This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Welcome to a brand new week. Excited to have you back. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I've been making this show every single day for 1700 days, 1700 plus, all with the goal of helping people pursue creative money-making projects. Now, since we are here in a new week and we're all about creative money-making projects, I would like to introduce the Side Hustle School Altcoin.
You can come and get 1 million coins for just $10. Okay, just kidding. There's actually no such thing. I haven't even made an NFT yet. No NFTs, no altcoins.
But today's caller says, if you can't understand them, join them, right? Like if you can't beat them, join them. If you can't understand them, join them. Well, he wants to get in on a hype coin craze while it lasts. If you have no idea what this is about, well, that's what we're gonna talk about in this episode.
He's actually referencing a New York Times story that came out recently. A New York Times reporter who wanted to make his own digital currency, wanted to make his own coin like Bitcoin, except his coin was called Idiot Coin. I'll say more about that story and what happened in my answer. But first, quick shout out to our sponsor, then our listeners question. We're talking about hype coins.
How can you start one if that's what you wanna do? Okay, stay tuned. [Music]
Hey Chris, this is Will. I started listening to the show this last year. I read a New York Times story about hype coins, which are like Bitcoin, but can be created by anyone for a few hundred dollars.
In the story, the reporter made one that he called Idiot Coin to show how easy it is. And some people ended up buying it, even though it was only intended as an example. The story also explained that there's no real enforcement around this industry yet. So now I wanna make my own hype coin. I might even call it the Hustle Coin.
Are you in? Maybe we can do an initial coin offering to the side hustle school community. [Music]
Will, great question. And thank you for the proposal as well. I think I'm not quite ready to make the Hustle Coin, but when I'm ready, we will do that initial coin offering.
And I read that story too. So if anybody's interested, this story is about hype coins. It's by David Segal in the New York Times. Just search for his name and Idiot Coin, or you can probably find it if you just search Idiot Coin. So you've heard of Bitcoin.
There are actually 70,000 other coins or digital currencies out there, including these great ones that I discovered myself, Cookie Coin and Pluto Coin. I'm gonna go buy me some Cookie Coin right after I finished this episode. Most of them are not in fact a great investment, including these hype coins. And if you're like, why do you keep saying hype coin? What does that mean?
Well, a hype coin is a financial product created by someone who then hypes it through online promotion. When I say financial product specifically, I'm referring to a cryptocurrency or a digital currency. And there's a whole industry for this now, including influencers you can hire to post videos on TikTok. I mean, what a world we live in. And your whole goal in doing this, if you are starting a hype coin, is to drive the price up, get a lot of people to buy it, and conveniently since you founded it, you own a lot of the coin of which the price is increasing.
So you can then sell your shares at the peak of the market. Now, is this legal? Pretty much. Will is right when he said it's not super regulated. It's not legal to do this with stocks and other securities, just to be clear.
But the Times article talked to lots of experts who said, yeah, nobody's really stopping this now. So is it legal? Pretty much. Is it ethical? Well, I'd say definitely not if your whole intention is to rip people off, but there's actually a lot of gray area here because some so-called hype coins have actually stuck around and risen in value.
So it's not always like a penny stock in which a few people get rich, some speculators, and then everyone else loses money. Like I said, a whole new world here. So how do you do it? If you want to learn more, let's say. In the story, the reporter spent $1,000 making idiot coin.
The market value ended up reaching $108,000. Although, as he pointed out in the article, if any one person, including him, were to sell a ton of the coins at once, it would likely crash the price. So it's not necessarily that he has gone from $1,000 to $108,000, but still pretty impressive. You use a site called CoinTool to make your own currency. There could be some other options, but that's just the one that I'm familiar with.
CoinTool, it costs maybe $8, and the rest is marketing using Reddit, Discord, and those aforementioned TikTok influencers. So if you want to learn more, read the story, go to CoinTool, but should you? I guess maybe that's the bigger question. So I will leave you, Will, and anybody else to answer that question. This episode is getting long.
I'll just say thanks for the idea, Will. But for now, there is no Side Hustle School coin. All right, I'll keep you posted. Listeners, if you have a question, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Let me know what crazy ideas you have heard of or have come up with yourself.
We will continue to feature them along with updates from listeners, case studies, tips, encouragement, all kinds of stuff in a different short episode every single day. Thanks for tuning in. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
