Today I joined the SHIBArmy.
Would it be an exaggeration or an understatement to say that I know relatively little about cryptocurrency? The statement exaggerates how much knowledge “relatively little” would imply, yet drastically understates just how miniscule my grasp of cryptocurrency is. That said, I’ve never been one to let ignorance be an impediment to action.
Which is why today I joined the SHIBArmy.
I couldn’t stop myself. If there’s one thing I learned from this past April’s Dogecoin boom it’s that the effect of pairing a cryptocurrency based upon an internet meme which is, in turn, based upon an adorable canine with the sporadic and seemingly senseless tweets of an erratic tech billionaire, it’s that people get rich. I missed Dogecoin; I wasn’t missing SHIBA INU (SHIB).
And here’s the kicker. Ostensibly, I’d already missed Shiba. Elon Musk had tweeted a photo of Floki Frunkpuppy, his adorable SHIBA INU pup, four days ago — ancient history in the Twittersphere — and SHIB was already up 300% for the week when, once again late to the party, I pressed the BUY button on the Coinbase app this afternoon.
Buy high, sell low, said nobody ever.
Have I mentioned knowing relatively little about cryptocurrency? The same might be said for my experience with investment. Although the word investment implies the application of a sort of research and/or analysis that was completely absent from my purchase of SHIB today which, in effect, was really just gambling.
About SHIBA INU
SHIBA INU is an Ethereum blockchain-based, decentralized cryptocurrency created in August 2020 as a play on Dogecoin (which was created as a joke in 2013 by a pair of software developers).
Shibatoken.com, the coin’s website, refers to SHIBA INU as “a vibrant ecosystem,” regaling the reader with tales of a storied history since its birth in August 2020 when Ryoshi, Shiba’s anonymous founder, “burned” half of the one quadrillion starting supply to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who then donated most of that crypto to Covid-19 relief in India and “burned” the rest himself.
Burning cryptocurrency involves sending the coins to a dead crypto wallet, thereby rendering them ineffective (much in the same way that burning $100 bills would render them ineffective), reducing the supply, and thereby increasing the value.
Ryoshi — Founder of SHIBA INU
Shibatoken is great for historical background and marketing shlock, but if you really want to dive into some creation myth-making, read the posts of RYOSHI RESEARCH, in which the purported founder positions himself as a humble software developer (“I am just some volunteer”) toiling in service of the greater good, the creation of “an experiment in decentralized spontaneous community building.”
And who wouldn’t be a fan of decentralized, spontaneous community building? Not me.
This post from Ryoshi reads like a manifesto:
From the beginning, it is always the same. SHIBA is SHIBA. that is all. Anybody who comes and honors the Shiba walks equal with me. Anybody who comes and attempts to leech from the Shiba is a scammer and placed into exile. This is easy to know and then requires constant focus to continue.
Ryoshi’s stuff reads like some samurai warrior text lifted straight out of the Hagakure. I read it after purchasing the coin, so it’s not what drew me in. But, as a gambler with a taste for romantic rhetoric of this sort, it gives me a good feeling about being one of the coin’s 700,000 holders.
All hail the Shiba.
