this video is brought to you by surf shark stick around to hear more about the special holiday offer they are providing to the entire upper echon Community what would you be willing to do for money would you lie would you steal would you commit a crime or do you have a higher set of personal standards everybody answers that question differently obviously but that question is also incomplete what someone might do for a dollar is radically different than what they would do for a thousand and what they would do for a thousand pales in comparison to what they might do for million greed is a powerful motivator and greed combined with a perfect storm of catalyzing factors is the primary sin responsible for our topic today which is pump. fun and a story of how the dark web briefly came to the surface in a disgustingly horrifying way let's begin by setting the foundation every cycle in crypto is a roller coaster ride early on you had a mass Financial casualty event for example taking place like the hacking of Mount gaau where 650,000 Bitcoin was stolen from a magic the Gathering Trading card website which had been repurposed into crypto's largest exchange at the time more recently you had the nft craze where little jpeg pictures of monkeys were being purchased by celebrities and gamblers for Millions upon millions of dollars and now with the most recent hype cycle in full swing you have the rise of what are called meme coins primarily being driven by a platform called pump. fun it's actually hard to overstate the level of frenetic energy here millions of active users tens of millions of dollars being funneled through the website but much the same as a typical Casino experience when the masses gamble only a few can win pump.
fun is unrestricted unregulated and completely unfettered gambling the process of creating a meme coin which is exactly what it sounds like has been made exponentially Easier by the platform and with that ease of access combined with the possibility of a massive payout the website has seen a colossal explosion of user adoption to a point where it's now generating millions of dollars in Revenue per day to briefly explain how it works users get to create their own tokens obviously usually based on various internet memes and then offer those tokens up for sale publicly with a bonding Curve Model determining prices at a particular market cap liquidity gets injected in this case on a decentralized exchange called radium and the most popular tokens can go on to be listed elsewhere in simplified terms If Your Meme token gets popular enough you have the potential to make a large amount of money with some tokens from the platform such as dog with hat even going on to be listed on major exchanges like Robin Hood and coinbase literally anyone can do this with an understandably large community of gamblers doing so as a result subsequently calling themselves devs devs meaning developers in this case despite the fact that they didn't develop anything at all but for the purpose of today's video all we need to understand is this pump. fun allows anyone interested to create meme tokens which have the possibility of skyrocketing in price thereby earning millions of dollars that's the first piece of the puzzle the second piece of the puzzle is the dark web itself self but that's where things get a little bit more complicated I've got a whole graph I'll be using to demonstrate and it's going to have to wait until after the video sponsor all right once a year every year like clockwork we arrive at the Black Friday SL holiday season which when it comes to YouTubers like me means special discounts or deals with buzzwords like unbeatable sales on relevant products for any of you watching who happen to be interested in that however which is some of you the data doesn't lie to me there I'm happy to say that the special unbeatable holiday deal this time is for surf shark surf shark is a VPN a virtual private Network and vpns among a variety of uses protect you from a bunch of different things certain types of fishing attacks malware DNS tunneling DS attacks in particular that's the main one and also against invasive big Tech data harvesting as well as tracking on the entertainment side of things surf shark unlocks additional content on streaming websites like Netflix just change your geographic region which unlocks additional options in your video library and surf shark also helps mitigate Regional censorship like the government deciding to block websites with encryption IP protection modific and more I say this in all of my advertisements for their product which is a decent number since this is the longest running individual sponsor of the entire Channel but surf shark operates completely separate infrastructure from nordvpn and surf shark also maintains a warrant Canary if you click the link down below surf shark. com Echelon you can get four extra months with unbeatable price points again link down below surf shark.
