I am a long-time troll, classically trained. A Usenet troll. An alt.flame award-winning Usenet troll of some renown. Not a fucking griefer, which is what people think trolling means nowadays. Usenet was mostly intelligent readers and writers. All text. Trolling used to be an art form.
Anyway, I've also been into cryptocurrency since 2014. Not enough to retire, of course. I like to say I believed in Bitcoin, but I didn't believe in people. That's sort of still true today.
All prologue.
About a year or so ago, I found a few devs who were willing to work on an ERC-20 token for me. Creating one is quick and easy, of course. But we were going to work on the greatest crypto troll of all time.
CommCoin. CommunityCoin. CommunistCoin.
Oh, we weren't going to call it that. CommCoin, short for CommunityCoin, would suffice. The subtext would be there in the white paper and promotional materials, peppered with phrases like "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need."
It was going to be, hear me out, a literal labor token with a progressive income tax.
Raoul needs his lawn mowed. Mary (don't assume her gender!) needs her "lawn mowed". CommCoin would be the (money free! anti-capitalist!) unit of exchange. With a big disclaimer that this coin was not to be used on exchanges, or sold for money. Just a big ass air-drop (and ICO, in which we collected money).
Nothing legally binding, of course, so eventually, we would try and get it on exchanges. One part of the joke would be to make money via 'Communism' by tailoring it to what a certain class of people wanted to hear.
The progressive income tax would be a sliding scale based on the amount you were spending, progressively graduated. The taxed amount would return to a pool to be redistributed to those in need.
Along the way, during brainstorming, we kinda said, "Holy shit. This could kinda actually sort of work. Voluntary taxation."
So what happened?
Well, it's a long ass way to go for a joke. Since I would pretty much have to do all the writing, websites (all anonymously). white paper, branding, etc., I just...didn't. The final nail in the coffin was the FTC's focus on regulating ICOs. Fuck all that noise.
But as a concept and troll go, it was aces. I do want to thank the people who were involved. Good times, even if it was largely in our heads. You might see the idea seriously proposed and implemented in the future, though. Stranger things have happened.