The brother of deceased Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar has created his own cryptocurrency. It’s called Dietbitcoin (DXX), and it’s perhaps even more bizarre than you would imagine.
Roberto Escobar, who served more than 11 years in a maximum security prison for his role as an accountant for the Medellin cartel, is launching the coin through Escobar Inc., a private investment company.
Though technical specifications claim it will use the SHA-256 Proof-of-work (PoW) mining algorithm, DXX coins will also be distributed through an initial coin offering (ICO) that offers pre-ICO contributors a 99.8 percent discount off the main sale.
In an interview with The Blast, Escobar assured prospective investors that “the value will be very high soon,” adding that they should “buy as many dietbitcoin’s as you can afford (sic).”
By the way, if Dietbitcoin’s website looks familiar, that’s because the bulk of its source code originally appeared at Bitcoin.org (though the original site does not feature a link that says “BUY!!”).
That Time Roberto Escobar Met Satoshi Nakamoto
Escobar has also published a 280-page eBook — Pablo Escobar’s Dietbitcoin: the True Story of Roberto Escobar — that purports to outline his vision for Dietbitcoin.
Though it devotes the vast majority of its space to chronicling the life of his brother, Pablo, the single chapter devoted to the cryptocurrency contains some real gems.
Most notably, Escobar claims to have met pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, who he says wanted to partner with the Escobar family to create a new cryptocurrency. Escobar even included a photocopy of Satoshi’s passport as proof of the meeting.
However, Escobar later discovered that Satoshi was actually an agent of the US government, after which he realized that Bitcoin was a CIA plot.
He writes:
“I am the first person in the world…to publicly come out and claim that Bitcoin was created by the American Government, and I am not going to be the last person to say this. The world is going to wake up. The world is going to see that this was created by them. And when they see it, it is too late, and when the CIA founds out that the world knows about this, the CIA is going to sell all of their coins, and they will destroy the value of Bitcoin.”
“I can tell you with one-hundred percent certainty, one-thousand percent certainty, one-hundred-million percent certainty that the American Government is going to ruin it all because they are behind the Bitcoin,” Escobar says, adding that this is why he chose to create Dietbitcoin.
Indeed, Dietbitcoin — though sharing virtually all of Bitcoin’s technical specifications — is the first cryptocurrency that is not a scam.
“Because my coin is not a scam. You are free to buy the coin or not buy the coin. I don’t care. You can stick with your worthless coins. Keep the Ethereum, Keep the TRON, keep the Ripple, keep the Bitcoin. You will see what happens. They will all go to zero, almost zero,” he concludes. “But not my coin. Because my coin, this is going to be my new work in life.”
Featured image from Wikimedia.
AUTHOR
Josiah Wilmoth
Josiah is a former ancient and medieval literature teacher. He has been writing about cryptocurrency since 2014, and his work has been cited in Business Insider, NPR, and Yahoo! Finance. He lives in rural North Carolina with his wife and son.