CRYPTOCURRENCY
Is HOGE Coin Legit?
The good, the bad, and the ugly
By Hogefather, aka Jesse J Rogers
[last edited 4/19/2021] Author’s note: In the month since the original writing and the unexpected success of this article, Hoge Finance and my relationship with it have changed significantly. Instead of being an unbiased amateur reporter investigating Hoge Finance with curiosity, I’ve become one of its most fervent evangelists and now have a large portion of my own portfolio invested for the long term in the HOGE token. Part of what gave me the confidence to do that was the access the Hoge team provides in the AMAs.
On a recent AMA, the chief finance officer, AM, offered her reassurance that Hoge is a legitimate project. As a financial and accounting services wealth manager with a $100 million portfolio, she would never have gone anywhere near a rug pull. A community member named Crypto Camel covers the AMA below.
For anyone who doubts her claims, I hope I can put you at ease by acknowledging that I do know her identity. I did find the company she’s referring to. I am confident she’s telling the truth. “Trust, but verify” as they say.
As you can hear from the video clip, and as I had the opportunity to experience first hand in a recent Zoom call with her, AM exudes a combination of competence and integrity. I can understand why wealthy clients trust her with their finances. Frankly, by investing in HOGE, so have I.
In case you wonder why she keeps her privacy if there’s nothing to hide, I suspect that like all effective people, AM is ruthless with her time management. The entire team seems to use privacy as a filter to protect that valuable time from distraction. That’s important because we’re all working extremely hard behind the scenes, some of us taking leave time off our day jobs and building this for no pay because we want to make sure Hoge Finance succeeds.
What fruit has this borne? The community deeply appreciates it, I can tell you that.
Put simply, the dev team that actually got it this far (they are not the original creators) doesn’t overpromise but they do deliver. That’s important because trust is the foundation for sustainable wealth-building. I’m still writing so much precisely because they have built that trust with me.
Why is the mission so important? Because this is literally the future that we’re building. In 1976, you’d have wanted to be with Steve Job in the garage. In 2004, you’d have wanted to be with Mark Zuckerburg in the dorm. In 2021, you’ll someday wish you were part of the early days of Hoge Finance. Here’s why.
What follows is the original article, written a month ago, before I had my current insider perspective. Some of it may be obsolete compared to my newer articles, but you may still find my evolution interesting and entertaining.
I’ll give it to you straight.
HOGE doesn’t have a well-connected, well-funded, award-stacked academic team like I wrote about for Algorand.
It’s not a massive exchange with deep pockets and millions of existing users like Binance or Crypto.com (which I also wrote about).
Hoge.finance has none of that. But check out that sweet website though!
This altcoin isn’t the sort of established project with strong pedigree, deep pockets, and a rock-solid value proposition that I usually shill for. This isn’t my typical cautious, long-term, well-researched, calculated conservative position.
No. But as you’ll see it is quite a bulldog of a coin just the same. This meme coin is more like an acid trip where I’m stacking the chips on green at the roulette wheel and telling a C-3P0 with a dog face on it to “never tell me the odds” while listening to Kenny Rogers sing The Gambler.
HOGE is currently only available on Uniswap, Bilaxy, and Whitebit. With $.03 billion in market cap (compare that to “risky” Bitcoin’s $1 trillion) as of this writing, this microcap is an extremely-speculative moonshot investment.
I bought it anyway.
Yes, with these new coins there’s always a risk that my $200 is going to fizzle out and be worth nothing. But along with that risk I really do think there’s a lot of upside for HOGE and that the expected value is overwhelmingly in my favor right now.
Oh, did I say $200? That’s not quite right. You should know that about $70 worth of that is burned up right off the top in Uniswap transaction costs.
Still, even with only $130 worth of HOGE finally landing with a heavy thud into my MetaMask wallet, followed by an immediate -10% downturn in the price as soon as I got in, I nevertheless feel very good about my decision. I’m in it for the long haul.
Why am I so confident?
Well, HOGE has 3 interlocking things going for it that make me believe it is launching for the moon.
Reason 1: FOMO Tokenomics on Steriods
The reason I never got into Dogecoin is not necessarily that it started off on a whim as a joke. Sometimes there are happy accidents in life, and I can live with that comfortably enough.
What I can’t live with is the uncapped inflationary supply. The current circulation is limited but there is a technically infinite number of Doge that can be mined. Therefore, Doge doesn’t appeal to me much more than fiat does.
Bitcoin, by contrast, has only 21 million BTC that will ever be mined. That’s why its value is always skyrocketing. That apparently is enough to make it 200 times more valuable than Litecoin, which is the same thing but with better functionality and about 4x the supply. The functionality clearly isn’t that important. The scarcity is. There simply isn’t enough of a squeeze on supply for any other coin except Bitcoin to push the price into the stratosphere.
So why do I think HOGE, with 1 trillion (yes, with a “t”) coins all minted from day 1, will skyrocket from its current $0.0005 price tag?
