Shitcoins: are pointless cryptocurrencies a scam or a gamble?

Science Weekly

The Guardian

Science

4.2 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 June 2022

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When the Guardian’s UK technology editor Alex Hern was contacted on Twitter to ask if he was involved in a new cryptocurrency called Tsuka, he assumed they just wanted him to buy it. He ignored the messages. But soon after Alex realised that, without knowing it, he was already involved. What happened next reveals a lot about the strange world of ‘shitcoins’ – cryptocurrencies with no reason for existence beyond buying low and selling high. Madeleine Finlay speaks to Alex Hern about his shitcoin saga, and how the lines can get blurred between a gamble and a scam. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Guardian. You've probably heard about Bitcoin in the news recently.
0:17.0	crypto is destabilized.
0:19.0	Investors getting jolted by volatility rippling through the crypto world.
0:23.2	This coin has lost about a quarter of its value, get this, since Monday.
0:27.2	It's not just shares in the dollar that have plunged day, but Bitcoin and other
0:30.5	cryptocurrencies took a hammering.
0:32.8	Tonight a massive sell-off of cryptocurrency
0:35.8	erasing more than 200 billion dollars from the entire market in a single day.
0:41.2	But you might not have heard about shit coins. And yes that's a technical term,
0:48.0	ish.
0:50.0	Bitcoin promised us a financial utopia, a decentralized democratic currency that didn't
0:57.6	need the big banks or old institutions.
1:01.6	This exciting new digital asset was set to change the financial world and it made
1:07.2	millionaires of many early investors. A decade later we are awash with different
1:14.7	cryptocurrencies. Some are trying to be the next Bitcoin,
1:19.7	eventually what we might be using online and in shops.
1:24.2	Shit coins, well, you could barely even call them a currency.
1:29.4	They have no purpose except so that early investors can buy them cheap, drive their
1:36.9	sales and then sell them high. No one is pretending otherwise.
1:45.0	You just don't want to be the last person holding the can, or coin.
1:51.0	Today we're getting into this strange world of shit coins scams extremely risky
1:56.7	gambles and we'll even get a bit of identity theft.
	...

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