Memecoins on the Cardano blockchain

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Hello,

I wanted to give some feedback to the fact, that memecoins are been minted on the blockchain. Of course this is just my opinion, but imo some points have to be taken into consideration.

First of all memecoins are a problem for the credibility for the blockchain technology, as politician and also the SEC( and similar authorities in different countries) are seeing those rallies caused by a twitter comment or a politican saying mongoos in a hearing. As memecoins are associated with blockchain technology those habits are beeing transfered.

Further memecoins are ponzi scheme by its nature which are illegal in some(or even many?) countries, so by allowing memecoins being minted, the Cardano blockchain is participating in an illegal act in those countries. Of course this is my opinion, but this is where we are again by the point of credibility, because it might be possible that politician come to this conclusion too. Which will leed to further problems.
Maybe they will ban memecoins or force blockchains to ban them by not allowing them to operate in their countries as long as they are supporting ponzi scheme due to investor protection.
And if the ban only memecoins, what will happen with the money? Who will get how much and maybe the aggrieved party might sue the blockchain on which the memecoin was minted.

So imho the best thing to do would be, not letting memecoins being minted on the Cardano blockchain. Of course this might be a drastic move to some of the community. But how can memecoins be part of the values of cardano? Millions to billions of money are being put into a ponzi scheme, while veritree hasn’t even reached 1 million $ADA yet?
So maybe a charity burn mechanism to memecoins would be a more ajusted messurement.

So to summit up, I think that some preparations for memecoins have to been done, to ensure massadoption of the blockchain technology and to protect the Cardano blockchain from possibile prosecution.

regards

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I hear you, but one must accept the good AND the bad that comes with decentralization.

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Not letting memecoins being minted on Cardano is quite impossible. It’s like creating a harddrive on which you can’t store porn. We have to accept that Cardano is an open platform.

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I agree with previous commenters. The place where Cardano and memcoins philosophy intersect is freedom through equal access.

Memecoins are legal and there is no clear cut way to say what is a memecoin. Who will get to decide?
You can be sure that some memecoin holders believe deeply in their future.

A ponzi scheme is quite difficult to prove legally, but basically it means investment was done in bad faith. Cardano could be considered a ponzi scheme, same goes for stocks (if you believe they will fail in the future). Investors often plan to sell at a profit to future investors, that’s why ponzi schemes are quite hard to prove.

Memecoins may not be the best investment, but banning them is not the Cardano way imo.
You want to “protect people from themselves”? The way banks would “protect you” from crypto? It’s a slippery slope…

There is a lot of dark stuff going around the space right now, but we’ll have to resist the desire for authoritarianism and the urge to impose our beliefs on others. We need to come up with better solutions.

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It’s not possible to ban a coin from being minted. How do you recognize a meme coin while minting. It’s not how a blockchain technology works. It’s up to you to buy into meme coins or not. Also some well known Cardano coins where you think they have value or technology company / group behind it are just the same as a meme coin but with other marketing approach to hide that

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I don’t understand what this exactly has to do with decentralisation? It is a question of permission.
And yes, cardano is about permissionlessness, but for transaction and microcredits of people who can’t access the banking system. I don’t see the point in memecoins, this is more like a habit of people who have enough money in there lifes.

And cardano a ponzi scheme? No way, there is a company, a technology/code and a usecase behind it. But I don’t think it’s a good way for cardano to wait and let a court decided, with the consequence of getting sued and cardano having to pay for it.

I don’t get it, on the one hand the crypto community is yelling for massadoption and crypto companies are asking for clear regulation. And on the other when I use an argument, which the authorities use all the time, it is too much authoritarianism?
And do we need to protect people from themselves? The answer is yes, especially if cardano is serious about africa and other developing countries. Why? Because if you throw them into the crypto wildwest, they will lose their money. And if they lose 100$ it might not sound a lot to you, but to them it might be their lifesavings.

And how to do that? What does cardano have catalyst for?
If cardano wants the community to decide which why the blockchain will go in the future, then why not also which coins can be minted?

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How would you technically determine, which coins are “memecoins”? How should all nodes independently determine, which coins to allow to be minted and which not?

There is no central authority that can say: “No, we don’t want this here.” That’s the basic idea, not only of Ada, but of all crypto currencies.

Yes, that’s a problem for mass adoption. And this thread is probably not even the best example. There are others like the fact that transactions to very obvious scammers and transactions of very obviously stolen funds cannot be stopped, cannot be undone. Or that there will never be anyone able to reset uncle Joe’s password if he lost it.

