Crypto Wars Ch. 1: The Wild West of Joke Coins and ICO Madness
From Crypto Wars: Faked Deaths, Missing Billions and Industry Disruption by Erica Stanford (ISBN 9781398600683). This is a chapter retelling, not a substitute for the book.
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Chapter 1 of Erica Stanford’s Crypto Wars is basically a tour of the most unhinged fundraising period in modern finance. Bitcoin had gone from fractions of a cent to over a thousand dollars by early 2017. People saw early holders getting returns that looked impossible anywhere else. So thousands of others decided the real move wasn’t buying crypto. It was minting their own.
Copy-paste money
From 2016 onward, launching a token was stupidly easy. Open-source blockchain code meant you could copy Bitcoin or Ethereum, tweak a few lines, outsource the rest on Fiverr, and call yourself a founder. Some projects didn’t even bother with tweaks. They copied whitepapers word for word and swapped the company name.
Unlike Bitcoin, which was built carefully over years, most new tokens had no use case. No innovation. No reason to exist except hype. But that was enough. The ICO (initial coin offering) bubble turned “create token, sell token” into a money printer.
Stanford’s numbers are brutal. By early 2018, the crypto market hit over $800 billion. Then it crashed and wiped out around $600 billion. Less than two years after the ICO craze took off, 81% of projects were scams, 92% lost most or all investor money, and only 1.9% were actually successful.
The miracle tech that fixed nothing
Blockchain is genuinely useful in some places. But in 2017 it got sold as the answer to everything. Banks would collapse. Dating, dentistry, religion, real estate, porn, all of it would run on chain. One-man-band startups claimed they’d replace Amazon and Google just because they said “blockchain” on a landing page.
ICOs fed on that story. Founders promised to reinvent entire industries without building anything first. Investors threw billions at projects that mostly never delivered. The money was largely gone for good.
Joke coins that still cashed out
Here’s the part that still blows my mind. Some projects were honest about being scams and people invested anyway.
PonziCoin raised $250,000. ScamCoin promised “0% return from 100% of your investments, guaranteed” and still got buyers. Then there’s Useless Ethereum Token (UET), which Stanford calls possibly the first fully honest Ethereum ICO. The developer said plainly he’d take your money and buy electronics, probably a big TV. “Seriously, don’t buy these tokens,” the site warned. People sent $40,000 anyway.
An Asian ICO put Ryan Gosling’s photo on its team page as an “experienced graphic designer.” It raised $830,000 from 380 investors. Another project messaged Stanford on LinkedIn offering $2,500 in tokens to be their legal expert. When she said she knew nothing about law, they didn’t care. They just wanted another profile photo on the website.
Tea, sex coins, and prayer on the blockchain
The absurdity scaled fast. Six men in China ran roadshows selling Pu’er tea tokens, claiming billions in tea reserves. They raised $47 million from 3,000 investors. They owned almost none of it. All six were arrested.
Benebit built a real-looking community with a marketing budget, then vanished with about $4 million. Its “team” photos came from a British boys’ school website.
Then the niche projects piled in. SexCoin. SpankChain (founder: Spanktoshi Nakabooty). TittieCoin, offering a luxury island timeshare. Prayer Token, backed by prayer sent to God on the blockchain. Sand Coin for buying sand. Trash Coin to consolidate the garbage in your wallet. Long Blockchain Corp was literally a iced tea company that renamed itself and saw its stock jump 289% overnight.
Roughly 99% of ICOs had no real need for a token. They still pulled in tens of billions because FOMO was louder than common sense.
How the sausage got made
Launching an ICO could cost a few hundred bucks. Fiverr gigs got you a website, logo, whitepaper, and fake testimonials for $5 or $10 a pop. Some founders paid people to paint the token name on their bodies.
“Bounty hunters” became a real job title overnight. Thousands of people did social media, translations, and video work for newly minted tokens instead of cash. Only 8% of ICOs ever made it onto an exchange. That meant 92% of token holders had zero path to cash out.
Marketing was just as wild. Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled got fined for promoting Centra Tech without disclosure. Celebrity endorsements, fake teams, and exchanges charging millions just to list tokens. Everyone took a cut.
Dead coins and bitcoin doublers
By 2017, deadcoins.com was tracking thousands of projects that raised money and flatlined. Reasons ranged from founders running away to copying other projects to blowing funds on more scammy ICO services.
And then there were bitcoin doublers. Send your BTC, get double back in 24 hours. Scammers slapped the word “legit” on the ads. People sent coins. Almost nobody got anything back. Stanford notes those sites still show up in search results today.
My take
Chapter 1 isn’t really about crypto technology. It’s about what happens when you remove every gatekeeper and add get-rich-quick energy. Open-source code plus unregulated fundraising plus social proof equals a market where honesty and fraud can look oddly similar.
The Brave browser ICO proves good projects existed. But in the ICO era, scams weren’t the exception. They were the business model.
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