Hawk Tuah coin pump and dump

[zbigi]

What a crazy world we live in. A 22 year old girl makes a random funny comment in front of a camera, the comment goes viral, and a couple months later she cashes in on her short-lived popularity by exploiting a bunch of suckers who wanted to get rich quickly. Are we living in idiocracy yet?

Full story: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-styl ... 59619.html

[theanimal]

I don't think the concept is all that new in the current cycle. Since at least 2020, the idea of "investing" in crypto is betting on what memes will take off and become viral, filling the holder's bags, then selling out before the ultimate collapse. And actually, maybe that's just the investing world at large now. Fundamentals don't matter. What's the narrative? In crypto, this has taken a few forms, notably early on with NFTs and then back to meme/shitcoins. Those "investing" in these assets give no thought or care to the underlying value or if it has any function, but rather its potential strength as a meme. It's pure speculation. This is how you get people investing in things like PNUT (named after the pet squirrel killed in NY), MEW (after cats) , and MOG (as in mogging someone). These coins all have ~$1 billion market cap. What is different about this case is that the figurehead behind the coin has a little more notoriety.

The good news is that the Fed is continuing to cut interest rates.

[chenda]

Tulip mania.

[Henry]

Setting aside judgment and jokes, this was a legitimate investment for many people. It's not a Tulip situation, or a sucker situation, it's a criminal situation. In the crypto world it's known as a "rug pull." It wasn't that the bottom fell out, it's how fast the bottom fell out and how quickly those who created the coin made $1.8 million in fees. Chances are The Hawk Tua girl had no idea what was going on but people are going to jail for this. It's a big deal. If crypto is going to survive, these people need to be made an example of. These types of scams need to be prosecuted.

[7Wannabe5]

The idle affluent have always engaged in this sort of behavior. A frequently engaged plot line in Regency Romance is that an attractive rogue, bastard born of jaded aristocrat and some sweet commoner wench he pumped and dumped, creates his fortune by opening a gambling hall/bordello and fleecing the more drunk or dull-witted of the elite class. Then after the aristocrat who spawned him dies in mysterious hunting accident or quite mad and riddled with syphilis, it is discovered that due to entailment of estate and title to nearest legitimate male relative, a portly cleric disdained by the aristo, all properties not so entailed have been willed to his bastard, leaving the aristo's young blind daughter by his dead from despair third wife entirely without support excepting that provided by her mother's beautiful, spunky, bluestocking cousin, entering as our heroine, most unlikely to murmur "Hawk Tuah", yet...when an acquaintance of our Rogue suggests, "One could find all kinds of entertaining uses for that sweet mouth. I wouldn't mind catching her in a dark corner and having some fun. She might resist at first, but soon I'd have her writhing like a cat..." Our Rogue (soon to be reformed) lunged at him in a blur of motion, seizing him by the lapels. "Touch her and I'll kill you," he snarled.

There is really no end to the inventiveness of humans when it comes to capitalizing upon the erotic or eroticizing capital.

[Ego]

Setting aside judgment and jokes, this was a legitimate investment for many people.
...
If crypto is going to survive, these people need to be made an example of. These types of scams need to be prosecuted.

Crypto is still in the infrastructure building and testing phase. These nonsense coins provide testing for what has been built. Billions of dollars of nothing secured on a blockchain stress tests the infrastructure in ways that valueless coins could not. In other words, these meme pumpdumps are a feature, not a bug.

Eventually it could (will?) lead to the tokenization of everything. Want to own a .00001 cent stake in every tokenized home in the US, $20 worth of tokenized Picassos or, taken to extreme, The Unincorporated Man (great ERE read btw!) dystopian future where humans themselves are tokenized?

It is a good time to learn how dex's work and how to secure wallets if you want to avoid your own "teaching grandma to use a smartphone" moment.

[Henry]

There are legitimate stupid investments opportunities. I have made more than my share of those. But this was an illegitimate stupid investment opportunity. This appears to be inside selling which is an SEC violation.

[theanimal]

Matt Levine wrote about this in today's edition of Money Stuff

https://archive.is/uetH6

So! I mean! Here you are! You have become extremely famous for one thing. Parlaying that into a long and lucrative fame-based career probably will require doing other things: singing or acting or at least showing up at nightclubs. But you have a ton of meme value right now, even if you probably won’t in a year. So the thing to do is to capitalize that meme value into a memecoin, give yourself most of the tokens, and then sell them to the public. The coins will be popular among traders for, you know, a day, so you will sell a lot of them and pocket millions of dollars. And that’s it, that’s the end. You don’t have to do any other things. You have gone viral and then fully, directly monetized your virality.

....Meanwhile, the way memecoins work is that you put the name of some meme on a crypto token that took five minutes to set up, and then you go on social media and are like “this memecoin represents that meme,” and everyone is like “yep it sure does,” and if they like the meme the token goes up. There is no effort to connect the memecoin to the meme in any substantive way: no ownership of intellectual property, no contracted cash flows, nothing. And yet it works! Sometimes! The price of the memecoin really does have some rough tendency to reflect the popularity of the meme! It’s amazing!

