That time cryptocurrency proved people will buy anything | Crypto

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In his regular column, veteran journalist A. Craig Copetas asks whether Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin are the modern day equivalents of sneezing powder and whoopee pillow.

Samuel Soren Adams felt it was time to quit at a New Jersey pool hall. So he put his pool cue aside and took a job selling coal tar soap in 1905.

“Dad noticed that distilled coal tar has an enormously high sneezing potential,” says his son Bud thirty years before the iPhone “Neeze app” came onto the market. “So just for fun, dad squirted the powder through keyholes in hotel rooms and cafes.”

The elder Adams bottled and marketed his carcinogenic brew under the name Cachoo. Within three months of its launch, a Philadelphia retailer had purchased 70,000 bottles. This triumph was followed by the Snake Jam Jar, which when opened released a meter-long imitation snake. Then came the Dribble Glass and then of course the Whoopee Cushion. Exploding matches created another big boom.

Bud Adams said his family’s jump from gag to riches proved that the public will buy anything, regardless of how seedy, ridiculous, or dangerous the gimmick is. And all these years later, it’s hard to dismiss the marketing wisdom of a joke mogul whose records suggest he sold 10,000 Super Joy handshake buzzers annually in Kuwait and made locals come back.

The Adams family gadgets pioneered all sorts of silly things currently available on a smartphone, such as Ajit Khubani’s massaging slippers ($ 27.99); Witty Yetis’ Dehydrated Water ($ 13.30) and Arnie McPhees Yodeling Pickle ($ 12.99). A can of “slightly radioactive” uranium ore on Amazon is $ 39.95 and a $ 5 per month fee allows anyone to play Wall Street tycoon on the Robinhood Gold stock trading app.

“The trick,” said Bud Adams precisely, “is to develop a product that captures the public’s desires and can bring that dream, however brief, to life.”

Since everyone wants to be a millionaire, how about a Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin worth $ 32,000. Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum will be added to your digital wallet for $ 3,073 per ether. Too steep for your pocket? Dogecoin is a deal for 17 cents a doge, especially as software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer say they own the Gimcrack – which today has a market capitalization of more than $ 32.65 billion.

Although the Wizard of Oz advises “paying no attention to the man behind the curtain,” Nassim Nicholas Taleb still says that the cryptocurrency buffoons extol a “gimmick” and a “Ponzi scheme”. Taleb should know. The economist’s 2007 bestseller The Black Swan described highly unlikely events and their potential to cause serious cascading effects.

In fact, acclaimed multibillionaire Warren Buffet described Bitcoin as “likely rat poison square,” a crap cryptocurrency as an unproductive asset. “All you count on is whether the next person will pay you more because they look forward to the next person even more,” was the judgment of the Oracle of Omaha.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argues that cryptocurrencies play almost no role in normal economic activity. “Almost the only time we hear of their use as a means of payment as opposed to speculative trading is in connection with illegal activities.”

Microsoft Corp.’s digital godfather and founder, Bill Gates, adds, “Bitcoin uses more electricity per transaction than any other method known to man.”

It’s probably no surprise that all of the baby boomer grumbling about cryptocurrency reflects the establishment’s initial reaction to Adam’s sneeze concentrate. “Cachoo has split the country like nothing since the Civil War,” read a New Jersey newspaper. “City fathers issue ordinances, school principals give sermons, editorial writers rail against Cachoo. But a laughing population demands more. The eagle screams as this beautiful land echoes ‘under the thunder of the broadsides of the nose’.

But whatever cryptocurrency you’re betting on, I’d bet that Adam’s product catalog would have branded the Digital Dough stuff and featured the product alongside Suckers Soap, Squirting Flowers, and Mystic Smoke From Fingertips, a goo that puffed between your thumb and forefinger when you rubbed it .

Bud Adams described his business as a “hand jive”. In 2001 he died a millionaire.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own views and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.

source https://www.bisayanews.com/2021/10/04/that-time-cryptocurrency-proved-people-will-buy-anything-crypto/