Bitcoin and Meme Coins: A Surprising Comparison

Peter Schiff stated that Bitcoin is a meme coin.

A week prior, I made a similar observation in my Medium article: "Meme tokens are the new Bitcoin."

However, this doesn’t mean I fully agree with Schiff. There are a few key consumer-oriented qualities where Bitcoin and meme coins are indeed quite similar:

• Transparency: Both satisfy my need to track where money I’ve sent (e.g. to my kids) is going.
• Spending restrictions: Both can prevent funds from being misused. Imagine governments collecting taxes in Bitcoin or meme coins—those taxes could be sent to multi-signature addresses (one signature from the citizen, the other from the government), creating true financial accountability.
• Ease of payments: Receiving payments in Bitcoin or meme coins is as simple as sharing an address, which anyone can create in seconds—no bank accounts necessary.
• Seizure resistance: Neither can be forcibly taken from you.
• No infinite inflation: Unlike fiat money (or some other cryptocurrencies), Bitcoin and most meme coins have a fixed supply cap, defined from the very beginning.

These qualities make both Bitcoin and meme coins excellent alternatives to traditional fiat currencies.

That said, Bitcoin still has a couple of advantages over meme coins:

• Travel-friendliness: Bitcoin is highly liquid and easily exchangeable for local currencies almost anywhere in the world. Meme coins, on the other hand, are much less liquid. However, popular meme coins can be quickly converted to BTC or USDT on rabbit.io, and you can most likely exchange them for local currency in most countries.
• Government-backed reliability: Bitcoin provides a sense of security for those who need government guarantees. El Salvador is the state which guarantees Bitcoin can always be exchanged for dollars at the market rate within its borders. No meme coin offers that level of assurance.