Perhaps that means that crypto currencies are here to die and the world really needs governments and banks that have clear responsibilities and support structures. Because people need that, because you cannot build that on a system which at the very core says that everyone is responsible for their own shit.

And just out of curiosity: How do you come to the conclusion that memecoins are very clearly Ponzi schemes, but NFTs or even crypto currencies themselves are not?

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That’s not true, everything you said can not be applied to the whole cryptospace.

There is governance in many parts of crypto which is a decentral authority.

For example: uniswap changing to the polygon network, voted by the token holders

Stolen funds which have been returned happened too: e.g. on the binance smart chain
Accounts which have been frozen happened too.

And no, it is not the basic idea of crypto not having some form of authority which can say no.
Bitcoins upgrade are voted by the miners. Crypto is not anarchy, decentralistion is not anarchy, it’s democracy.

I am using catalyst and there you can deside which projects are being funded, from the ADA pool of the community, so it is a form of authority which can say ‘No, you don’t get that money’. So why not let the community decide, if a coin being minted on the blockchain is alright? If it is a serious project, then they will propably be ready to wait for the vote.

So what can I do with a memecoin except waiting that it gains or loses in price and sell it again? Nothing!

And what can I do with cryptocurrencies? I can buy a VPN, Filehosting, Cloudcomputing etc. there is a network behinde the currency with many lines of code and servers running them.

NTF is like a copyright and therefor can be used to claim ownership, which is more a law thing, but has a clear usecase. In the past, I saw many gamers selling the accounts illegaly and this might change in the future with NFTs. And there are many other usecases like dID and music

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So, in essence, your idea is that the code of the Cardano protocols is modified, so that tokens cannot be minted (and “smart” contracts that also could mint tokens cannot be deployed) without a Catalyst-like vote by the community? That would lead to quite a lot of votes per day/week/month.

Yes, Cardano’s goal is to put some governance on-chain in the next era and Catalyst is kind of a preparation for that. But the topics that can be voted on are limited by practical considerations. Vote on modification of some protocol parameters? Totally possible. Vote on every contract to be put on the chain? Hardly possible. Vote on confiscation of wallets from (more or less) obvious scammers/thieves? Perhaps possible, but also really risky.

By the way: Since voting power scales with stake – at least in Catalyst right now – it’s not really democracy, more like capitalism on steroids – only with the hope that the powers that be are other people, at least partially.

You could try to implement some kind of one person, one vote, but how? The blockchain cannot decide if two wallets/accounts/addresses are different people. We would need to get some external identity information. Totally possible in nations with a functional government (although there is no need for a freaking blockchain, there, they could just certify identity with good old public-key cryptography), but if the goal is to include people from nations with less infrastructure, that’s not a solution.

Binance and other exchanges can do that. Sure. Because they are single entities having governance over their system. But how is that any better than the traditional system of governments, banks and fiat money? Swapping rich guys that can at least be taken to court, to congressional hearings, can be regulated by elected govenments, for rich guys, of whom we do not even know, where on earth they reside, seems like a spectacularly bad deal.

It’s really not clear up to now if you buy some copyright or usage rights or just the hash value of an ugly image. For most NFTs there are next to none terms that can be found, what it is that you are purchasing there. Since people seem to believe that they buy rights of any kind, most of this NFT thing could fulfill the definition of fraud.

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I don’t think it will be that much of voting, because most poeple won’t go through those troubles and will choose a different blockchain, so maybe it would be even better for cardano to do so, as more serious project will likely do that.

I don’t see the difference to our democracy right now. Those with the money win the elections, like Trump with Cambridge Analytica e.g. , and we still call it democracy, but else you are right, but thats why tokenomics are so important and the idea behind it was to prevent exactly that. And maybe dID will be a part of it, we will see.

It was just an example, that it is possible reverse illicit transactions and maybe will be possible in the future, just need to have the right idea. And sometimes I have the feeling people are mixing up immutability with irreversibility, also privacy with anonymity. So reversing illicit transaction might be possible in future.

Of course NFTs are a thing for themselves and will probably be decided by gouvernments and/or courts. And how you can prove that memecoins are a ponzi scheme? Let all the token holders claim their money at once and you will see not everyone will get what they believe they should have.

Anyway, the point is, those are problems which will imho be important in the future and have to be discussed. As it will be important for massadoption, as more regulations will come in place.