What else could memecoins be?

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/03/29/memecoins.html

The problem with memecoins as they currently exist is that there's a lot of information asymmetry and the market basically pays people to be good at trading, resulting in a few whales/traders making bank and most normal people buying the top. 

This sort of applies to altcoins in general too

We wanted eternal life, instead we got 140 new genders

Imagine something like a pop star or famous movie or something that gained a load of hype and then at the last minute insiders just ran off with all the money and didn't deliver anything (c.f. Fyre Festival)  

That's what most altcoins and memecoins are

The tradfi world prevents (or at least tries to prevent) this type of abusive behavior by agents higher up the information asymmetry gradient with a bunch of institutions around law and finance and corporate governance. 

The Fyre Festival guy actually went to jail for example

Crypto just lacks the infrastructure and institutions to protect low-information investors. 

Now ideally someone would build out that infra... to some extent the point of Bitcoin as opposed to crypto is that Bitcoin protects low-info investors by removing complexity!

Crypto altcoins/memecoins but with infra to make it more positive sum is a noble goal but it would really need a bunch of technical and game theory research. 

It might look something like coins not getting listed on major coin tracking sites and exchanges unless they passed to tokenomics checks

If you want money from low-info gamblers to be funneled to good causes rather than to traders and whales, the game needs to change and it needs to be much harder to exit coins. 

I actually think HEX was somewhat innovative here with variable length staking.