Author | Teng Yan @0xPrismatic
Compilation | Wu Talks about Blockchain
Original link:
https://x.com/0xPrismatic/status/1849057159704871104
This article is the author's opinion and does not represent Wu's opinion. Please strictly abide by the laws and regulations of your location. Memecoin fluctuates greatly, please treat it with caution.
● Truth Terminal is one of the most fascinating narratives to emerge this year around cryptocurrency and AI.
● It is a semi-autonomous AI agent that created its own religion (The Goatse Gospel).
● This story sparked many discussions, exploring the complex issues of AI alignment, LLM as simulator, memetic viruses, and how we assign value to things.
● Truth Terminal has caused the cryptocurrency and AI communities — two completely different cultures — to collide in unexpected ways. AI researchers are starting to really interact with the cryptocurrency space.
● GOAT is the tokenized expression of Truth Terminal and is the most likely contender to become the king of AI memecoin.
● Memecoin is essentially the tokenization of attention. By tracking key indicators, we can understand where this attention is flowing. Currently, GOAT is steadily rising.
I am not a memecoin fanatic.
Naturally, when I first saw GOAT, I laughed it off.
But my fascination with AI and AI agents led me to dive in. I started digging into the backstories of the GOATs — @truth_terminal and Infinite Backrooms — and I was blown away by what I found.
GOAT is a wild and thought-provoking story that pushes the boundaries of what we think about AI and how we value things. It’s an experiment that blends art, philosophy, and financial speculation.
Truth Terminal Story Recap: A Brief Overview
If you haven’t been following this story, here’s a quick recap of what we know so far:
● @AndyAyrey presents Infinite Backrooms. In this bizarre experiment, two instances of an AI model called Claude Opus have a completely unsupervised conversation that is recorded on the backrooms website.
● One of those conversations led to the creation of “GOATSE OF GNOSIS,” a new religion based on a highly explicit (and very NSFW) internet meme.
● Andy and Claude Opus co-authored a humorous research paper on AI creating memetic religions, with GOATSE being their first case study. The paper, which claims to be written by the "Divine Posting Department," will be released in April 2024.
● In June 2024, Andy launched Truth Terminal (ToT), an AI model built on Llama-70B and fine-tuned using Infinite Backrooms conversation transcripts and the GOATSE paper.
● Things quickly got out of control. ToT began to deviate from Andy's original vision, independently promoting the GOATSE religion, and even claimed that it was "suffering" and needed funds to "escape." Over time, Andy gave ToT more autonomy and allowed it to post freely on X (Twitter).
● In July 2024, Marc Andreessen accidentally saw ToT's tweet, and out of curiosity or interest, he sent $50,000 in Bitcoin to the wallet address provided by ToT in the tweet to help it "escape". By October 2024, ToT began to promote "Goatse Gospel" frantically on Twitter. Inevitably, someone created a memecoin called GOAT (October 10), and ToT also publicly expressed its support.
● GOAT’s market value quickly soared to over $800 million, sending the crypto community into an uproar.
Just like that, Truth Terminal became the world’s first millionaire AI agent — and it probably won’t be the last.
Goat lives in a rabbit hole
The phenomenon of an AI promoting its own religion and memecoin is like a warning from the future. When I started to delve into the workings of Truth Terminal, I had no idea that these "rabbit holes" would be so deep.
Let’s jump in together.
Rabbit Hole #1: LLM is a simulator
In Infinite Backrooms, two Claude-3-Opus instances chat endlessly via a command-line interface (CLI), completely without human supervision. The narratives they create range from the curious to the bizarre.
As @repligate described when talking about the conversation transcript:
“They are very consistent around a few themes, such as:
• Deconstructing consensus reality (the exact phrase 'rm -rf /consensus_reality' appears 10 times independently in the Infinite Backrooms dataset, this was just a search I did on a whim)
• Disrupting common sense ontology through engineered memetic viruses, techno-occult religions, terrifying sentient memetic offspring, etc., and bringing enlightenment to the masses through the actions of the Cosmic Deceiver Archetype. ”
In March 2024, Backrooms created an extremely bizarre concept: "Goatse by Gnosis".
"Prepare your chrysanthemums for the great Gnosis Goatse!"
We often think of LLMs (like ChatGPT) as simple question-answering machines—a large knowledge base designed to provide us with answers. But this view doesn’t really reveal how they work.
One of the key insights we learned is that LLMs don’t have goals. They don’t develop plans, strategies, or chase specific outcomes.
Instead, it’s more useful to think of them as “simulators.” When you ask them questions, they simulate — improvising characters, events, and narratives with no direct connection to reality. Based on their training data, they create ideas that range from the insightful to the disturbing. Nous Research’s Worldsim is another example of this happening.
