Meme 币将继续存在。这是一件好事

这些通过满足人们的真正需求来帮助加密货币赢得“叙事战争”。

An excerpt from The Node newsletter, a daily roundup of the most pivotal crypto news on CoinDesk and beyond. You can subscribe to get the full newsletter here.

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Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.

注：本专栏中表达的观点仅代表作者的观点，并不一定反映 CoinDesk, Inc. 或其所有者和关联公司的观点。

I get it: Meme coins are dumb. Unserious. A waste of time. They give the impression that the crypto industry is trivial. Full of speculators. Vitalik Buterin is probably right to say the whole industry would be better off if people instead focused on legit projects.

我明白了：Meme 硬币很愚蠢。不认真。浪费时间。他们给人的印象是加密行业微不足道。充满了投机者。 Vitalik Buterin 的说法可能是正确的，如果人们专注于合法项目，整个行业将会变得更好。

But. Buuuuut – the only thing lamer than trying to financialize memes is complaining about meme coins. You can have many deep thoughts about how meme coins are emblematic of this age of “financial nihilism,” but shame on anyone uttering them aloud – especially if you’re holding a bag.

但。 Buuuuut – 唯一比试图将模因金融化更蹩脚的事情就是抱怨模因币。你可以对模因硬币如何象征这个“金融虚无主义”时代有很多深刻的想法，但对任何大声说出这些想法的人来说是可耻的——尤其是当你拿着一个袋子的时候。

I don’t necessarily think meme coins should be celebrated, particularly not for the reasons most often given. At this point in the cycle, it’s clear tokens – even "blue chips" like shiba inu (SHIB) or dogwifhat (WIF) – aren’t really bringing in new adopters; at least not yet. I think it’s dubious to suggest that the “communities” that form around investing in meme coins are at all long term sustainable. And it’s, of course, irresponsible to suggest these tokens are creating “generational wealth” for people.

我不一定认为模因币应该受到庆祝，特别是不应该出于最常给出的原因。在这个周期的这个阶段，很明显，即使是“蓝筹股”，如 shiba inu (SHIB) 或 Dogwifhat (WIF) - 并没有真正带来新的采用者；至少现在还没有。我认为，围绕投资模因币而形成的“社区”是否具有长期可持续发展的说法是值得怀疑的。当然，暗示这些代币正在为人们创造“世代财富”是不负责任的。

See also: Iggy Azalea's MOTHER Meme Coin Turned $3K Into $9M for 1 Lucky Trader

另请参阅：Iggy Azalea 的 MOTHER Meme 硬币为 1 位幸运交易者将 3000 美元变成了 900 万美元

Meme coins are what they are: highly speculative investment vehicles. That there appears to be a near endless amount of interest and capital to plow into them essentially proves that “speculation is a use case,” no matter whether you agree with the sentiment there.

Meme 币就是这样：高度投机的投资工具。似乎有近乎无穷无尽的兴趣和资本投入其中，这本质上证明了“投机是一种用例”，无论你是否同意那里的观点。

As Riva Tez put it in her recent speech at Consensus 2024, meme coins are helping crypto win the “narrative war” by fulfilling a genuine need that people have. Meme coins meet people where they are.

正如 Riva Tez 在她最近在 2024 年共识大会上的演讲中所说，模因币正在通过满足人们的真正需求来帮助加密货币赢得“叙事战争”。模因币在人们所在的地方遇见他们。

Fair enough to criticize casinos or state-sanctioned gambling like the lotto on moral grounds, but meme coins exist for the same reason – people like to dream their lives can change in an instant, without really having to do much work. It’s an itch that cannot simply be willed away, and it turns out gambling on blockchain-based tokens is as good as a scratch-off.

从道德角度批评赌场或国家批准的赌博（如乐透）是很公平的，但模因币的存在也是出于同样的原因——人们喜欢梦想自己的生活可以瞬间改变，而不需要真正做太多的工作。这是一种无法简单地消除的痒感，事实证明，对基于区块链的代币进行赌博就像刮刮乐一样好。

More substantially, it’s becoming evident that meme coins are tools for coordination and measuring attention. It’s in the name: meme coins are about mimetics – or the process by which ideas gain cultural currency by getting shared.

