They're all memecoins. Differentiating bitcoin because it happens to be created through encryption doesn't change that. It's not a "hard" currency* such a gold or silver or copper or platinum. It's not a government issued currency like the USD or Euro or Pesos. What it is is a collectible that people have decided they're worth paying a certain amount for. On the majority of the planet, you cannot pay for groceries or rent or utilities using bitcoin. First, you must trade your bitcoin for money. Or, you could use it to buy up all the video cards, hike up the price of those video cards 5x, then sell those, and use that money. That'd never happen though, right?
No, you're differentiating on the "First in, Best Dressed" philosophy, OR you believe that the generation method to create the coins makes them somehow better. They're just collectibles. Another meme like Pogs. Or trading cards.
*Now that a couple nations have turned bitcoin into their national currency, you could make the argument that Bitcoin, at the least, is a hard currency. I would heavily disagree. I'd argue that any "cashless" currency is not viable. All you have to do to take the entire economic system of the nation down is hit it's electric grid. Suddenly you have no currency, and can't even afford a tomato to throw at your idiot government officials. :)
The argument here really works in both directions. you're speaking as if bitcoin aspired to live up to being a "hard currency" but that term can apply to all sorts of terrible currencies throughout the globe which regularly get inflated into uselessness. both in cases of rapid hyperinflation and just poor financial printing.
really tho it's an apples to oranges comparison, the term itself "memecoin" can't mean "coin" or its redundant. a "memecoin" is a type of coin, which suggest there are "nonmemecoins". any time someone uses the term "memecoin" you can infer they're referring to a specific category of coins, typically that means anything without an underlying development for smart contracts or another use case. BTC actually is well outside of the typical memecoin category but has no use case outside of alternative currency, which is a use case anyways even if all we attribute that to is store of value or currency swapping.
This post was edited by thesnipa on Jan 21 2025 03:31pm