“We’re the little guys saying the emperor has no clothes,” he says. He claims to fear that if he did, pro-crypto Redditors would read this, track him down and punish him for his many contrary comments, perhaps by doxing him. His prolific publishing has had consequences, he says, and it’s why he studiously refuses to give his name. “You’ll see me post at 8 in the morning, sometimes 11 at night, sometimes at 3 a.m.,” he says, proudly. (Since the latter seems rather like unearned aggrandizement, let’s refer to him by the former.) AmericanScream attests to never owning any cryptocurrency, and his complaint about the asset class is a familiar one: That it lacks fundamental value, and it can only increase in price if enough people successfully convince more people into buying: “Once you hold Bitcoin, PR is all you’ve got.”ĪmericanScream, who says he is a 50something semi-retired software engineer, is a near-constant presence on ButtCoin, talking about upcoming changes to Ether, the death of crypto proponent John McAfee and the recent vanishing of two South African crypto-preneurs, whose disappearance could represent the largest scam in the industry’s history. Most Buttcoiners are more like another group moderator who would only identify himself by his handle, AmericanScream, or by his preferred pseudonym, Adam Smith. He admits to having dabbled in short term trades of crypto over the years, though insists he would never buy and hold for the long haul. “They’re just trying to build this other system and replace it with something that’s either a joke or a huge bubble.”īrown can seem like something of an anomaly within his own group. No one is sure who created Buttcoin almost 10 years ago Brown and the seven other moderators represent as much authority as it has known since. “It’s not real, actual finance,” declares Stephen Brown, 40, a software engineer in Portland, Oregon, one of the moderators of the Buttcoin Reddit group. He didn’t believe what he was saying at all. McCormick’s actions get at the real weightiness of these social media-led financial manias. Today it fetches around half that.) The combination of these elements makes crypto even easier to ridicule than an aging retail chain or an ailing movie-theater business. (Bitcoin, for instance, was worth over $60,000 at one point this year. Plus, the stuff’s super volatile, its value seeming to ping-pong madly on a consistent basis. It has no value tied to a physical object. Owning it requires a remarkable leap of faith many cannot justify: There’s nothing backing it. But Buttcoin’s antics at least aren’t gyrating financial markets.ĭespite two decades of steadily increasing mainstream acceptance, crypto remains an undeniable easy target-something that some people love to hate, like say, the tax man and the New York Yankees. As you can tell, Buttcoiners aren’t any more buttoned-up online than their idealist counterparts, and much of the thinking on both sides tends to be pretty simplistic, accepting little nuance. This type of thing is what Amy Castor, a Buttcoin fan and online crypto pundit, calls “shitposting.” Within the crypto world, “there are a lot of ridiculous things that happen, so ButtCoin is a place where you go to poke fun at all that,” she says. Some of the most popular posts over the past week: a screenshot from a pro-crypto Reddit of someone losing $35,000 on DogeCoin a photo of red and green chiles tracing out Bitcoin’s trading chart and one simply headlined “30k finally broken □,” a reference to Bitcoin’s recent descent from all-time highs earlier this year.
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