Once upon a time there was a guy named Bob ....https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9855219Intermezzo:Her name was not BitSwift at the start. It was Timeshare Coin.
Gentle reader, when you have stopped laughing, I will continue.
Thank you.
We could not pull an ICO out of thin air. We had to have a coin. And that coin had to have a dev, and be crypto-certified and not launched yet. Once we found that coin - we could just rebrand it into anything we wanted for our ICO.
The Salamander found Timeshare Coin. It was a slam dunk. Ready to launch, a perfect coin for our ICO, but the name had to go. In fact, the whole timeshare concept had to go – it was too sleazy.
We started brainstorming a stronger concept. Paradise Coin (Condo Ownership). Real Estate Coin (Industrial property). We argued for a couple hours over what was a better investment, vacation property or commercial real estate. Half the conversation was about how much Bob hated condos. We decided that shit was too complicated. We had a great name from before - XWire. We could slap that onto the coin. But we didn’t know what XWire was. We just knew it was a cool name for a coin. Bob said arrright I gotta walk my dogs, you guys figure out what the coin’s gonna be. People started coming with ideas. XWire would let you transmit Bitcoin faster than the block chain. How? Well …. it would use dedicated satellite transmission. Satellites? Hmmm. Wait a minute. What about putting btc wallets in satellites? In case of like – typhoons and nuclear war and shit. Yea, that was a good idea. How much did renting hard disk space on a satellite cost anyhow? But what about EMP, wouldn’t satellites be vulnerable? (15 minute discussion of EMP. Some pretty good movies it had happened in.) Ok. So no prob. We’ll do backups at those, like, remote places on here on earth, you know what I’m talking about? where they are saving the two each of all the worlds’ seeds? That 10, 000 foot deep cave in Svalbard. Or Switzerland. Wait a minute. Wasn’t Richard Branson doing something like this already? Fuck it. Ok. Back to the start. XWire would let you get your money the fastest way possible from point A to point B. Money, or Bitcoin? Both. In fact, any coin. Yes, any coin. You know, Xwire should really have Bit in the name. Bit-this and Bit-that were no-brainers for a good coin name. BitWire. Nice. Wait a minute. Money moving, money transfer. What’s that thing called, y’know, when you send money overseas? The international bank wire system? Yea. SWIFT.
Fuck BitWire.
BitSwift was her name.Part 4. Little BitSwift and the Glory of PaulFor a hustler, or a grifter, or a down-on-his-luck dev, for foot soldiers in a pump group, for the leaders of a pump group, an ICO is a brilliant play.
The same cannot be said for an exchange owner. The same profits are there, but the risk is exponentially higher. After all, you are getting in bed with – let’s see. Hustlers. Grifters. Pumpers. Future ronin. And down-on-their-luck Devs.
One must wonder. What was Lin thinking?
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This is how a fake ICO works:
The foot soldiers commit to buying a certain amount the coin during the ICO. The leaders get 100% of the BTC generated from the ICO back, and refund the foot soldiers what they bought, without taking back the coins involved. This means the soldiers can sell these coins later at any price above 1 satoshi – and it is all pure profit, since they got their original BTC back already.
Of course fig leafs are needed for such a play. Large chunks of ICO are set aside for “marketing” and “development”. Conveniently, it is the ICO leaders who control these addresses.
One would think this sort of thing would eventually boomerang back on the leaders. And usually it does. But only for awhile. Because after the fud subsides, the only people left in the coin are those who are “investors” and “believers”. And for very different reasons, these stakeholders have no interest in seeing truth emerge.
Investors don’t want to demand truth and accountability. That would tank the price forever and they would never be able to realize any gain, or even get out alive.
The believers are a species unto themselves. They develop a cult like devotion to the coin and its supposed technology, blocking out all reasonable outside voices. They cultivate a devotion to the leader of the coin – usually the dev – and join with him in his messianic complex, which is defined roughly like this: CoinX is going to change the world, and the world doesn’t want that to happen. Paid forces are out to get the leader, and we must circle around him.
If it all gets too much, the leaders of the coin just remove it from the public eye. They retreat to a private forum or bb, where only the voices of the leader and followers can be heard.
That is how a fake ICO works. This is how little BitSwift came into this world.
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Electronic pulses are a beautiful thing. Those flickers of pixels on the screen that convey a tight, definite chunk of information, an amount, a number. They exist for just a few seconds, then suddenly are gone forever.
We were all watching those numbers weren’t we, my former brothers-in-arms? The night the BitSwift spoils were divided amongst us? Each of us in our individual darkened rooms the world over.... The numbers came up on the screen, one by one. The chat silent, so silent. We knew each other only by nicks. And in that silence, every thirty seconds, another one of our nicks was spoken.
Seconds after each name was spoken, a large quantity of Swift would flicker on to the screen, safely high in the order book, then immediately disappear. Another nick would be spoken. Another pool of silence. Another large sell appearing, then immediately cancelled. We were proving our buy-in, that we had in fact bought what we said we bought during the ICO. Each of us in turn demonstrating allegiance, presenting blood - and few minutes later each of our wallets flickered with that lovely unconfimed transaction symbol - our foot-soldier's share of the BTC.
This was how little Bitswift was born. In the days after the sold-out ICO we fell to work. There was a roadmap to write, whitepapers to be written, tweeting to be done. Everyone had a role to play. Our intention was to make Swift a real coin.
This was not entirely altruistic. We all held large amounts of Swift. The stronger the coin, the larger our reward. And almost to our surprise - little BitSwift was a scrappy little kid. She grew fast, like a puppy not spared the milk. And lucky for her, she had Paul.
Paul was a savant. There is no getting around that. It fell to Paul to define what Bitswift was because that was Paul’s forte – white papers, technology, and networks. And though none of us understood it at the time, this was a perfect match. BitSwift had no identity. It was a blank canvas, an uncarved chunk of marble. Paul could make anything he wanted of it.
These are renaissance metaphors, gentle reader, because only renaissance metaphors will suffice to convey what happened next. Michelangelo was given the Sistine Chapel. Paul was given little BitSwift. And just as the frescos soared across the vaulted ceilings of the Sistine, Paul’s savant, Hieronymic vision of all the block chain could ever be began to pour into BitSwift. BitSwift would be the glory of Paul.
To Be Continued
