The term "Bitcoin" comes directly from "bit," the simplest unit in a numerical system represented by a 1 or 0, and "coin," a small, typically round piece of metal that is usually issued by a government as a form of currency.
The term "shitcoin," often used sarcasm or ridicule, refers to coins considered "worthless" due to their lack of interest, utility, or even purpose.
But does the term "shitcoin" truly signify anything? Or is it merely a joke?
The term "memecoin" also comes from "coin," and mainly from the internet's "memes."
A meme is like a funny virus on the web: spreading at lightning speed across social media, carrying visual jokes and irony. It's often a simple image, like a cat pulling a strange face, or an absurd statement made by a politician, twisted endlessly to make people laugh and drive it to viral fame.
In the world of cryptocurrencies, a memecoin is like a meme… but with money.
The most famous memecoin so far is Dogecoin (DOGE), a crypto born from a meme, which itself came from a photo of a Shiba Inu dog giving a sideways glance at the camera.
Dogecoin was mainly created to troll traditional finance and those businessmen who mock Bitcoin. However, no serious project has ever aimed to give it real value.
Beyond memecoins, the crypto world is filled with tokens that serve no purpose, not even to make people laugh.
CoinMarketCap currently lists 2.4 million different cryptocurrencies, but only the top 1,000 have a market cap of over $10 million. Moreover, many of these cryptos likely maintain their capitalization artificially, and outside the top 100, most crypto projects see little to no activity.
This leads many investors to label the 2,399,900 cryptos outside the top 100 as "shitcoins."
If you're a Bitcoin maximalist, maybe for you all cryptos, even those in the top 10, are just shitcoins.
But seriously, do you really think projects with over a billion-dollar market cap would be valued that high if they weren’t solving any problems? Take 2 minutes and face the fact that Kaspa blockchain and the KAS token are a revol… haha! Just kidding, of course, they’re all shitcoins.
And let’s not even mention the fact that most of the activity in the crypto ecosystem comes from people just trying to make a quick buck on the latest trendy narrative. Even the so-called "serious" projects are scams, funded by VCs who dump their tokens at the first chance they get.
The problem with cryptos other than Bitcoin is that all of them, including Ethereum, claim to be building decentralized infrastructure or applications, yet they are EXTREMELY centralized and the U.S. government could easily censor transactions whenever they want.
My main argument? Over 50% of Ethereum blocks are OFAC-compliant. If you want more arguments, feel free to reach out, I’ve got plenty to share.
In short, all cryptos are shitcoins because they all pretend to have the characteristics that Bitcoin actually possesses, but with a bit of research, you quickly realize the reality is very different. And that stinks a lot.
Generally speaking, the term "shitcoin" is used for scams and things that lose value over time. So, could the dollar, backed by the U.S. economy, be a shitcoin?
Well, not exactly, since it’s not a scam : you can earn it by working, you can spend it on goods and services. But why does my rent keep getting more expensive???
Well… in a sense, the dollar is a scam. It’s controlled by a small group of people, the Federal Reserve governors, who are often out of touch with reality. They follow monetary policies handed down by their predecessors, and they know exactly how to protect themselves from the system’s flaws, flaws they themselves oversee. The biggest flaw being the endless printing of money.
Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, the money supply has increased by more than 37%, adding over $6.7 trillion into circulation in less than 5 years. And it has grown by 350% since the year 2000, representing $16.4 trillion more in circulation in just 25 years.
In simple terms, even though inflation is more complex than this, increasing the money supply causes the currency to lose value, leading to a decrease in purchasing power. It also forces people to spend quickly, fueling sectors of the economy that are artificially boosted, creating goods or services no one actually truly needs
This results in overconsumption, more waste, and more chemical pollution in our soils and water, etc. Inflation in the dollar works like an invisible tax, a hand you don’t see, and most of the people don’t know about, that reaches into your pocket to redistribute wealth to governments and businesses close to the money printer.
So, in the end, isn’t everything a shitcoin?
Well, not quite, because certain assets have real everyday utility in the economy, like housing, some businesses, or commodities like gold.
However, because the currencies we use daily are constantly losing value, the price of any given asset might not truly reflect what a free and sound market would assign to it.
Fiat currencies can trick us into thinking that an asset’s value is rising just because it takes more dollars to buy it, but this effect could simply be due to currency devaluation, not an actual increase in value.
For example, the price of gold recently surpassed its previous all-time highs, reaching $2,600 per ounce. However, if we factor in the increase in the money supply, gold has actually dropped by over 30% since its peak in 2011.
Bitcoin’s goal is to give everyone access to a digital payment system that works like cash.
However, one of the earliest criticisms of Bitcoin's blockchain was its lack of scalability. While it’s decentralized and highly resistant to censorship, it couldn't handle the daily transactions of billions of people without overloading the network and driving up the transaction fees.
The Bitcoin community has developed several solutions to address this, like the Lightning Network.
That said, while the Lightning Network is reliable and highly scalable, it still depends on on-chain limits and may struggle to accommodate the entire planet without significant technical and infrastructure advancements.
If developers can’t find a way to scale Lightning or another solution globally, Bitcoin might end up only usable by a small portion of the population or through custodial wallets.
Even though wallets like Blink make Bitcoin easy to use, allowing users to send and receive payments with just a few clicks, it’s custodial. This means the user doesn't control the private keys to their funds. And while Blink securely manages these keys, users aren’t fully sovereign over their money.
The Lightning Network, through custodial solutions, works very well. However, if the entire world were to use Bitcoin solely through these types of wallets, it could be seen as straying from Bitcoin's original mission of providing a currency that enables exchanges without a trusted third party.
Consequently, some might start to view Bitcoin as just another "shitcoin.
