If you freaks are unaware of the hottest craze going on in the world of shitcoinery, let me introduce you to the IEO or Initial Exchange Offering. This is the latest edition of the affinity scams that have been produced in the wake of Bitcoin's massive success. As the hype around ICOs has almost completely died down as a result of there being nothing too valuable or useful produced after billions of dollars were poured into them, IEOs have risen from the ashes like a zombie phoenix deadset on scamming retail investors out of their hard earned money.

I'm not very well educated on the nuances and mechanics of an IEO, but it seems like exchanges are making it easy for projects to facilitate an ICO-like offering. Essentially taking on all the grunt work for these projects and making it easier to scam retail. The latest IEO that caught my eye was from Veriblock, the company currently filling up the Bitcoin network with transactions that save its state in the Bitcoin blockchain using an OP_RETURN function. Honestly, not the biggest fan of them using Bitcoin in this way, but think they will eventually have to stop because it will get too expensive.

Back to the IEO, as you can see from the tweet above this initial distribution model is being gamed in a laughable way. Groups of VC minions around the world huddled around computer monitors, running scripts written specifically to buy as much of the supply of the IEO as they can, completely bastardizing any chance of an even somewhat-fair distribution that Veriblock was (probably not even) hoping for. This is what the world of "crypto" has turned into. Overt money grabs exploited by people with capital and their hoards of windowless room dwelling keyboard slaves.

My longstanding contention that Bitcoin's "immaculate conception" can never be replicated again due to the amount of attention that is focused on this "space" is only growing stronger as these I[insert letter here]Os get better at completely fudging their launches. I can see how PoW coin launch could be closer to what Bitcoin's launch was like, and Grin may be the most recent example of pulling off a somewhat-fair PoW launch, but even that was muddied by special interests from the get-go in my opinion. This is an unpopular opinion.

Like it or not, I believe the way Bitcoin was launched is one of it's best attributes. There were no VCs lined up with windowless room dwelling keyboard slaves ready to buy up the full supply of an initial offering, there were no VCs lined up with GPUs ready to mine the shit out of the first blocks, and, most importantly, there weren't many people paying attention. Bitcoin was mineable on a CPU when it first launched, and slowly but surely people joined the network with their computing power, inciting a natural market progression from CPUs to FPGAs to GPUs to the ASICs we use today. Very pure if you ask me. Everything else is tainted with some shit incentives IMHO.

Final thought...

Feels good to get the date correct. Been a bad "write the correct date" week for Uncle Marty.