didn't do the due diligence. You were lazy. If you valued your money, you would have done the research and set the trust bar higher. If you lost money in a cheap scam like this, you didn't deserve to keep that money in the first place. Don't go crying to big daddy SEC about the big bad wolf who fleeced you clean. Be thankful it didn't eat you alive because that's what should happen to any sheep which ventures into a wolf's lair. Not saying that the wolf shouldn't be punished... Just saying; we shouldn't protect irrational agents at the expense of rational ones.
- netsharc 2y agoSomehow it feels like even if I did something where I openly say "This is 100% going to be a rugpull", people are still going to put money in it... I need to get on this con... It seems like the crypto boom times gave a lot of people a lot of stupid money, e.g. that crypto guy who bought that "art" banana for millions (well, single digit millions) and then ate it. There must be a term for this similar to "fuck you money"... maybe "dance, monkeys, dance money"? Edit to add: which is why I feel like most of the people joining on the memecoin/rugpull bandwagons are either playing with their -- let's call it "monopoly money" that they gained by "playing crypto", or rubes that are actually putting their savings in. The first group will just laugh off a loss, while the second group saw the fist group, got FOMO and will get ruined when the rug gets pulled. Somehow it's very similar to card-sharking, where the other "victims" help the shark lure the actual victim..
- yashg 2y agoI wonder in what currency the kid actually made that money. Solana tokens I believe. Can they be converted to actual money with which he can pay his college tuition in future?
- hiq 2y agoWell I see it listed on Coinbase (https://www.coinbase.com/price/solana https://www.coinbase.com/price/solana), so I assume that means that US citizens can easily sell them for USD?
- ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago>pump prevents rugs by making sure that all created tokens are safe. That's rich.
- gryt67 2y ago[dead]
- rldjbpin 2y agothere has to be legislative precedence already for this scheme, especially if focused on those allowing fiat money to exchange hands in return of memecoins like this.
- Elizabeth0147 2y ago[dead]