Crypto’s problem is Telegram – not the Elon variant
Some years ago in the 2000s, I was in San Francisco for a mobile trade show and had my photograph taken with the Iron-Man costume before the first film of that franchise was released; something to show off to my family and young son.
More bizarrely, a couple of years later I was living in India and helped Paramount Pictures with the marketing for Iron-Man 2 across Indian operators and handset makers. So I know Iron-Man.
However, at no time did I realise that Tony Stark was based on Elon Musk, which is something that happens a lot when you live on the beach for two years far away from home. Obvious things slip through the net and not just the fish on the Goan coast.
Now that I’m up to speed, this so-called Marvel has been playing silly buggers on Twitter, bigging up and bigging down the Bitcoin price as easily as Donald Trump on the same platform did with the American people’s psyches.
Again, it’s breath-taking how stupid some people can be, that one person can have so much influence, be it a manic Musk or a dangerous Donald. No doubt, Musk will say something else next week and the lemmings will take their dopamine and hit on the next wave… whatever Musk says.
Musk isn’t stupid, but a lot of his followers are. Rendered gormless by Covid and bloated by crypto profits, it’s as if they have given their brains over to the Iron-Man as cerebral prosthetics. Round and round the mulberry bush; we all fall down… when the music stops etc.
The story, however, isn’t Musk, he’s just a pretend superhero who is showing off to his girlfriend Grimes who rakes in dollar from NFTs and likes being part of this particular franchise. Who doesn’t want to rule the world for a while? I’d be laughing to myself if I was her about how easy it all was.
Crypto volatility
However, the real story of crypto volatility is much further down in the platforms that dictate price movements and sentiment. Places such as Reddit or, infuriatingly, Telegram.
Without naming names, I’m the Chief Evangelist to a privacy DeFi project that has been extraordinarily successful over 2021. It’s been beyond our wildest dreams and the launch of our coin last week was amazing.
But it came at a price and that was from the Telegram trolls, bots, scammers and Gif-wielding children who rapidly convened, all after either a quick profit or a quick stolen buck.
It’s not a good feeling having your identity copied (which happened five times) and it’s even more esteem-lowering when one such scammer was challenged and asked for a image to prove my so-called identity.
The response was a picture of what looked like a red meat-friendly American man with jowls of flesh and while it was funny for a while, the depth of aggression and attack was something I’ve never experienced before. Compared to Twitter it was frightening in its intensity and obviously debilitating to one’s psyche.
Perhaps Telegram itself is the problem. Deregulation is one thing and freedom from centralisation is another, but if it creates a cesspool of who-knows-who-is-human dystopia, then what does that mean in the future? Telegram trolls are way worse than Twitter ones. For those who still read books, it’s like being Piggy in Lord Of The Flies, there’s an arrow in your back and you’re in the crosshairs as well. Easy, sitting target.
Holding AMAs
Don’t even get me started on holding AMAs (Ask Me Anythings) to up the marketing once the coin has been launched and the number of Telegram followers has dipped by 10 per cent (perhaps they all had to go back to school).
An hour of attack, like a teacher holding a classroom of will-go-to-Borstal children. I have nothing against emojis or GIF-expresson, but hosting AMAs is like being a victim in a soon-to-come 5G universe from which there is no escape.
Maybe I’m an old fart who is used to more traditional forms of media, marketing and manipulation. Buying somebody lunch may always have been a bit dodgy, but everybody knew where they stood.
Now there’s a plague of Telegram users who are either angry because they were denied an allocation of coins or because they’re just wrong-uns, period. There is no goodness or maturity on Telegram. So, there will be more Elon variants to come, a kind-of crypto plague engineered by the Rat King, but while this obfuscates the real world, there’s a revolution going on in Telegram… and it’s not a particularly uplifting one. Time to delete.