Thread by @arbedout

Behold: a 20-bagger tweetstorm that will alienate most of the people that follow me.

I present to you a short story on 'The Glenmutchkin Railway', written in 1845, as a warning to future participants in The Great ICO Mania. (Maybe). 1/20

"These were the first glorious days of general speculation...." The start of the railroad bubble makes the dotcom mania look tame. 2/20

"Now's the time for a bold stroke. The public are quite ready to subscribe to anything." 3/20

"Why not write yourself down as the Laird of M'Corkindale? [...] I dare say you would not be negatived by a counter-claim."

Translation: give yourself whatever title you please, no one's checking. 4/20

"It will be sonorous in the ears of the Saxon!" Know your audience and play to their expectations. 5/20

"But the engineer - we must hire such an officer as a matter of course."
"I never thought of that [...] couldn't we hire a fellow from one of the steamboats?"

You don't need actual techies. Just a Potemkin-like veneer of technical aptitude is enough. 6/20

Want to lure the noobs in? Obviously you'll need a whitepaper... 7/20

"You and I must restrict ourselves to a couple of thousand shares apiece. That's a third of the whole - but it won't do to be greedy."

Playin' the market cap game, respect. 8/20

"Heaven bless you, my dear countrymen!" On overhearing noobs in coffee shops excitedly plotting to snatch up scamcoins - er, shares - based on the whitepaper - er, prospectus. 9/20

Our protagonists decide to announce their offering is oversubscribed: "That will be a slap in the face of the dilatory gentleman, and send up the shares like a wildfire."

Pre-sale's all locked up, maybe you can try your luck on Binance when it lists? 10/20

"Nothing effects so great a metamorphosis on the bearing of the outer man as a sudden change of fortune."

(Sure is fun watching the transition in near real-time on social media tho)

11/20

Yikes, apparently the 1845 equivalent of mortgaging your house to dump into Bitconnect loans was tentatively floating the idea of marrying your daughter off in exchange for shares. 12/20

Side note - legit lesson from the railway bubble (and I'll add my experience in the doctcom bubble as well): never pass up the opportunity for a free meal.

None of my vested shares ended up being worth anything, but at least my employers bought us the occasional dinner. 13/20

"Three weeks had elapsed, and still [...] shares were at a premium, though rather lower than when we sold. Our engineer, Watty Solder, returned from his first survey of the line..."

First sell shares to speculators, _then_ perform basic tech diligence. What could go wrong? 14/20

Wherein our protagonists conspire to dump the price, having already sold, so that they can buy up all the shares, drive the price up and squeeze the shorts. Sound familiar? 15/20

One big difference - in 1845 there weren't any rando anonymous fly-by-night exchanges or limit order books to dump on - you had to squeeze your shorts in person. Harsh. 16/20

Now that our protagonists have convinced noobs to trade coins for useless tokens, and dumped said coins for profits, all that's left to do is fake running the "business venture" until we they convincingly exit scam without being charged with a crime. 17/20

The story ends as soon as somebody bothers to perform the first bit of peer review on their engineer's work, and finds no less than 73 fatal flaws.

"Why this was not done earlier, I never exactly understood..." 18/20

Moral of this story: There is nothing new under the sun. Almost all of the participants in the mania, given the choice between capitalizing on existing railroads or imagining themselves to be railroad barons building railways to nowhere, enthusiastically chose the latter. 19/20

The only ones who made a profit locked up shares early and pumped their memes as hard as they could, until it became crushingly obvious that the bullshit in their whitepaper would never work in the real world.

Thankfully, we're all much more civilized than that these days. 20/20