...Yes I mean obviously Haliey Welch should get millions of dollars from selling a token representing her own virality, and obviously that token’s value should go to zero in like a day. That is how modern finance works! I don’t know why you would buy the token, but then I don’t own PNUT or PEPE or Dogecoin either. People are complaining that this is a “rug pull” or a “pump and dump,” but I cannot understand what different thing they thought would happen. The Hawk Tuah coin would build an enduring business with large and growing value for years to come? What? Why? How? It’s a memecoin representing the fastest-melting imaginable form of fame; of course it should go to $500 million and then to zero in a day. That’s what it’s for! It worked perfectly!

[ertyu]

Observing this and other coin memes, what they thought would happen (I doubt this was conscious) was similar to what a run on the mill consumer thinks would happen when they go to the mall and buy Product X -- they would merge/commune w the "coolness" and "status" magically present in Product X and said coolness and status would accrue to them. With personally-branded products such as this meme coin, there is an element of parasociality as well: the psychological effect one hopes for is a feeling of connectedness to the person and a feeling of belonging in the tribe that all like this person.

There was a tweet screenshot that made the rounds on social media, some bozo going, "I'm a fan of Hawk Tuah but what you did was not decent, I will contact my crypto representative (?) or was it broker (??) -- I forgot the exact word OP used -- and see about getting a refund." Of course, everyone was laughing at OP's cluelessness about what tokens are and how they work. But to me, this reveals the psychology: the person buying Hawk Tuah coins earnestly (rather than in the hopes of selling to a greater idiot) does it because they are a fan. In other words, parasociality. There's no meaningful difference between buying Hawk Tuah coin and DJT Sneakers.

[Slevin]

The existence of pump.fun leads me to believe some large portion of the people involved (the majority even?) know everything is a scam / pump and dump, just that wayyyyyyy too many people believe they can buy low and sell high at the right time. Go look on the site at some of the highest performers, and watch some fun vids on little kids rug pulling coins for enormous amounts of money. It’s all just a goofy new form of meme based lottery + degenerate gambling.

[fingeek]

... what a run on the mill consumer thinks would happen when they go to the mall and buy Product X -- they would merge/commune w the "coolness" and "status" magically present in Product X and said coolness and status would accrue to them. With personally-branded products such as this meme coin, there is an element of parasociality as well: the psychological effect one hopes for is a feeling of connectedness to the person and a feeling of belonging in the tribe that all like this person.

I don't see this at all. People don't typically share their wallet (so you can't actually see their shoes). People tend to say that they've bought a token, to get everyone else to buy the token, so everyone else is their exit liquidity.

There really is no connectedness in deciding to buy a token. There might be a second order effect if that person then joins the discord or telegram channel and adds to the chatter there - but again, really nothing more than to encourage buying.

[fingeek]

The existence of pump.fun leads me to believe some large portion of the people involved (the majority even?) know everything is a scam / pump and dump, just that wayyyyyyy too many people believe they can buy low and sell high at the right time. Go look on the site at some of the highest performers, and watch some fun vids on little kids rug pulling coins for enormous amounts of money. It’s all just a goofy new form of meme based lottery + degenerate gambling.

There is very little - if any - utility in shitcoins. BTC and ETH maybe, but nothing more alt- than that. Deep down, I think everyone knows that whether they are conscious of the fact or not, which leads to people becoming degenerates that try to jump off the house of cards before everyone else.

I agree that pumpfun specifically speaks to those that think they can outsmart others. The mechanics of pumpfun is that you're almost certain to lose 90% of 90% of your token purchases.. but that one time might be a 10,000x. It's basically a direct lottery but where you have a tiny amount of perceived control on the outcome. Clever really.

[jacob]

Maybe they should have called in dump.fun? Oh, slay me. See what I did there? Thank you, thank you, you're a great audience. I'll be here all night!

Seriously though, I suspect the name is but a meaningless slogan to a lot of people. Recall that the median adult literacy skill level is below the 6th grade level. What does that mean effectively? The average 6th grader can find one piece of information in a single text that's put right in front of them (they can even do it multiple times as long as they're just looking for one piece at a time while being cued up with questions) but they can't (yet) mentally process two conflicting pieces of information from the same text nor can they not cross reference concepts with other texts. (I highly suspect this comprises the demographics being targeted by AI-search assistants where you can just ask a question for AI to respond with a short narrative, because this is the demographics that has so far struggled using 'teh google'.)

[white belt]

I didn't think the Hawk Tuah crypto scam would make it to this corner of the internet

If you really want to deep dive the situation, you can check out Coffeezilla's YouTube video. He is an investigative journalist who uncovers a lot of similar crypto pump and dump schemes in the influencer space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUHq8AWR1Rg

TLDW: The team behind the Hawk Tuah coin/token deliberately targeted an audience who they thought wouldn't be familiar with crypto, which lends credence to @ertyu's point.

In regards to Jacob's point about 6th grade literacy level, I'm 99% certain Hailey Welch fits in that demographic. In one of her podcasts episodes, she did not know the meaning of the word "philosopher".

[macg]

A funny thing I saw was the statement that the biggest criminal offense was naming it HAWK and not spitcoin

[Henry]

Take advantage of stupid investors is the mantra of Berkshire Hathaway. However, it does not apply to the investors of their company. BRK.B is a third party taking advantage of the stupidity of investors which is what the market permits. It's fraudulent when it's a first party that is taking advantage of stupid investors.