Its been almost three years since Zack Brown raised $55,000 on Kickstarter for a potato salad. His goal was $10. He wanted to raise the money in order to pay for making the midwestern cookout staple for the first time.

I made that Kickstarter project to get a laugh out of seven people, so the money and attention were a shock, Brown wrote the Observer in an email. The original intent of the joke was more like, This is funny because its not what Kickstarter is for.' But it didnt take long for him to see that hed created a satire of the site on the site itself.

My first two thoughts were This is ridiculous and How can I get in on this?

But when Brown raised far more money than he ever thought he would, the Columbus, Ohio, resident opted to actually do something with the cash and make a cookbook devoted to the staple of Midwestern picnics,The Peace, Love and Potato Salad Cookbook.It came out two years after the campaign ended, which isnt bad considering the fact that he didnt launch the campaign to make a book and hed never made a potato salad before.

The Useless Ethereum Token logo. Thats a cityscape (no its not). Twitter

Today, theres a new, even more ephemeral way to raise money: by creating a new cryptocurrency. Called an initial coin offering or ICO, entrepreneurs have been creating new digital currencies (like Bitcoin) in order to support various projects. Fortunately, just as it starts to crack mainstream attention, ICOs have gotten their own answer to the potato salad campaign. Its called the Useless Ethereum Token(UET), and its creator will absolutely sell you cryptocurrency good for absolutely nothing.

It went on sale yesterday and runs through July 11.

The UET ICOtransparentlyoffers investors no value, so there will be no expectation of gains, its creator, who only goes by UET CEO, writes on its website. Rememberthis is acompletely honestICO, which means I dont want anyone to mistakenlyexpectthe value of the tokens to go up, either. Theyre called Useless Ethereum Tokens for a reason.

We can think of one other cryptocurrency that came out and promised buyers nothing but the digital asset itself: bitcoin. In the end, every new currency of any kind is a satire on the very strange idea of money.

We wrote about a decentralized company, The DAO, which was working well until a security flaw made it collapse horribly. We wrote about the first Bitcoin felons ICO-poweredsecond act after prison, which fizzled (according to a profile in Fortune, hes glad). Recently, we covered the Basic Attention Token designed by a major web pioneer to change the economy for eyeballs online. It sold out almost instantly. Soon, messaging unicornKik is going to have a crowdsale to foster a new venture capital-independent ecosystem of developers.

Its such a buzzy world thatThe New York Times ran a deep dive recently begging the question: how many millions will get raised in this space for the Securities and Exchange Commission starts putting up red flags? UET CEO sees it much the same way.

I saw that people were investing in ICO after ICO, with each having its own slew of problems (both technical and in principle) and still making absurd amounts of money, UET CEO wrote the Observer in an email. My first two thoughts were This is ridiculous and How can I get in on this? I didnt have a product but I realized that people didnt really care about the product. They cared about spending a little bit of money, watching a chart and then withdrawing a little bit more money. So why not have an ICO without a product, and do so completely transparently just to see what happened?

The satire is actually built into the smart contract as well. Buyers get 1 UET for every 0.1 Ether (ETH) invested, plus a bonus. Every UET bought comes with free UET equal to the number of ETH invested. So, as of this writing, someone who paid 0.1 ETH right now would get 1 UET from the base formula plus 52 bonus UET, because people have put in 52 ETH so far.

Plus, the system will also randomly give away some bonus tokens along the way.

This, along with the bonus blocks were completely intentional, both to mirror some of the goofy crap other ICOs have tried to do in the name of fairness or whatever, and to further highlight that these tokens arent meant to be attached to any real value, UET CEO wrote. What good is an ICO if it just gives away tokens right?

Tokens get released right away. Prices dont swing with ETHs value.

Most crypto watchers online like the gag. We liked this exchange on an Ethereum investor subreddit.

This guy gets it. Reddit

The only way to buy in is with Ethereum, which also provides most of the underlying code. So far, UET has acquired 52 ETH, worth an equivalent of nearly $14,000. Over $1,000 worth has gone in since we have been working on this post. The site continuously updates with investments, but it can all also be verified on Etherscan, a third party site that makes the blockchain records a bit more comprehensible.

So whats UET CEO trying to say with this project? Well leave that for readers to decide, but remember that the best jokes tend to be made by folks who care about a subject enough to understand it well.Will the anonymous entrepreneur imitate Brown and do something substantive at the end of the crowdsale? Or would it be more in the spirit of the project if he just took all the money and blew it on an epic night at Applebees?

See the article here:

Cryptocurrency Has Its Potato Salad Moment With the Useless Ethereum Token - Observer