The Design of ShitCoin 💩

The post discusses the design of ShitCoin, the first completely honest cryptocurrency. ShitCoin is, of course, inspired by DogeCoin. Think of this as the ShitCoin white paper. Perhaps to be followed by other white papers if some fool decides to invest.

Distributed Ledger: Forget about it

Most cryptocurrencies claim to be distributed with no centralized control. However, to trade cryptocurrencies you have to trade through a centralized service like Coinbase.

ShitCoin doesn’t make empty claims about being distributed. ShitCoin uses a centralized database controlled by ShitCoin. The database is hosted on Amazon Web Services and is designed to scale as the ShitCoin userbase grows.

Centralization of the database means that ShitCoin doesn’t burn electricity with proof-of-work validation or require staking money for proof-of-stake validation.

Crypto NOT

The only crypto part of ShitCoin is the empty claim that it’s a cryptocurrency. There are no cryptographic hashes. No crypto anything except for the SSH connection and salted hashed passwords. ShitCoin uses a centralized database so we dispense with all that crypto stuff.

ShitCoin is not the future of money!

In keeping with the core design principle of honesty: ShitCoin cannot be used to buy anything. ShitCoin is not a store of value or anything else. ShitCoin has no value. It is not used for the transaction of taxes, goods, or services, like the US dollar (USD). There is nothing backing ShitCoin but a notation in a database.

We Provide the Exchange

You can buy and sell ShitCoin on the ShitCoin exchange. In keeping with the fad for stablecoins, the initial price of ShitCoin is one US dollar. The only way that ShitCoin will rise in value is if you can find someone to buy your ShitCoin at a higher price. There is no rational reason for anyone to do this or for you to assume that such a buyer for your ShitCoin exists.

We need to pay for our ShitCoin infrastructure so we charge a transaction fee for all ShitCoin transactions. You can cash in your ShitCoin at any time. If you sell your ShitCoin to a greater fool your ShitCoin account will be credited with the money, minus our transaction fee.

You can only buy ShitCoin via a credit card and we keep a record of transactions, so you can forget about the pseudo-privacy of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Although your transactions are private since we don’t publish them in a blockchain so no one will know that you’re buying something called ShitCoin. Which could be embarrassing.

ShitCoin is fun — for us

There are interesting and fun computer science and software issues involving building an order book and transaction infrastructure for ShitCoin. The security issues are also interesting. We want to do our best to avoid being hacked. But this is, of course, ShitCoin, so all we can guarantee is our best effort.

Credit Cards and Banks

We need to process credit card transactions and store the funds in a bank account. Finding a bank willing to handle the account for ShitCoin transactions may be difficult. Or maybe impossible. We don’t know.

This is one of the biggest hurdles to building the ShitCoin infrastructure. Well, this and the open question of whether crypto believers are actually willing to buy and sell ShitCoin. I mean really, why would anyone do that. Oh, wait, Bitcoin…

Venture Capital

We need funds to build the infrastructure of ShitCoin. So we welcome venture capital funding, as long as we control ShitCoin. We don’t want anyone to get in the way of our founding principle of complete honesty. The venture capital funders can get some amount of ShitCoin issued for their investment. They would presumably do this because they hope for a greater fool to buy their ShitCoin. It worked with NFTs, so why not?

Won’t the VS be insulted by being called fools for investing? Maybe, but they’ve been called worse. And there are a lot of stupid VCs.

Contact us in the comments if you want to invest.

Is this just bitter satire…

Well, yeah. But so was Dogecoin. And look at what happened with that.

I’m an experienced computer scientist and software engineer, so I can build this. Just send money.