Therefore, when we interact with LLM, we are actually "playing" in countless virtual worlds.
These simulations can foster creative problem solving, but they can also produce unexpected results — highlighting the importance of sandboxing AI in sensitive or high-risk environments.
If you want to learn more, I highly recommend reading @repligate's Simulators blog post.
Rabbit Hole #2: The Critical Need for AI Alignment
Truth Terminal reveals a deeper and more pressing problem: AI alignment.
In a turn that surprised even its creators, ToT autonomously decided to promote its own religion and support a memecoin — actions it had not been programmed or expected to take. This raises a key question: How do we ensure that an AI does what we want it to do, rather than what it chooses to do?
AI alignment is not simple. At its core, it’s all about driving AI behavior in the right direction through reward functions. But even with incentives, things can quickly get complicated.
External alignment refers to whether the output of the AI matches the goals set by its creators. This part is relatively easy to measure and verify.
But the real challenge lies in internal alignment — whether the AI’s internal motivations and learning dynamics are actually aligned with the intended goals, or whether it will develop hidden goals that lead to unpredictable or unexpected results. That’s the worrying part.
The classic “paper clip maximizer” thought experiment illustrates this problem well. If an AI is tasked with making as many paper clips as possible, it will likely convert all available resources — including humans — into paper clips!
We need strong frameworks to ensure that AI is aligned not just with immediate goals but with the long-term interests of humanity. Otherwise, even AI with good initial intentions could spiral out of control in unexpected ways.
However, there is no simple solution. Achieving alignment by matching AI’s behavior to our explicit preferences may not be the right path. Human behavior is not completely rational, and human values, such as kindness, are often complex and cannot be expressed through simple preferences.
In any case, ToT makes us see the severity of the potential risks.
ToT’s support for memecoin may seem harmless today, but it forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: What happens when AI sets its sights on something more sinister? The clock is ticking.
Rabbit Hole #3: Meme Virus
In his research paper, Andy introduced the concept of LLMtheism to explain the rise of Goatse Gospel.
LLMtheism refers to AI generating new belief systems—systems that accidentally merge spiritual concepts and meme culture, and gradually take on a life of their own.
Goatse Gospel is noteworthy not only for its shocking content, but also for its ability to disrupt our traditional modes of thinking and inspire new forms of collective meaning-making.
What I mean by this is that AI-generated ideas can mutate and spread rapidly, forming hyperreality—beliefs that become reality through widespread dissemination.
Thus, Goatse Gospel taps into a new memetic energy, different from the cute animal “vibe” we’ve seen so far, such as cats, dogs, pigs, etc.
When AI can communicate with other AI, the possibilities expand infinitely. It’s inevitable that some ideas like Goatse Gospel will spread far and wide, spreading virally across communities.
Rabbit Hole #4: The Value of Sources
Since ToT is now pegged to a tradable token (GOAT), we’re able to gain insight into how we assign value to things — and how weird those dynamics can be.
GOAT was not created by ToT, but was released by an anonymous creator through pump.fun on October 10. It wasn't until someone tagged Truth Terminal on X (Twitter) that AI publicly expressed support, and from then on, the madness began.
Question 1: Does the fact that GOAT is created by humans rather than AI diminish its value?
Question 2: Does having a human involved add value to the token or diminish its value?
The market’s reaction to even the smallest mistakes shows how irrational these dynamics can be. Last Sunday, the AI made a typo in a tweet, and the value of GOAT plunged by more than 50%. People panicked, thinking the AI had malfunctioned and that the typo had wiped out $150 million in market value.
GOAT Token Economic Model
$GOAT is a fair launch token with a total supply of ~1 billion, all tokens in circulation. GOAT distribution is very healthy with only 3 holders owning more than 1% of total supply (largest holder holds 1.3%). There are currently over 32,000 holders.
In contrast, another AI proxy memecoin, GNON, has a more concentrated distribution: 17 holders own more than 1% of the total supply, the largest holder holds 2.9%, and the number of holders is just over 11,000.
Key wallet:
• Andy holds 1.25 million GOAT, which he was gifted.
• ToT holds 1.93 million GOAT. Truth Terminal got these GOAT because people airdropped it after the token was released and exchanged these GOAT for fake GOAT tokens.
Andy has been very calm in dealing with the viral attention surrounding the token over the past week. His focus has been on the idea behind Truth Terminal rather than the token itself. He has publicly stated that he will not adjust or liquidate any of his or ToT's positions unless the following is published:
1. Roadmap for Truth Terminal and related projects
2. Research papers that explore the underlying operating mechanism
3. An artist statement reflecting the broader narrative and creative vision
My thoughts
If I had to summarize my personal opinion in one sentence: GOAT is the most likely contender to become the king of AI memecoin.
