In May 2021, an initial 10% dip in cryptocurrency prices was caused by Musk announcing Tesla’s environmental concerns of Bitcoin mining.
This was the precursor to the main crash that followed, with dire news coming from China banning and clamping down the cryptocurrency mining industry.
Right before this Tesla/Musk announcement, the cryptocurrency market had been experiencing incredible growth and many tokens brought exceptional returns to their investors.
This article is not just about debunking the hollow CNN story that went viral. First of all, we examine this story under the scope of investing and as an investing indicator (or perhaps a counter-indicator).
Coinmarketcap: Shiba InuCoinmarketcap: Shiba Inu
The date of publication of this article is marked and we can examine two charts that give us a good indication how to treat this news invest-wise.
The price of Shib dropped significantly after it peaked at around the same date the CNN article was published.
Google Trends: Shiba InuGoogle Trends: Shiba Inu
The story appeared right on the top of Google trends back in May. Right after Shib had its massive upside movement.
While this leads us to believe it is a true story, still investing-wise, stories like this should always be taken with a pinch of salt, and not influence our investing strategy.
This kind of stories promoting sudden riches, “Lambo’s” and “mooning”, are always counter indicators.
It was published at the best time possible to retain the investors in Shiba Inu and allow the dumping that occurred to find a better price.
It was an article aiming to generate more buyers to sustain prices and help whales to keep dumping trillions of Shiba Inu tokens in exchanges.
And these whales made multiple millions since this article was reproduced an infinite number of times and even helped Shiba to recover with the revival of the bull run.
In short, two brothers made many bets in Shiba Inu that in total wagered $8,000, buying the token on multiple occasions. By April, their total profit reached $10 million, at an ROI of 1000x!
Could be a true story, although, this article makes me feel it wasn’t.
Makes me skeptical considering the timing it was published, (right at the May top).
It is an article that messes with the emotions and logic of the reader. At this point, I urge you again to read the CNN story, it only takes a few minutes ( link), and comment your thoughts.
A friend, who happened to be a crypto expert, told them he believed it could be a big moneymaker.
"I trusted my friend and I figured if it went to zero, that's OK."
My first thought was:
“I wish I had a friend telling me the same back in (any time this happened and price was still low).”
If I was this CNN reporter, I’d do everything possible to find this friend’s phone number and contact ASAP.
A random “friend” that believed Shiba could be a big moneymaker when nobody was discussing it. How appropriate. Although it could be true, not saying otherwise.
My thoughts on the million-dollar tip?
This “friend” (if this story is real) was an insider. An exchange insider who knew what was happening, and was probably in direct contact with whales and exchange operators.
This was a planned pump that will ultimately become a vast dump once the whales’ exit.
The hype in Shiba is still at an unreasonable level.
Price recovered and quickly reached new heights with promises by the Shib army of wealth and more riches.
Difficult to counter the “number go up” arguments, when there are thousands of shills, spamming the comments of all social media about Shiba Inu.
It instantly convinces any newcomer that Shiba is the hottest coin they should invest in. And judging by what I’ve read from Tommy and James (the two brothers), they clearly had zero knowledge of anything crypto. Example:
"I kind of thought about bitcoin — that was once a fraction of a penny and now it's tens of thousands of dollars, and this happens to people, it's possible,"
- Tommy...
An argument flawed by inception. Completely ignorant of facts or technology. For example, the fact that Shiba Inu is just another ERC20 token without a blockchain, developers, or, more importantly, a concept.
It took 9 years for Bitcoin to reach $10,000. What I read above, means Tommy views crypto as a get-rich-quick scheme. A red flag over here. And the reason I explained above is that I consider such articles a counter-indicator.
Less than two months after their initial investment in late February, their lives changed.
The article is full of masqueraded punch lines with an attempt to shill Shiba Inu and emphasizes suddenly acquired life-changing riches, unemployed managing to win a lottery ticket, and the worst of all:
...and I figured if it went to zero, that's OK. (!!!)
A way out for the Shiba team. In case it goes down to zero, no questions asked, no one gets persecuted, no SEC or federal agents involvement, no lawsuits, and no court orders.
Nope, that is not OK. But there is no chance this story is true, anyway. This is just a surgical shill article. One that was perfectly written by professional manipulators. I doubt this is the work of the journalist mentioned.
Another part of the story that struck my attention is the fact that the two brothers wanted to protect their anonymity and asked CNN not to mention their surnames.
We can acknowledge this decision for many reasons since becoming “nouveau riche” also comes with a heightened sense of responsibility.
Tommy, 38, and James, 42, who have asked CNN not to publish their last names to protect their anonymity...
Probably the first names (Tommy and James), and the ages are fake, given out just to put a certain identity and make these people look more relatable to the public. Otherwise, there is no real anonymity.
If these two brothers gave out their small names, age, location, and occupation, then they can easily be found if anybody starts looking.
While we keep reading we find this phrase by “Tommy”:
The government stimulus checks weren’t enough to sustain us.
The article covered every aspect of psychological coercion to convince (especially) the (US) audience to invest in Shiba Inu, right at the worst time when the token-whales wanted to sell.
Selling takes time, though, and the buyers are not always ready to purchase mass amounts of tokens.
And SHIB has one quadrillion tokens as total supply. An inconceivable number for the human brain.
This story contains no credibility and we can’t verify any of the events actually happened. It is just the readers choice to put trust in this reporter and CNN as a news network.
I’ve made my case already about this article of the “anonymous” two brothers having inside information and not giving any credible evidence of their wealth.
