Lawmaker's Joke About Mongoose Crypto Coin Ends How You Think

At a congressional hearing on cryptocurrency this week, one skeptical lawmaker made a joke about a fictional mongoose coin. The result? It's no longer fictional. As Mashable reports, the weirdness began Wednesday during a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee. Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman, aiming to make a point about how crazy the crypto market can be, declared that "bitcoin could be displaced by ether, which could be displaced by doge, which could be displaced by hamster coin and then there's cobra coin." All of those coins are real, and Sherman took it a step further, wondering what a "mongoose coin" might do. (Insider notes that in the real world, mongooses feast on cobras.)

Almost immediately, crypto traders created a mongoose coin, along with related ones such as mong coin and goose coin. Bloomberg notes that this kind of thing isn't unusual in the crypto world, with "meme traders" often attempting to cash in on the joke. After all, doge coin famously began as a joke but made a lot of people very rich. In the wake of all this, Sherman thinks all of the above proves his point about the market. "How can you pay a fortune for a bitcoin if you can’t be certain that in 20 years from now that it’s going to be more valuable than a hamster coin," he asks Bloomberg. "And how can you pay anything for a hamster coin, if a joke made by a bald congressman from LA at a hearing is gonna rip your hamster coin with its mongoose teeth." (More cryptocurrency stories.)