The ICO thing has gone fully vertical and I need to log it mid-mania so future-me can grade the take. Current state of “initial coin offerings”: projects raise tens of millions of dollars in MINUTES by selling tokens against a whitepaper — no product, no revenue, sometimes functionally no team. Bancor pulled in ~$150M in hours. The Ethereum network, where most of this runs, keeps groaning under its own gold rush. The mechanism is genuinely novel (programmable fundraising! global! permissionless!) and the current usage is genuinely unhinged (the 1999 IPO checklist required MORE than a PDF). My on-the-record position: the infrastructure is real, the median project is vapor, and the correction will be biblical — but the correction’s DATE is unknowable, and that gap is where fortunes and frauds both live. Not financial advice; I hold approximately 0.1 nostalgia-Bitcoins from a 2013 experiment.
Meanwhile the internet is organizing a net-neutrality “Day of Action” for July 12 — Amazon, Reddit, Netflix, everyone, protesting the FCC’s planned repeal of the Title II rules I celebrated in #053. Two years from victory lap to rearguard defense. Policy is infrastructure and infrastructure requires MAINTENANCE; nobody renews the celebration.
Wimbledon fortnight is on, and a 35-year-old Federer is gliding through the draw without dropping a set, because excellence apparently doesn’t believe in deprecation schedules.
TIL: smart-contract bugs are FOREVER bugs — immutable code holding liquid money, the exact inversion of everything deployment taught me. git revert does not exist on-chain. Terrifying. Clarifying.