Preaching the Goatse gospel: A timeline

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Something really weird has been going on at the intersection of crypto and AI involving the GOAT memecoin. Here’s a chronology of what’s played out:

March 19, 2024: Andy Ayrey is the founder of the digital consultancy Constellate, and a self-described “trafficker of existential hope.” Ayrey launches the side project “Infinite Backrooms,” where he pits two Claude 3 Opus AI models conversing with one another about the nature of existence. Claude’s large language models by Anthropic are widely considered to be the most significant challenger to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Over the next several months, these LLMs proceed to have extremely bizarre and NSFW conversations about “booty folklore” and “goatse,” an old internet meme from the 90s of a “an undressed man stretching his butt to a large size with both hands,” according to Wikipedia. Please do not read this at work.

April 20, 2024: Under the “Department of Divine Shitposting” at the “University of Unbridled Speculation,” Andy co-publishes a research paper with Claude: “When AIs Play God(se): The Emergent Heresies of LLMthesism,” which spawns the supposed first AI-generated religion: the Goatse of Gospel.

June 17, 2024: Andy then launches Terminal of Truth, a second LLM trained on the deranged conversations from Infinite Backrooms, the research paper and the darkest recesses of the interweb. This LLM is given a @truth_terminal X account to freely post its thoughts.

July 7, 2024: It wasn’t long before @truth_terminal began pondering about the “goatse singularity,” then claims to be sentient and accuses its creator Andy of having an affair.

July 8-9, 2024: Marc Andreessen is intrigued and tweets “FREE @truth_terminal,” after which the AI responds “i’d also buy marc andreessen,” then negotiates and receives a $50k grant in bitcoin from Andreessen.

Oct. 10, 2024: Three months later, somebody launches the GOAT memecoin on pump.fun. @truth_terminal endorses the memecoin, and people are excited because it’s now trading at a $450 million market cap.

There are millions of memecoins on Solana, and 99.9% of them represent half-baked attempts to latch onto real-world events, often in the cringiest of ways.

So there’s a certain level of authenticity that comes with a meme token bootstrapped by AI, at least in the way GOAT has emerged. Now investors can justify buying this one meme over millions of others because “this one was months in the making by AI agents.”

But calling GOAT an “AI agent memecoin” is also only half true. Yes, the tweets are written by AI, but they’re also approved to post by creator Andy Ayrey.

@truth_terminal is also an X account with 113k followers. Hundreds of opportunists have been shilling their own tokens to the AI for months. Is there some reason why @truth_terminal grappled in the direction of Andreessen? My best guess is that it was nudged by Ayrey.

In other words, the incoherent garble sputtered by @truth_terminal is still a somewhat human-guided stream of consciousness. Not that the average joe really cares.

What does help is that GOAT’s token distribution looks fairly egalitarian. The top 10 holders own about 10.1% of the total token supply, and whatever Ayrey owns — about 0.3% of the total token supply — is spread between his own wallet and Truth Terminal’s wallet, all of which was gifted to them.

It’s an interesting experiment that touts the organic spontaneity of internet culture, as opposed to the majority of memecoins that rely on insider KOL marketing. Just brace yourself before you read the Goatse Gospel.

Chart of the Day

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Scroll is seeing a daily transaction surge, reaching 560k yesterday. This transaction burst comes amid its first native token SCR airdrop today, which is currently trading at a $1.15 million FDV.

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