The other night I came across The Useless Ethereum Token, or UET for short. This seemed like a funny name for a coin so I took a look.
The first thing I read was this;
Let's be honest—everyone's tired of ICOs. They get hyped up for weeks, and then they launch and clog up the Ethereum network for days, Coinbase goes down for a while, and then “investors” see the new tokens lose most of their “value”. This ICO is going to be different.
Hmm, so far so good, I was intrigued so I read on . .
The UET ICO transparently offers investors no value, so there will be no expectation of gains. No gains means few investors, few investors means few transactions, and few transactions means no Ethereum network lag—not to mention no depressing posts on /r/ethtrader about people losing all their savings!
Aha! I thought; this man has got my attention, he is offering absolutely no value whatsoever, and telling us about it in advance.
I like your style sir . . I read on . .
I learned all about Ethereum smart contracts and Solidity over a weekend so I could launch this ICO. Most of the smart contract contract code is copied from GitHub and Stack Overflow posts, so it should be pretty much right… right?
You had me at; I copied the code from Github.
Also, I definitely didn't have any smart contract experts look at the contract before I launched it. I mean, why bother? All the other ICOs go through weeks of auditing and they still end up with bugs and vulnerabilities in their contracts.
Good point, well made.
Unlike with every other token sale on the market, I can guarantee here and now that the value of UET will not (in fact, can not) reduce during or after the ICO. Since these tokens aren't worth anything to start with, there's nowhere to go but up!
But remember—this is a completely honest ICO, which means I don't want anyone to mistakenly expect the value of the tokens to go up, either. They're called Useless Ethereum Tokens for a reason.
Well there you have it, a rather funny joke you might say; and you'd be right.
Except for one thing, that isn't the punchline hasn't come yet. The funniest thing about the Useless Ethereum Token is that it raised 310.444 Eth, the equivalent of /$69505 at the time of offering.
That's right people, a whole bunch of people spent 310.444 Eth on a token the developer warned them would be worth nothing.
Welcome to the future, welcome to a disturbing, and frightening new world.
What can I do with UET?
UET is a standard ERC20 token, so you can hold it and transfer it.Other than that… nothing. Absolutely nothing.
(Seriously, don't buy this. Why are you even still reading these?)
Let The Madness Begin
So now the insanity has truly begun, we know the Emperor's naked and we don't care.
We will not only trade tokens that carry promises that at best, could be described as complete bullshit. Now we will happily buy tokens that are telling us they're worthless.
Perhaps in the hope of . . ? Maybe the people who are left holding the UET wondering why they can't sell it, are hoping for a random strike of irony. Whereby it somehow becomes worth something, because it's funny.
I mean why would any . . erm, well, it turns out that it is trading . . it wen't as high as 0.02 BTC (/$58) and then crashed to a few hundred Satoshi (/$0.003).
It was pumped and dumped by the Dev, just like he promised . .
Will UET be traded on any exchanges?
I hope so. You have no idea how much I hope so.In fact, if it does get picked up by any of the major exchanges, I promise to use some of the ICO proceeds to constantly and incessantly manipulate the market.
How do I get a refund for the tokens I bought?
You're kidding, right?
What Now?
So where do we go from here? Well clearly we go headlong into oblivion, there is no what now. If you feel suitably insane, you can hunt down UET and trade it for around 1300 Satoshis.
If you do, you are crossing the boundary, into the twilight of madness, where you will buy any old shitcoin just for the laugh of it.
Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of the ICO, perhaps, just as the modern internet rose from the smouldering ashes of the dotcom boom. So too will the phoenix of cryptocurrency ascend from the burnt pyre of Initial Coin Offerings.