Are meme coins quite literally only a giant pyramid scheme, please explain if not
Edit: perhaps not a ‘pyramid scheme’ but rather MLM marketing
I was initially thinking meme coins have value to them defined by the strength of the community and what we see today is a decentralization of marketing — if that makes sense.
For example, useless companies/brands are being sold for millions only due to the large audience it has accumulated. Now only a few at the top profit and everyone else gives all their money to them.
With meme coins (ideally speaking) everyone gets a stake of the profit sharing. No one cares about celebrities anymore — so whatever money they could have extracted from us we decided to just form our own community with it and we all have a chance of building together. Also, memes can be viewed as leverage to buy btc (which also implies the coin will have a short lifespan from an individual 'investor')
Of course, I’m leaving out the rug pulling as I’m talking of the what meme coins are supposed to be imo and not what inevitably happens to 99% of coins. But to answer the rug pulling, this is a byproduct of minimal regulations. As the sector grows and some regulation takes place, meme money will converge to the best memes that have proven its proof of concept.
Cool. But here’s where I’m at right now:
- Memes have almost no intrinsic value
- People buy a meme for its growth
- Memes are not a store of value
- Memes run on another crypto’s blockchain
These equate to the same very thick ceiling for all memes. Once a meme hits a certain MC, it’s basically a wrap for the meme. People don’t see it having quick growth anymore, it’s not a store of value, what if it grew so much you need to spend 1 SOL just to get a fraction of a meme, hey it’s dipping and there actually is not intrinsic value to any of this —> dump
So far, going long on any memecoin after initial hype almost always results in failure. Long as in 5yrs+. Doge is doing ight (although I’m sure most got burned) but only because of Elon.
So, given the above how can meme coins not be a giant pyramid scheme? I’m not even talking about rug pulling here. After an its growth, you have to cash out because memes don’t store value. They only Caveat I see is no one knows when it stops growing — but at the moment mc is a huge indicator.
My only optimistic conclusion so far is Solana just has to explode to increase the ceiling of these coins, and there needs to be a huge barrier for minting new memes thus other coins will have long term value. And I think memes are going to be around because gambling hasn’t gone anywhere.
My question is though, is a ‘strong community’ actually enough to support a meme coin, long term? People want to buy a meme, forget about it, come back 5yrs later and still be up.