Just a few blocks off the bright lines of the crypto elite’s digital estates, there’s a pile of discarded meme coins drifting in the dark corners of the internet. No single person made them all. The pile is a collective endeavor, added to day by day by the numerous unwitting traders of the great speculative highway. Out where the data farms hum and the old message boards decay, there isn’t a single trace of permanence, only the faint echo of the last trade and the ghost of another liquidity pool drying up. By the billionaire’s gleaming metaverse mansion, where his tokens yield silently and the bots keep watch, this little pile of digital debris sits in the wilderness of forgotten blockchains. It’s all there because this particular stretch of the web is “one click away” from the launchpad. Dozens of traders wake each morning, scroll their feeds, mint a meme coin, buy, post, and by the time they’ve burned through that brief burst of euphoria, they’ve tossed their token aside at 65 transactions per second. Each one lands in the same invisible ditch, blazing briefly before fading into the dirt of the internet. If you wander through that stretch of digital ground, you might notice a few details that others overlook. There isn’t just one pile. There are two. The first one is closer to the exchanges, filled with coins named after dogs and frogs and politicians. You can tell these were minted fast, bought by those who wanted a hit before breakfast. Further along, you find another heap, full of stranger coins, the ones named after inside jokes, half-forgotten events, or obscure anime. These tokens were held a little longer, perhaps by the slower crowd, the late-night traders with cheap beer beside the keyboard, the ones who wanted to believe in the next great story before bed. Though I’m not the sort to police the internet for financial litter, I find myself picking through the wreckage sometimes, doing a bit of digital archaeology. I doubt the billionaires ever touch these coins themselves, or if they do, I doubt they ever hold them for long. Their portfolios, like their supercars, are cleaned regularly by quiet, unseen hands. Their meme exposure is likely a talking point, not a conviction. For all I know, their “decentralized estates” are nothing more than tax shelters and speculative art galleries for algorithms. Mulling over the ins and outs of their lives, I wander through another Discord, another launchpad. The moderators are friendly in their own way, their screens glowing in the blue light of the bull market’s memory. They speak of liquidity like preachers, and every few minutes another token appears out of nowhere, hoping for a brief moment of light before joining the pile by the side of the digital road. And there I sit, watching the flood, trying to understand the rhythm of it. Because there’s something quietly human in all this noise, something honest about the repetition, the rise and fall of attention, the way each tiny burst of belief flickers, fades, and leaves behind a trace. Somewhere in that pile, I think, there’s still a story worth holding.