Foreword: Many of my examples directly implicate Safemoon, as I have done deep dives on how it operates. However, this format is successfully used across many shitcoins including dog-tokens and other reflection / burn based tokens.

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I've been around the shitcoin scene for about a year now. I think I first heard about Safemoon in April 2021 as this hot new thing and checked it out. We were in the middle of a very bullish run and many people were looking for the next bandwagon to jump on. I remember reading people enthusiastically saying how Safemoon had this crack team of developers who had previous developed a video game and were now behind a revolutionary token. Without getting in to it, I discovered it was a bunch of smoke and mirrors (there was no game, the developers had no experience) and I decided to stay well away, but warn people that things weren't as they seemed. That was met with this crazy level of vitriol and generally abusive response, which has kind of galvanized me into documenting as much scummy, scammy and shitty behaviour from Safemoon as I can, while thickly laying on some classic British sarcasm and dry-humour.

I've found an audience and received a lot of hate, but ultimately I think the existence of such coins are detrimental to our space. It helps perpetrate the culture of Crypto being this place to get scammed and propagates the "greater fool" theory. Shitcoins don't do us any favours, but human greed is human greed and people will ignore many red flags if they think they can make a few bucks.

The purpose of this post is to highlight many of the ???? red-flags ???? I've seen and debunk the nonsense within. Let's get started.

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FULLY DOXXED TEAM

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This is one I see a lot, and in the spam-posts the mods on this sub deal with it is one of the most frequent keywords. The idea behind this is to state that all the developers are "known" people and perpetrate this feeling that "You can't possibly get scammed because the developers have all their names out in public!"

It's just simply not true. Crypto is unregulated. Theft is still theft, but there's a lot you can get away with in Crypto that you can't in the regulated market. One example is unduly hyping a product while selling your tokens. This kind of insider trading isn't allowed in the "real world" but in Crypto it's fair game and not necessarily illegal.

As an example, here's what Safemoon had to say when the Certik Audit highlighted numerous security flaws regarding the liquidity pool being unlocked:

SafeMoon is very different from other projects, and our differences provide more security for the community vs. anonymous teams and projects. Risks in regard to “rug-pulls”or anything else is mitigated due to the fact that every member of SafeMoon would be subject to litigation and likely a swift prison sentence. Additionally, outside of the law, our social lives would be in ruin, and we would not be able to show our faces in public again, let alone get another job. This should be taken into account when looking at the SafeMoon project as a whole.

(Translation: Trust me bro)

Throughout 2021, Safemoon developers withdrew tens of millions of dollars from the liquidity pool, using the same method that the Certik audit highlighted as a security flaw.

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DON'T FUD YOUR OWN INVESTMENTS

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In short, it's a very abrupt way for people to say "Stop questioning things" - as we all know, FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt - nowhere in this acronym is the word "Untrue" in there. Truthful things sometimes do cause fear, uncertainty and doubt - but it doesn't stop them being fact. And it should make investors cautious, rather than reckless. Unfortunately, the latter response is what you see the most.

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TOKENOMICS

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'Tokenomics' is a weird one because it's almost like a buzzword, it makes it sound exclusive and like a unique feature, but it's literally just the way the smart contract operates. In that sense, every token out there has tokenomics. But in the shitcoin world, it's usually used to give a pyramid scheme a friendly and marketable name.

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CHARITY

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Lot's of shitcoins exploit human nature, in particular generosity or the pursuit of doing something good.

You do have to wonder why there are so many dog and cat tokens whose main use case appears to be collecting money to be sent off for Charity.

As we all know very well by now, Charitable donations are rife with fraud, even with fiat. Crypto is no exception to this rule.

Collecting money to send to charities isn't a use case. It doesn't continue to generate new interest or revenue, it serves as a get-rich-quick scheme from devs who exploit generous people that want to do some good in the world. If you want to do some good, donate to charities directly. There's no need to buy a dog token and hope the price rises enough before the devs pinch millions of dollars from a liquidity pool.

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BURN BABY!

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Burning is a fun one. It plays on another very human trait - the general inability to discern large numbers. As humans, we aren't evolutionary built to think about extraordinarily large numbers. We have ten fingers, we hunt prey that was often seen in low quantities, we see forests as a total collection rather than an individual count of trees.

Humans are quite terrible at explaining the vast chasm between a Million and a Billion. Now imagine a Trillion. Now a Quadrillion.

As an example, Safemoon started with a 1 Quadrillion supply. They burned 223 Trillion tokens immediately, leaving them with 777 Trillion. In the first half of 2021 they ended up burning about 400 Trillion tokens. Since then, there's been a 1000:1 consolidation to Safemoon V2, but even still lets look at the glacial pace of Safemoon burning:

On the 11th March 2022, Safemoon had burned 43.423% of the supply. A month later, they have burned 43.489% of the supply.

It took a month to burn just 0.066% of the supply. The site estimates that at this rate, it will take 34,702 days to burn the rest of the supply, or a casual NINETY FIVE YEARS

So when you see stars-in-their-eyes moonboys telling you how price will rise with the burn, it's complete horseshit. Maybe your great-great-Grandchildren can enjoy their wealth? I dunno.

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LARGE SUPPLY

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This is another thing that plays into the exploitation of a human's inability to parse large numbers. By giving tokens a large supply, they can exploit people into thinking they're scooping up a bargain. I can't tell you how many times I've read "When Safemoon hits a penny!"

The logic here is "A penny isn't a lot of money, so why shouldn't Safemoon hit a penny!" despite the fact this is currently nearly an 11x in current price (but even before Safemoon was consolidated, people thought the V1 price, 1000x lower, was possible to hit a penny).

The fallacy is failing to realise the extraordinary amount of money required to attain that. People do the mathematics in their heads and think "Oh at 100,000,000 tokens, if it reaches a penny, I'll be a millionaire!

They never think about the impact to the total market cap. And as we discovered before, burns don't mean shit.

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REFLECTIONS

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A greater pyramid scheme, there never was. My analysis on Safemoon's reflection system, which is now copied almost globally across the shitcoin scene, is that it's a form of indentured servitude. I'll explain;

Token reflections come from other users executing transactions with the token, which are then split proportionally amongst the holders based on total wallet size. This means the Lion's share of reflections go to those who have already gorged themselves on the token supply, meanwhile the later retail investors get the crumbs scraped off the floor.

What happens is people are redpilled into believing they will be able to live off reflections, but the cynical reality is that even amongst holders who own several thousands of dollars worth of Safemoon, the reflections gained per month is barely enough to buy a Coca-Cola.

These holders are suckered into believing that a token which taxes transactions (10% in, 10% out) can somehow sustain a large volume, which is the base source of reflections.

So the only thing that can get them reflections is a continued pressure to bring new investors in. You know, a ponzi. In this way they become indentured servants. They can't leave because they will be taxed. They're led to believe their reflections can alleviate their taxes, but even in a year of holding, it hasn't come close to replacing the 10% lost on the way in, let alone the 10% loss on the way out. And they are now left to roam the Internet trying to hook new investors in.

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That's all I have for now. I see these bunk arguments in and out across Reddit and Twitter, and I hope you gained something from this.

Thanks and see you next time Safemoon fucks something up! xoxox