For the conservative looking to get into crypto, Bitcoin and Ethereum are still where it’s at. They’re the coins that offer the lowest risk profile—they have enough attention, backing and third-party investment to ensure that of all the coins out there they’ll still be around in ten years. But if you’re looking to get rich, they’re not it.
Unless you’ve got cash to burn, or are an institution offering futures, you’re not making serious bank off of Bitcoin or Ethereum anymore. It’s one of those things Bitcoin and Ethereum speculator types don’t like to talk about. The prices are too high and the barriers to entry can be many. The age of the Bitcoin millionaire has come and gone.
And let’s not start on the opportunity cost.
If you’ve been on the internet scouring cryptocurrency sites, then you probably know crypto-millionaires still happen. Note the distinction between Bitcoin millionaire and crypto-millionaire. They’re far more rare than the pumpers on facebook and reddit would have you believe, but sometimes folks still get lucky and find an old key to a wallet wherein they filled up on altcoin when it was trading at $.15 two years ago and it’s now $5. And sometimes they throw $1000 at a coin that’s worth a fraction of a penny and they get seven figures when it goes to a penny.
That’s really the only promise that a coin like Shiba Inu (SHIB) has to offer.
The cryptocurrency corner of the various social networks are all abuzz about SHIB, and even in interoffice and inter-coffee shop conversations with crypto-afficionado types, you’ll hear about the other coin with the funny dog. Here’s the skinny. Shiba Inu is a decentralized cryptocurrency invented in August 2020 by an anonymous person or group calling themselves “Ryoshi.”
If you’re so inclined, you can read their shambolic Borg-like entries that pass as a white paper on their medium page. Be sure to gobble down some psilocybin mushrooms beforehand to help it make sense.
SHIB was modelled intentionally off of Dogecoin, and on May 13, Vitalik Buterin, the head honcho behind Ethereum and the Ethereum foundation donated more than $50 trillion SHIB (worth more than $1 billion at the time) to India COVID-Crypto Relief Fund. Because why not?
It’s trajectory has been towards the moon this month, jumping 55% on rumours of the launch of a decentralized exchange in the earliest weeks, and has since continued its upward climb with an increase over 636.3% over the weeks. It’s now landed at 11th largest coin by market cap at $24 billion.
Seriously, look at this chart. The FOMO is real:
But wait. There’s more:
The major CAVEAT here is obvious—this bubble is going to burst eventually, and who knows where SHIB might be. Buy in at your own risk. But what’s most curious, and may actually lead to SHIB being around in the next five years instead of sinking into obscurity is the notion that it’s a burn coin.
Coin burn
The US inflation rate has been 5% or greater for four consecutive months, which for the uninitiated means the government’s been busy devaluing its own currency by blowing out paper to cover for its massive war, COVID-19 and bank-bailout debts. Remember when the price of bread was a dollar? Neither can I. I distinctly recall it being sometime in the 80’s but I was too young. Now it’s $5 and as I recall, our wages haven’t really increased since the mid-seventies. You get the idea.
Shiba Inu’s developers are going the other way. Instead of printing new coins, they’re controlling their internal monetary supply via a coin burn. It’s partly why it’s trampolined itself into the stratosphere over the past few months.
It means a coin holder transfers some of his or her assets to a wallet that nobody can get into. This destroys the coins, and reduces the cryptocurrency’s total supply. SHIB started out with a 1 quadrillion supply and then the dev-team gave 50% of it to Buterin, who burned most of it in a ‘dead wallet.’ Last month, the token developers tweeted their intention to burn more to reduce supply, and revealed that they had already burned their way through $25,000 SHIB.
And that’s before all the celebrity endorsements ranging from pod-person and former Backstreet Boy Nick Carter to Buterin to tech-CEO and real life Bond villain, Elon Musk.
Now let’s talk about the future for SHIB.
There’s no clear path and anyone who tells you differently is selling you something, but the folks are looking to make two changes which will probably positively affect the price. The first is they’re getting into non-fungible tokens. The frothy, market hot potato that is NFTs will add its bubblicious power to SHIB’s bubble to make a superbubble until everything bursts. Secondarily, the dev-team behind SHIB are looking to get out of their parent’s basement, and by parent’s basement I mean the Ethereum environment, and onto their own blockchain.
Yes. SHIB runs on Ethereum. I’ve since heard that when it gets into NFT and gets its own blockchain, it’ll rise to a penny.
It’s presently trading at $0.00005240 (down from an all-time high five minutes go) and each zero represents an order of magnitude, so if you put in a thousand dollars now…
No. Let’s not be silly.
How does SHIB differ from DOGE?
One way. SHIB is compatible with the Ethereum ecosystem and DOGE isn’t. It lets the community put together apps like ShibaSwap, a decentralized exchange that lets users trade and stake tokens without an intermediary. In addition to getting into NFTs and their own blockchain, they’re looking into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) style governance system for the Shiba ecosystem, which they’re going to call “DoggyDAO.”
Because of course they are.
If you’re so inclined, you can check out the white paper for that organization, called the Woof Paper. It’s a lot less weird than the white paper for SHIB listed above. Promise.
In summary—is SHIB worth buying? It depends on your risk tolerance. I’m really not qualified to give you or anyone else investment advice in crypto or anything else, but I can securely say that you should do your own due diligence before buying this or any other coin. This one could go to a penny and make you a millionaire overnight. If it does don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. If you buy it and it goes to zero, similarly, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.
The takeaway is to be careful with this coin because when the market froth goes away, it probably will too. But if you can get out before the bubble bursts, you could be among the few, the proud, the cashed-up.
There are several platforms where you can buy Shiba Inu, including Binance, Crypto.com, Atomic Wallet, Coinbase and KuCoin, and probably more. You can also buy SHIB on Uniswap (via Trust Wallet), which requires you to exchange Ethereum for SHIB.
—Joseph Morton