(Image: Private Media)

Hello. I have an exclusive investment opportunity for you in a new, exciting technology product with an incredible upside that’s getting a lot of buzz. 

But first, it’s been a while since the last CryptoCam and things move fast in the world of web 3.0, so let me quickly catch you up: the value of major cryptocurrencies have sunk like a rock due in part to Kazakhstan — the world’s No. 2 country in crypto mining — shutting off its internet. And Russia looks set to ban cryptocurrencies.

Crypto.com is buying up naming rights to some of the world’s most valuable properties (like Los Angeles’ Lakers stadium) and also with the AFL. The same company also got hacked. A project to buy a Fijian island and an original copy of the US constitution based on groups built on the blockchain both failed.

A committee given the job of recommending reforms to Australia’s laws to allow cryptocurrencies came back with a report that will be shelved until after the federal election. The return of a cartoon ape stored on the blockchain and an outage of a major web 3.0 platform proved that the so-called promise of “decentralisation” is a myth at the moment. 

If your eyes glazed over in the last paragraph don’t worry. It doesn’t make much sense to me either. 

But back to our investment opportunity.

So far, I’ve only mentioned Bitcoin and Ethereum. These remain the big two cyptocurrencies in terms of how much money is sloshing around in them and how other services are building off their networks. (Refresher: as well as being a kind of money, these cryptocurrencies are also infrastructure that other people can use to do other things.) 

However, there are a gazillion other cryptocurrencies out there: Cardano, Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, the list goes on forever! These are called altcoins or, in the case of cryptocurrencies that people don’t think much of, shitcoins. 

Each coin has different rules — the amount of currency circulating, whether more can be issued, how many fractions the tokens can be split into — that affect how it works. At their most basic, they all function in the same way: you can create something that only one person can have at once (in the same way that you can’t transfer an Australian dollar to me without losing one yourself) and it can be transferred from person to person. This is the beauty of cryptocurrency, advocates say. You can program something that can keep track of an item without having to trust any one person to keep score. 

The reality is there’s an endless number of essentially identical cryptocurrencies that don’t do anything but fluctuate based on whether people who’ve already bought into them can convince others to buy into them too. It’s day trading, except instead of shares of a business you’re buying something that isn’t backed by anything in the real world and is extremely volatile. Speculation is rife as well as shady coordinated pump-and-dump schemes that rip off people hoping to make a few dollars trading. Honestly, it’s a mess.

But it got me thinking: if anyone can have a cryptocurrency, why shouldn’t I? Imagine if I could get people to invest in me, allowing them to cash in on me when I’m at my nadir (now) and ride me to the moon (TBC). Enter: Cammycoin.

After a Google search and combing through a few Reddit threads, I found out that there were two ways I could go about it. There was the manual, getting down and dirty with the blockchain version where I could fork (copy and make minor alterations) another cryptocurrency’s code to make my own on the Ethereum network, for example. This hands-on approach is what legendary Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto would have wanted, I reckon. 

Then there’s the easy way — which is the one I took. I used an exchange called Wave which allowed me to generate one for the cost of a single Wave token (you heard of it? Me neither) which ended up costing me about 18 real Australian dollars. All I had to do was verify my real identity, again, and answer a few basic questions. Other than selecting a few variables like how many tokens I wanted to make in circulation, I have no idea what went into the backend of making it and frankly I don’t really care either. 

Now, to be clear: like most other tokens, Cammycoin has no purpose. It can’t do anything. In fact, because it’s based on a rather obscure token’s network and is only in one exchange, most people who already have a cryptocurrency wallet couldn’t even buy it without some effort. If the company I used to make it decided to shut up shop, I’m pretty sure I’d be out of $18 and whatever Cammycoin is worth (precisely nothing). 

That’s the squeeze. For all their promises, cryptocurrencies and web 3.0 technologies are complicated and unwieldy like many other types of technology before them. That’s why other companies have found opportunities to come in over the top and make them user-friendly. But when that happens, these technologies lose the very thing that is supposed to distinguish them from current tech. Without that, all we’re left with is crazy financialisation and unrestrained capitalism that looks and feels a lot like a pyramid scheme. 

In conclusion: get in at the ground floor for Cammycoin. I hear it’s got nowhere to go but up.