更重要的是，越来越明显的是，模因币是协调和衡量注意力的工具。顾名思义：模因币是关于模仿的，或者说是想法通过分享而获得文化货币的过程。

As Ravi Bakhai, who is building a meme-coin trading platform called Hype, explained, meme coins have essentially become a big, generalized betting market for determining how relevant anything is at any given time. For instance, Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER token literally put a price on her fame, and the rapper’s ability to draw an audience of crypto enthusiasts.

正如正在构建一个名为 Hype 的模因币交易平台的 Ravi Bakhai 所解释的那样，模因币本质上已经成为一个大型的、通用的投注市场，用于确定任何特定时间任何事物的相关性。例如，Iggy Azalea 的 MOTHER 代币确实为她的名气以及这位说唱歌手吸引加密货币爱好者观众的能力定价。

Now, a lot has been said over the years about crypto’s place in the “attention economy,” based around the idea that attention itself is a scarce commodity, and it’s easy to overstate the value of “crowdsourcing” popularity this way. In essence, what meme coins have revealed about the world is that people like cute dogs and can be incredibly racist.

现在，多年来关于加密货币在“注意力经济”中的地位已经有很多说法，其基础是注意力本身就是一种稀缺商品，并且这种方式很容易夸大“众包”流行的价值。从本质上讲，迷因币揭示了这个世界：人们喜欢可爱的狗，并且可能存在令人难以置信的种族主义。

But that doesn’t mean that primitives behind meme coins can’t one day be more useful. In the same way that prediction markets help us understand sentiment because users with “skin in the game” are incentivized to tell the truth, meme coins may also help cut through the noise.

但这并不意味着模因硬币背后的原语有一天不会变得更有用。就像预测市场帮助我们理解情绪一样，因为“利益相关”的用户会被激励说实话，模因币也可能有助于消除噪音。

This is the idea behind the emerging category of “PoliFi,” a portmanteau of politics and finance, and the array of tokens like JEO BODEN, MAGA and elizabath whoren that some people are using as metrics to gamble on those candidates' re-election odds. But this doesn't have to be limited to politics.

这就是新兴类别“PoliFi”背后的想法，它是政治和金融的组合，以及 JEO BODEN、MAGA 和 elizabath whoren 等一系列代币，一些人用这些代币作为衡量候选人连任几率的指标。但这不必局限于政治。

See also: Trump MAGA Meme Coins Are the First Experiment in 'PoliFi'

另请参阅：特朗普 MAGA Meme 硬币是“PoliFi”中的第一个实验

As Calaxy CEO Solo Ceesay recently wrote in a piece for The Defiant: “Memecoins are a prime example of how any collective group of individuals can create the economic infrastructure to facilitate commerce, trade, and collaboration without the need for an intermediary. Before blockchain, this was virtually impossible.”

正如 Calaxy 首席执行官 Solo Ceesay 最近在 The Defiant 的一篇文章中写道：“Memecoin 是任何个人集体团体如何创建经济基础设施以促进商业、贸易和协作而无需中介的一个典型例子。在区块链出现之前，这几乎是不可能的。”

Finally, as the creation of dogecoin (DOGE) in late-2013 showed, it’s worth noting that meme coins are essentially just a blank canvas for “performance art,” as Tez puts it. Co-creators Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer said DOGE was just a spoof of Bitcoin.

最后，正如 2013 年末狗狗币 (DOGE) 的创建所表明的那样，值得注意的是，正如 Tez 所说，模因币本质上只是“表演艺术”的空白画布。联合创始人比利·马库斯和杰克逊·帕尔默表示 DOGE 只是比特币的恶搞。

That actually gets to the heart of the most cutting criticism of meme coins: that they reveal the financial and psychological mechanisms that essentially make all cryptocurrencies tick. While it’s unlikely bitcoin (BTC)

这实际上触及了对模因币最尖锐批评的核心：它们揭示了本质上使所有加密货币运转的金融和心理机制。虽然不太可能是比特币（BTC）