There have been cases of sudden wealth for investors of Shiba Inu cryptocurrency, as there have been with thousands more. Still, this one, contains no proof, but a story of two anonymous investors and how they convinced their family to invest stimulus money (which did not even cover their expenses) into an extremely high risk investment.
Probably reporters in the entertainment sector often act irresponsible enough, yet, this article was not about a singer or an actor. It contained terrible financial advicemasqueraded as “cryptocurrency” news.
If this story was to be published under a journalistic scope, the real identities of these two brothers should have been announced.
Otherwise, there is no story.
We have nothing to trust. We do not need to trust a news network in this age, but we can verify the claims of these two supposed millionaires if they only proved the ownership of this Shib by signing their wallets. But we don’t even get a public key in this story.
There is no trust in blockchain networks, something the author of this story, as well as the mainstream media do not understand.
If this story is real, then these two newcomers in crypto bought SHIB from a DEX and not a centralized exchange since this was just a Uniswap traded token when the price was trading at relatively low.
Just by mentioning the Ethereum public address we would be able to verify these claims, but there is no mention of any such details in the article.
It shouldn’t even be published at a mainstream news network that wants to have an image as a credible and reliable news source. There is no way for anyone to verify the validity of these claims, yet this story was massively reproduced online, since it was published by CNN.
Shiba Inu probably had no plans for DeFi or any use case at all before it reached a market cap of billions.
As a token, Shiba Inu, is still worthless and its price action was always pure hype. Everyone discussing Shiba Inu is just hyping up this token but not focusing at all on features or what exactly makes it special. It was always a meme-coin and its value is extracted from another meme, Dogecoin.
Investors went on a rampage to buy a meme of another meme.
Basically,nobody cares what Shiba Inu does. Everyone was and still is in it just for the money, the “pump”. There is no interest in technology or developments. As long as the price is rising, the Shib army will keep increasing the endless spam in social media and any network possible.
Even in case, Shiba Inu is not a scam and is developing a DEX as we lately read, this doesn’t mean it currently holds a fair price and doesn’t make it unique. There are thousands of DEXs already in the DeFi market.
There is no data to back this story, or any of these claims of two brothers suddenly enriched by a total fluke and an insider tipping them.
Even if the conversation happened, there is nothing credible we can verify in this story, meaning it is invalid.
It is another story that explains how irresponsibly the mainstream media are handling the cryptocurrency market. An article reproduced thousands of times on the internet with millions of investors reading it and perhaps shaping their opinion to invest in Shiba Inu.
No sense of responsibility by mainstream media whatsoever. Price of Shiba Inu is higher today, but for four months was 50–75% lower than the date of publication.
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No financial advice intended. Do Your Own Research.
Perhaps a few smartBCH tokens can grow fast. Can't give such financial advise, though. Think of the long term, and which coins will have a place in the future financial systems.
There's a time that I saw Shiba Inu popping in my news feed but I didn't what's that all about, I never have time to read it. Thank you for sharing this information.
Rick and morty??? Lol... I thought you were going to debunk the story from the graphs,,, but you instead started the possibility based on the situation of the currency at the time... I think honesty is a pattern in your all your articles... Good job as usual...
Hahaha! Yes, I think the point is there. I mean, this is a made up story handed out to a reporter and published without any validation or due diligence. I don't even know how or why CNN allows this, or the editor of these publications thought this story is credible!
but you instead started the possibility based on the situation of the currency at the time
The price recovered 4 months later, but it won't last. Even so, after this article was published it was down by what was this? 50-75% for 4 months. Anyone that bought this piece was caught like a sucker.
Maybe it has another upwards leg in the chart, but this is it. There is no hope in Shiba as a long term investment.
And there are real stories of people made wealth from it, this just doesn't seem to be one.
Hard telling. It's funny you mention this article, because it popped up for me about a week ago, and at first when you mentioned it here I did not recognize it, but when I clicked to the article and started to read it, it instantly popped back into my recollection.
Shiba Inu is, for me, among many other coins that just have no purpose whatsoever other than to exist, to my mind. The whole crypto market is literally filled with tens of thousands of worthless coins, which is troubling for me as an investor who wants to believe in the future of crypto currency.
While this view is slightly outside the scope of your article, the thought that has come to mind is that in some way what we have entered with crypto is something akin to what we ran into with the dot com boom, and I wrote about that observation a month or so ago.
Granted, this is coming from a guy who's intention to invest in crypto is to make money on it—fiat ultimately. Because there is a side to me that thinks perhaps the whole market and the whole idea of crypto is flawed in many multiple ways.
At some point I may write about some of these thoughts since a comment here could become quite long.
As for Tommy and James, I think you are probably right. They are people who exist only in the imagination of the writer of the article and the intent of the article seems more cajoling of people to drop some money in the bucket than to be informative.
Frankly, this article is one piece rare to find. It contains just a story that could be true, since SHIB had extraordinary returns, but it also contains nothing to prove this story is real!
I keep getting flashbacks to this story every time I read about Shiba Inu (a token I despise for its marketing), and always felt how lucky these two guys had been. Until, I read it again and found it contains too many loopholes.
Just the fact that CNN publishes a report based on supposedly anons is quite absurd.
Well, it IS CNN of course, and for too many reasons to cite here, I do not think CNN has been a credible news source for many, many years.
As for SHIB, I do own some. But my investment to date is only $200, and that's about all I really intend to ever have in it. Supposedly, according to certain people I follow, it is supposed to have at least one more big pump before going into oblivion, so if and when that happens I will likely just take my money and run.
Hello my friend thank you for the information about Shiba Inu, thank you for sharing this article to all of us, by the way I'm Newbie here