Slap Coin?

Yeah, I've got to mention this sooner or later, as the whole world seems to be preoccupied by this trivial event. If you haven't heard (where have you been?), Will Smith slapped Chris Rock in the face on live television during this year's Oscars.

I haven't seen it live, but the internet is awash with posts, videos and rants about "The Slap." I'm not going to follow those, rest assured. You can all make up your own mind about what happened there, but just to service all three of you who've missed this whole unfortunate shebang, I've linked a short video below this paragraph for you to watch. This short post is about how not only Will Smith and the Academy Awards lost face with this incident, but cryptocurrencies as well.

Within 24 hours after "The Slap," a new meme token was already released. No, at least two projects were launched to capture the regrettable event on blockchain. The Will Smith Inu token as well as an NFT collection on OpenSea saw the light of day, capturing in time an event that should preferably be forgotten as soon as possible. I'm sure the actor who's become infamous in a split-second wishes it never happened, as he's already apologized to Chris Rock, and the Oscars has launched a formal review of the incident.

You'd think no one would attach any value to this regrettable, but ultimately insignificant event, let alone to some meme token created in its wake. But you'd be wrong, unfortunately. Within hours after its launch the Will Smith Inu token exploded; the Slap Token Rallied 10,000% . Unbelievable. A few lucky souls will have made some money, especially the ones who created the token. On to the NFT farce:

The Will Smith slap has also been turned into an NFT collection on the OpenSea marketplace. So far, OpenSea user “Will Smith Slap DAO” has sold 730 tokens for between $7 and $300 each.

The entrepreneurial NFT artist, who self-identifies as a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization), produced 2,000 Will Smith Slap NFTs – one-of-a-kind collectible NFTs, or “non-fungible slaps.”

"The entrepreneurial NFT artist..."? Artist??!? Please don't make me laugh... Once again mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies has suffered a serious blow-back on account of some greedy scammers who don't care about anything but their own bottom line. Bitcoin was launched in 2009 as an open source project to change the world. It was a dream come true, for it painted the possibility of a future without the blatant scammery coming from the authoritative institutions that control our money. It seems we have forgotten that initial promise, lost sight of that initial goal. It's as if we've now created an equal playing-field in which everybody, not just governments and banks, is allowed to indulge in egregious scams.

Linked below is a reminder. It's a 2017 TED talk by Andreas Antonopoulos, a name well known by any cryptocurrency OG. Please listen to what he had to say. I also remember another speech by him, one that I can not find right now, in which he predicted that with smart contracts it would become possible even for children to create their own tokens in an afternoon; he said that this would certainly happen and that it's just a wild-west period that we would have to suffer through while the technology matures. I hope he's right, and that this is just a temporary thing we'll all grow out of.

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