Chapter 9The ICO Era
If you asked almost anyone in cryptocurrency whom they would want to meet if they could meet just one person, I think a lot of them would say Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. But not me. I want to meet the CEO of the Useless Ethereum Token.
The Useless Ethereum Token was a gag for cash. The person running it was active on Reddit and Twitter and other such places in 2017, the last time people went crazy for crypto. We did an email interview in those days, but he never told me his name. He only went by UET CEO.
The website is still up. It's worth a look. The logo says it all.
ICOs (or “initial coin offerings”) were the second big new way to raise money that the internet created for us. The first big new way was crowdfunding via sites such as Kickstarter, IndieGogo, and GoFundMe. Crowdfunding reflected an optimistic era in the tech industry.
By 2017, the mood had become darker. By then, we all knew Silicon Valley oligarchs had turned us into lotus eaters scrolling mobiles in the gardens beneath the walls surrounding Bezos's and Zuckerberg's cuddle puddles of cash.
The UET CEO, whoever he was, was already jaded and saw a lot of ICOs grabbing money without much actual business. So he offered to sell a token that he promised would be worth absolutely nothing to anyone. He also committed to spending the money completely frivolously and to do no good for the world with it. The disarmingly honest caper earned him 310 ETH in 2017, about $42,000.
That would ...
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