On Aug. 20, 2025, journalist and Bitcoin advocate Max Keiser, who once jokingly suggested the U.S. government should sell states to buy Bitcoin, referred to the memecoins and meme stocks culture by saying, “The ‘Casino Gulag’ takes over, as predicted 15 years ago.” This was by far not the first instance when he used this term. What does ‘Casino Gulag’ mean, and who are the prisoners of this gulag?
Summary
- Bitcoin advocate Max Keiser often uses the term “Casino Gulag” to describe the condition where the law is getting more restrictive while the citizens fall into financial nihilism.
- The Gen Z and millennials tend to invest in high-risk assets like memecoins as they don’t see alternative ways to get rich like the Baby Boomers.
- Max Keiser and many other Bitcoin proponents see Bitcoin as the real salvation from the financial struggles of the young generations.
What is the Casino Gulag?
Max Keiser is binge-using the “Casino Gulag” term, sometimes adding that it’s coming as he was predicting some years ago. It seems that Keiser came up with the term in the early 2010s.
While there is no clear definition behind “Casino Gulag,” from Kesier’s X posts, we can get a solid understanding of this concept. In one of his tweets, Keiser claimed:
“America’s gulag economy is a stealthy concoction built by insurance companies that have access to free money to build what are essentially concentration camps with WiFi.”
In another tweet, he outlines:
“The Casino Gulag:
- Negative interest rates
Leaves you stuck online gambling in hopes of winning enough for a protein pill and to keep electric going another 6 hours.”
Usually, Keiser brings up the Casino Gulag concept when reacting to the news from the U.S. and other First World countries, when a decline in the quality of life of the youth or new restrictive initiatives take place.
In Keiser’s posts, Casino Gulag refers to:
- Government stripping citizens of their freedoms, like leaving the house during the COVID-19 quarantine or privacy violations.
- Millennials and Gen Z cannot afford housing, travelling, paying bills, etc.
- Youngsters doing sports bets or trading memecoins (crypto tokens with no use case apart from speculative trading) and meme stocks instead of building wealth from scratch through business or labor.
- People are getting distracted from real problems by virtual reality or idle hopes of getting rich through various types of gambling.
In one of the X posts, Keiser, who himself is a Baby Boomer, claims that it’s boomers who left millennials and zoomers with nothing but gambling in the Casino Gulag. Baby Boomers are indeed the wealthiest generation in the U.S., controlling over 50% of households in the country as of 2024.
In another post, Keiser is setting “Casino Gulag” against “Bitcoin beach,” emphasizing that, unlike many popular ways to get rich fast, Bitcoin is a real opportunity for the youth. In the very same post, Keiser indicates his disfavor of gold while giving his full preference to Bitcoin.
For Keiser, Bitcoin beach may also be a metaphor of El Salvador, as he is President Nayib Bukele’s advisor and speaks up in favor of El Salvador’s Bitcoin-centered policy. Like Bukele, Kesier ignores the recent International Monetary Fund review that revealed that the country stopped buying bitcoins by March of 2025 as the deal between El Salvador and the IMF required it.
Struggles of Gen Z
Nominally, wages grew by 78% between 2006 and 2025, but if we factor in inflation, we’ll see that the growth rate is below 12%. The average tuition fee doubled between 2004 and 2022. The housing prices grew by 88% between 2016 and 2025. Student debt loans, staggering inflation, high interest rates, and unaffordable housing make Gen Z and millennials lag in comparison to boomers.
Financial struggles of the American youth are one of the reasons why people in their 20s are seen as potential drivers of Bitcoin adoption. Most zoomers don’t have retirement accounts, but some of them see Bitcoin as a substitute. In his article for Motley Fool, Dominic Basulto outlines that zoomers tend to invest in riskier assets than preceding generations. While by risk assets, Basulto meant cryptocurrencies per se, betting on highly volatile investments reinforces Keiser’s claims about Casino Gulag. More than that, according to the research conducted by the Bank of America Institute, Gen Z is spending more money on entertainment than on savings.
The same study suggests that by 2035, Generation Z is going to become the richest one as it will gradually own the assets of boomers as they die.
House always wins
As zoomers are still far from being the richest living generation, some of them look for quick fortunes, as old-school wealth playbooks don’t work well for them. Many zoomers reject the advice to save money as they don’t see how it will help them get rich. Financial nihilism is born where the system is failing the people. At the same time, some brag about their riches made via lottery-like investments–and crypto fits in this image perfectly, especially highly speculative and volatile crypto like memecoins.
One of the biggest crypto novelties in the memecoin craze of 2024-2025 was the Solana-based launchpad Pump.fun, where users with no knowledge of coding can launch their memecoins. The platform went live in January 2024. Since that moment, its users created some 11.9 million tokens–mostly worthless ones. The core audience of the platform is youth. 59% of Pump.fun visitors are between 18 and 34. The audience aged 35-44 makes up another 20%, meaning that gambling is mostly a Gen Z and millennial thing.
As of January 2025, less than half of a percent of all Pump.fun addresses earned $10,000 or more via memecoins launched on the platform. The June 2025 findings show that 60% of users lose money via investing in memecoins. Every second, a wallet is lost at least $500, while several wallets’ losses amount to over a million dollars.
As for the Casino Gulag, it’s fair to repeat the old maxim: the house always wins. In July, Pump.fun conducted an immensely successful ICO, or “one last exit pump,” as Alon, one of the Pump.fun creators, called it. It took only 12 minutes to sell all the Pump tokens. The company raised $500 million despite the negative press coverage that preceded the ICO launch. The community was begging for airdrops, but the Pump.fun team preferred not to donate tokens to activists.
Memecoins launched on Pump.fun are only a vivid example of high-risk investments made by the youth. Other examples include betting on such memecoins as Official Trump and Melania, which were launched not long before Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025. The Melania token lost most of its value on day one and never recovered. The NFT collections are attracting the youth. As of 2024, 53% of NFT owners were below 35. NFT purchases emptied investors’ pockets immensely. According to some estimates, the combined losses in the sector amount to $25 trillion. In 2018, it was ICOs that dried out investors’ pockets, with 56.8% to 98% of projects turning out to be scams.
Outside the crypto space, financial nihilism of Gen Z is expressed in sports bets and irresponsible gambling-manner options trading.
Conclusion
Like Max Keiser, who distinguishes between Bitcoin and all the rest of the crypto, some young people stick with accumulating Bitcoin, whose price appreciates over time. While these people are not gambling with other crypto tokens, they are targeted by Bitcoin treasury companies that use bullish Bitcoin narratives to entice the crypto community members to buy their stocks. As the performance of these companies is going down, it’s time to ask yourself in a Kesier’s manner if the Bitcoin beach is really better than the Casino Gulag.
The American dollar is deteriorating year over year, while Bitcoin is keeping its value in the long run, and that’s the reason why many people, including a Baby Boomer, Max Keiser, and a Gen Z Bitcoin influencer Professor B, are seeing Bitcoin as the way out for the generations for whom the American dream became nearly unattainable.