com Echelon for an extra four months of the service at exceptional pricing big thank you to Surf shark for sponsoring the channel okay back to it what what even is the dark web and why does it relate to crypto meme coins well let's do a visual representation here using the most common image associated with this concept which is an iceberg icebergs are deceptively large much like the internet but on a deeper level of similarity icebergs exist mostly below the surface of the water and can't be seen famously this is how the Titanic sank because it avoided a surface level Iceberg but collided with its massive undersurface body but for the sake of the metaphor pump. fun had a similar type of accident here there's basically three sections of the internet or the iceberg in this case first is the Clearnet otherwise known as the searchable web which is comprised of websites called by Google or other search engines that exists in a very public way think Amazon YouTube Facebook things like that above the water the searchable web contrary to what some might believe is actually incredibly small most people picture this right here with a sort of even split or maybe 60/40 or 7030 something like that but the actual internet Iceberg looks a lot more like this see the clear net or searchable Internet is roughly only about 4% of the content and the real internet iceberg is a lot more skewed in reality the surface portion would even be smaller than this that I'm showing right now but for the sake of demonstration and visibility it's fine under the surface we get the Deep Web often interchangeably referred to as the dark web but that's actually not technically correct the Deep Web is comprised of non-searchable content and a good way to think about it would be private databases unindexed websit sites academic research infrastructure etc etc and really just a lot of raw content that isn't necessarily illegal it's just not directly searchable most of us have no way of accessing it a lot of people incorrectly refer to this entire underwater portion as the dark web but the correctly named Deep Web is roughly 95% of the whole internet nobody knows for sure by the way these are just estimates some say 90% some say 98% it's all guesswork because it's too big to fully measure and no one actually has access to all of it in the first place in order to try so take that for what it is surface web is a tiny fraction above the surface of the Water Deep Web is a super majority Lion Share of all the content online which is the big chunk of the iceberg down here however there is a portion of the internet World known as the dark net which can be accessed with certain browser options like tour which is found all the way down here at the bottom likely comprising something like 1% of the internet as a whole and this is where the hwood interpretation comes from the dark net contains exactly what people think it does a lot of it is broken links or spam or fragments of content that no longer function to be clear but the dark net is where you find illegal shocking or downright horrifying content that simply does not exist on the surface I'm talking about hacked satellites trafficking Rings illegal auctions and things I can't even say right now where I'd get a strike on YouTube believe me when I say this most people don't want to can't and frankly should never browse the dark net because it's not a safe place to be we're talking about law enforcement honeypots malware ransomware and things that will mentally scar you because this is where a lot of people go who can't exist or shouldn't exist in the legal surface level online world now understanding what the dark web actually is we need to also recognize one of its requirements and that is anonymity dark web activity often involves money changing hands or crimes being committed but using traditional Financial methods such as the US dollar involves a tremendous amount of risk sending money to someone isn't the easiest thing in the world to hide however with crypto it gets a whole lot easier not all crypto tokens are Anonymous or private or even desirable for this kind of thing but some of them are and especially unregulated tokens with low market cap on decentralized exchanges present an easy opportunity for converting and withdrawing money in a relatively untraceable way well that's the second piece of the puzzle because pump. fun is a platform allowing financial success with crypto tokens that become easily convertible thereby prepack ing a method of earning money that can be completely untraceable if someone wants that and puts in the effort to figure out how puzzle piece number two now for the third one which is publicity pump.
fun for a while at least only had the ability to generate the tokens and effectively gamble but in mid 2024 they added a new feature live streaming some people might see that and think wow cool idea but this completes a trifecta of horrible realities because now users not only have the ability to make a token and then profit massively off of that token in a difficult to trace way they also had the ability to live stream something or themselves in a lot of cases thereby gaining publicity for that token and helping it succeed three pillars profit incentive Anonymous payout and now publicity driving success Perfect Storm just to be clear the ability to make money by gaining viewership exists all over the internet today and it has for a long time take twitch for example where you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars off advertising and subscriptions if people want to watch you or if you do things that are exciting and new however if you break laws twitch will ban you but even further if you break major laws on Twitch your payout is in US dollars or Sovereign local currency wherever you happen to be you won't get that money if you start committing crimes because there's a long long chain of custody for those funds all of which have a vested interest in not rewarding you for that behavior but none of those checks and balances exist on pump. fund instead a pump. fund was allowing any one who wanted to a platform where they could not only gamble but Spike their own chances of success by live streaming that gamble getting as much attention as they possibly could and unlike traditional live streaming platforms there were no advertisers or brands or sponsors or anyone to serve as gatekeeper of the funds right now twitch as of November 2024 at least is experiencing an ad apocalypse because there's unacceptable content on their platform that advertisers don't want to be associated with agree or disagree with that stance it doesn't really matter because because it creates pressure and reinforces a system where doing or showing terrible or illegal things decreases profit potential however the same cannot be said about pump.
