Recently, I read a very interesting article on the Internet: "A great Meme coin is itself a ZZ movement." (ZZ：zheng zhi)
Everyone is familiar with meme currency. It has always been controversial, and many people still equate it with CX.
In the last bull market, when I started to participate in shit coins and PEOPLE, I vaguely felt that I could not simply use CX to define this type of meme coins, because they are somewhat different from our traditional cognition of CX:
The typical model of CX coins is that a very small number of people act as the banker and induce the public to support the banker. In the end, a very small number of people benefit.
But projects like SHIB and PEOPLE have actually become a national carnival. Moreover, the flavor conveyed by many of these projects is not simply interest relations but cultural attributes and value recognition.
Since there is such a difference between the two, what exactly does the value/price of meme coins reflect?
Community consensus? Community sentiment?
In my opinion, these statements only point out the symptoms, the results, not the root causes.
It has always been difficult for me to find the right words to describe the source of its value.
This article gives a very good answer. A sentence in the original article says this:
"Meme currency is essentially the first time that humans have realized the pricing and monetization of the ZZ movement. It is the shortest path to unify the common interests of the people in a movement."
I carefully recalled the process of my participation in the two meme coins Shitcoin and PEOPLE:
In the beginning, it was because their stories aroused my strong interest, resonance and curiosity.
Then, they bought their tokens without any scruples. I had only one idea at the time: to become a member of this project and witness its future development.
I believe there must have been a lot of people like me at that time.
As more and more people participate, the movement spreads from individuals to groups, from the minority to the masses, and from a spark to a prairie fire.
A typical social movement began.
But compared with traditional sports, it takes place not in real life but in the vast virtual world.
How is the impact and value of this type of movement reflected?
In real life, we can only measure it through the humdrum of news coverage: the more outlets that cover it, and the bigger the organization that reports on it, the greater its value is perceived to be.
However, this method is actually widely interfered and restricted by various external forces. It's possible that an event that changed the course of history is well known around the world, but remains unknown in some places.
In the virtual world, once it is linked to meme coins, its impact and value will be simple and crude:
Price has become the most direct measurement criterion.
As more and more people participate, the project’s token price (market value) will become higher and higher.
The impact of the price will exceed the publicity and influence of any media, and will ignore all restrictive means to suppress it:
A thing whose price rises sharply every day, no matter how you limit it, cannot stand up to human nature's pursuit of profits, leading people to care about its price from the beginning to everything that happens behind it.
In real life, we actually already have similar benchmarks - commemorative stamps and coins. But they obviously have the inherent characteristics of centralization: they are carefully selected by authoritative institutions, issued and promoted from top to bottom, with strong value indoctrination and public opinion purposes.
In the virtual world, this meme coin built from the bottom up inherently has the genes of mass participation and widespread dissemination. Their timeliness, influence and speed of dissemination are unmatched by stamps and commemorative coins.
Imagine this:
When the Wuchang Uprising fired the first shot to overthrow the Manchu Qing Dynasty;
When the victorious Nationalist Government accepted Japan’s surrender;
When the people of East and West Germany desperately worked together to tear down the Berlin Wall;
...
If we all had meme coins representing each historical event, what would be the value of those coins today?
In this sense, meme coins are not only a great practice in the social movement of monetized pricing, but also an excellent attempt to use blockchain technology to carry the historical process.
Of course, saying this doesn’t mean any meme coin is meaningful. In the permissionless world of crypto, where anyone can do anything for any purpose, most meme coins with impure purposes will end up being nothing more than a mirror image.
But a meme coin that happens to be at the right time, place, and people will definitely leave a lasting memory and long-lasting value in the crypto world.
What’s interesting is that this practice has been going on for so many years, and only now can we describe its essence and connotation so clearly and accurately.
There is nothing more wonderful and wonderful about the crypto world than this.