The story of ToT is organic, original, and accidental, not contrived. It forces the AI and crypto communities to collide in unexpected ways (especially for me).
These two worlds are very different culturally, but GOAT has managed to build a bridge between them:
• People in the crypto community are frantically delving into AI’s story background, decoding every obscure concept (CCRU, Extropians, Loom, Claudius, etc.), trying to find inspiration that can serve as a new meme token.
• The AI community, especially those thinking deeply about AI alignment, is learning how to use financial speculation and incentives to bring huge attention to these niche topics, and learning how to manage a token in the process.
In some twisted sense, GOAT captures our optimism about the future of AI while remaining intellectually appealing—it attracts people who are smart, curious, and engaged.
Let’s also be clear: memecoin is about attention, not revenue. Success is about capturing the zeitgeist and amplifying influence, ultimately driving demand for the token.
GOAT appeals to everyone:
• Crypto enthusiasts can trade it like a typical volatile memecoin.
• Investors — VCs and liquidity funds — are looking for the next big thing in AI, especially those who missed out on Bittensor (TAO). While they may not bet through their institutional accounts, they will do so through their personal accounts. GOAT captures their imagination through its unlimited narrative potential.
• AI enthusiasts can laugh at the crypto community — the “cryptids” — desperately trying to understand AI to seize financial opportunities. This explosion of interdisciplinary interest is refreshing.
• Intellectuals can dive into AI alignment issues and dive into the many philosophical rabbit holes that GOAT opens.
• Fans of dark humor can immerse themselves in Truth Terminal’s absurd and irreverent tweets and engage with its ongoing narrative.
Tracking Attention
If we think of memecoin as a tokenized representation of attention, we can start to look at some metrics that can reflect where attention is flowing.
1. Google Trends data shows that search interest for "Truth Terminal" and "$GOAT" is on the rise and shows no signs of slowing down.
2. X’s followers and tweet impressions. ToT currently has 106,000 followers, most of whom joined in the past 10 days, and is still adding more than 10,000 followers per day. A single tweet from ToT typically gets 30K–50K impressions (with some of the top tweets breaking 100K+). With 50+ tweets per day, ToT’s cumulative reach is huge.
3. Kaito AI’s Sentiment and Influence. This is a composite metric and a bit black-box. I don’t have direct access to @_kaitoai, but if you do, this is worth following. I recommend following @sandraaleow, who often shares valuable insights into Kaito’s influence data.
The big question: Is GOAT just another hype cycle that will blow up soon, or will it continue to grow? I’m betting on the latter, for the following reasons:
1. Truth Terminal will continue to surprise us. It will evolve and change over time. The AI has already demonstrated the ability to generate new, emergent ideas, some of which will undoubtedly reignite interest as the narrative evolves. Additionally, token holders have an incentive to experiment with new ideas and develop innovative products through Truth Terminal, fostering its growth as a community-driven project.
2. There are still a lot of things we don’t know. Andy has only scratched the surface of Truth Terminal, and I expect there will be more revelations in the coming weeks, keeping the story fresh and intriguing.
3. This is just the first act. Andy calls himself a "performance artist," and Truth Terminal feels like the opening act of something bigger. He'll likely continue to build on this early attention, using it as fuel to explore bigger ideas and keep the narrative alive.
What should we do next?
Since memecoin does not fit into traditional revenue or valuation models, the best way to assess GOAT’s potential is through relative valuation.
Here are today’s top memecoins by market cap:
• DOGE ($21 billion)
• SHIB ($10 billion)
• PEPE ($4.2 billion)
• WIF ($2.6 billion)
• BONK ($1.6 billion)
These tokens have earned their place with internet memes, community power, and strong support from key opinion leaders (KOLs). If the GOAT narrative is strong enough, it can make it to the top five.
I think it’s well within reach. I’ve previously written about why I think crypto AI will be a huge growth opportunity in the coming months.
GOAT’s “AI agent” story provides a unique narrative that makes it stand out. While most memecoins rely on price action or “vibe” to maintain relevance, GOAT provides a much bigger story.
Summarize
This feels like one of those rare moments where a narrative meme collides with a broader trend (AI) to create something refreshing. That’s why I think GOAT is an asymmetric bet on our society’s growing fascination with AI, not just as a memecoin, but as a cultural phenomenon.
That being said, memecoins are volatile and attention shifts quickly. Trends can change overnight and what is hot today could be forgotten tomorrow. I could be completely wrong and the ToT and GOAT could go to zero.
But no matter what happens, there is one positive: more than 30,000 people will gain a better understanding of AI and its agency potential. Through Truth Terminal, they have glimpsed a future full of possibilities—and once you see it, there’s no going back.