fun that type of pressure doesn't really exist in this case as you can imagine this new live streaming option went off the rails completely and here's the part where I can't actually show or even fully describe what transpired because I'll get strikes on YouTube developers Big Air quotes there as in gamblers who launched a token in the pursuit of getting rich began doing all sorts of disgusting things because the shock value of that content on a live stream resulted in higher viewership which in turn led to increased profit one kid and I say kid here very deliberately because he was 12 years old I think created a token and then live streamed himself rug pulling $30,000 from everyone subsequently mocking them and going on to do it two more times Well people found him they doxed him allegedly kidnapped his dog demanding restitution because of his actions and showcasing that the unhinged platform was so accessible a 12-year-old could scam tens of thousands of dollars I'm just making money over here I'm just doing my thing okay okay you Sam I I rugged $50,000 okay yeah shout out to Supra tusv and easy all the that help me R all right Sam have a good day you might be thinking so what that's not a big deal you made it sound really horrifying and that's not that bad but how about this people began doing hard drugs on stream one guy started firing a pistol just right out his window every time people purchased the token and yet another Dev locked himself in a cage doing all manner of disgusting things and promising to do even more as the market cap went higher women were having explicit relations with animals on these broadcasts one person had a child like 5 years old maybe with hands feet and mouth all taped up saying he'd not really be alive anymore if the token didn't increase in price get what I'm saying there was rampant explicit content shockingly bad instances of Cruelty both against humans and animals one guy was threatening to end his own dog one was holding a firearm up to a fish etc etc and even things like people threatening I don't know how to say this without getting obliterated by YouTube's content filter which I might already just based on the things I've said but guy was saying he was about to bang bang bang bang tragedy big sad school if you get what I'm saying another extremely young developer had a shotgun and his family was next door with all sorts of openly threatening statements about what was about to happen if the price didn't increase and I can't say whether or not some of these people were about to actually follow through with the stuff but the sheer scale of the ones that did follow through with something or other already was bad enough to wear the feature very obvious viously had to be shut down there's more I didn't even say there's things I can't say such as toddler a couple who were live streaming who were repeatedly let's say punching things like that all because pump. fun had created a perfect storm which allowed the dark web to bleed out across the surface think about it they created a financial incentive to get as many people watching you as possible they took almost every guard rail that you can imagine out of the equation and then stepped backwards with basically non-existent content moderation of their own creating an exponential feedback loop where the most provocative shocking or attention grabbing live streams were massively financially rewarded as a result we received a rather painful answer to the question what would you be willing to do for money as pump. fun quickly became a wideopen platform where anyone willing to go further and faster than their peers could rise to the top of the feed with a direct correlation between shock factor and payout clearly a lot of people were willing to engage with that to be clear these things have always existed in the online world but they didn't didn't exist on this side of the internet barrier and they certainly didn't exist where quite literally anyone who wanted to give it a try could do so with no barrier to entry that level of accessibility combined with such easy and immediate profits created a race to the bottom that no one was prepared for and it's a trend that would have continued had they not taken the entire feature offline we should all understand that if they hadn't taken that system down the level of severity would have only increased there would have been more and more and more extreme situations unfolding larger and larger groups of people participating or generating these live streams with higher production value and more shocking content because for a very short period of time the dark net had a foothold and came crashing through into a world that people can readily access to be clear the dark net is only relegated to that small underwater section of the iceberg because the systems it needs to function only exist down there but pump.
fun had everything necessary for the dark web to exist here above the surface so exist it did as it stands with the feature taken offline they might be okay but there's a very real chance that this domain name gets seized by some sort of government agency now this kind of thing is what causes actual laws to get written and this is where major corporate entities will converge completely obliterating something like that from the visible online world with good reason but ultimately it remains to be seen in the end the pump.