Because it is extremely deflationary. That’s why. It’s got the attitude of DOGE, but with incentives for coin holders that are so much better.
The way it works is that every transaction is taxed at 2%. 1% of it is permanently burned, and the other 1% is distributed to all the remaining wallets proportional to that wallet’s holdings. No staking or action of any kind is required to receive the rewards.
Already, in only a few weeks of existence, HOGE has burned more than half of its original supply. According to coinbase, this has caused its price to increase by about 70,000% since its launch less than a month ago.
Yeah. I know. Unreal.
This is only going to get more extreme over time as fewer and fewer coins exist. Every time that a swing trader takes profits (and who can blame them for cashing out 10x or even 100x) all the remaining HODLers get a nice bonus both from increased holdings and diminished supply.
It reminds me of the cryptocurrency equivalent of Survivor. Whoever cashes out their stash early is the one that “loses” (by “only” multiplying their money a few dozen times). Whoever manages to hold out for another day is rewarded with an ever increasing growth in value. What a hell of a social experiment.
“The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.” — Warren Buffett.
To the degree that The Oracle of Omaha captures the essence of the stock market with that quote, I don’t even know what to call HOGE. It’s like… the weapons-grade version of that, jacked up on steroids, I guess.
Obviously I don’t know what’s going to happen to the price though, so none of this information is financial advice tailored for you or your risk profile. These are just my own thoughts and behaviors.
You do you, boo. Not everyone’s a digital cowboy meant to speculate on meme coins. Some advisors will tell you to safely hold T-Bills for 1.59% annual yield so I’m sure they’re right, what do I know?
Whatever happens to the price though, I’ll tell you this. No force in this world is prying these coins out of our hands, My Precious. We HODL it!
Reason 2: Meme Traction and a Fanatical Community
Have you noticed I’m a sucker for pop culture references? Maybe. Whatever.
But it’s actually way worse than that. In every conversation I find myself in with unsuspecting no-coiner normies, I am basically a real life Michael Bolton to Lonely Island — except I bombard them with talk about cryptos instead of movies.
Still, I get results.
To give you an idea, I went to drive down the street today to help my 94 year old grandmother-in-law take in the groceries, and by the end of my visit she’s talking about getting her daughter so the two of them can work together on throwing $2k into Bitcoin.
Sorry, Peter Schiff. Lulz. Neither gold nor the CD’s from the bank are pulling in 200%. Granny’s gotta get paid! And she will, based on the actual data.
But I digress. The point is, you don’t get traction for something by attracting wallflowers. You get it by attracting lunatic-fringe evangelists like me, or pornstar Johnny Sins, or this guy.
And that’s something HOGE obviously managed to do, as evidenced by the fact that I’m using my precious vacation time to shill for this little gem instead of one of the other 4,000 coins that are vying for my love and attention.
There’s a number of reasons why, but it’s momentum is certainly important to me.
Part of that momentum is the fact that a few days ago it passed its code audit with flying colors. So is it legit? Yes. Or at least I think so, and as always I put my money where my mouth is.
But no matter how great something is, it doesn’t matter if no one knows about it. And lots of people are very quickly getting to know about HOGE.
And no, dear reader, I’m not just talking about people who are taking a break from watching Brazzers to read my articles!
Reason 3: Early-Adoption Discount
I’ve never had an opportunity to get in this early to something this potentially lifechanging before. Chances are that you probably haven’t either.
What’s cool is that because we’re so early to this party, we seriously don’t have to take any risks that are too wild and crazy. There’s no need to go out and mortgage your house. If you’re reading this soon after I post it, then even though this is growing quickly you can probably still get a million coins for somewhere between $500–$1000, which blows my mind considering what these coins might go for as they get increasingly scarce. A half-life of one month is pretty insane.
Even if you’re reading this late, I can’t imagine there ever being a bad time to get in unless it inflates to a massively unsustainable bubble. Keep in touch with me if you want to find out whether I think that’s happening at any given time in the future, just leave a comment or reach me at [email protected].
With a circulation that is always shrinking, and a user base that continually grows, I can only imagine the price moving in one direction for some time yet to come.
UPDATE: tomorrow it enters another exchange called BKEX. This sort of thing generally is followed by a price increase. So yeah, um… I bought a teensy bit more. ;)
If I am going to make any recommendations at all, just know that until it gets into exchanges that you can sign up for in your area (which it may have already, do your own research), I wouldn’t ante up with anything less than $200, because the Uniswap fees are no joke. You’ll want to make it worth your while if you do dip your toe into this pool.
Speaking of being worth your while, I hope that the research and entertainment I provide is something you wouldn’t want to live without. So unless you plan on leaving it to algorithmic chance to determine whether our paths will cross again, be sure to follow and subscribe to the newsletter!
P.S. This was the first article I wrote about Hoge and based on the massive interest from readers I realized that there’s more to this coin than meets the eye.
Since writing this piece, I’ve written many more about this fascinating project. Here are a few you may enjoy.
