Toilet Paper Token: The Reality Behind the Joke
“There’s a grain of truth in every joke! What could be the ironic reality of this one?”
CoinMarketCap decided that they would pull a prank on the community on April 1st by putting a new project named “Toilet Paper Token” to the top of the project list. Even though it was obvious that the project was not real, I was still surprised at first glance. I admit that I was nearly fooled for a moment, but afterwards, I also wondered why it had taken me by surprise.
There is a saying, “There’s a grain of truth in every joke”. Regarding Covid-19, we know that when the pandemic broke out, people started stocking up on toilet paper in large amounts. Several videos on YouTube showed how people got into fights with each other just to get their hands on some toilet paper. Obviously, CoinMarketCap was inspired by this grotesque state of excess demand due to a shortage of toilet paper, and they thought to take advantage of the memes and videos circulating on the internet to play a practical joke.
Several ERC20-based projects were launched in 2017 with goals that were pretty much on the same level as the “Toilet Paper Token”. After reading hundreds of meaningless White Papers, it is possible to get the feeling a blockchain could be created for anything; from selling hamburgers to offering dog grooming services. Many people thought that all of this would contribute to newer and newer business opportunities from developments proposed in the promises new blockchains had made. However, in reality, these were the projects that actually made a true fool out of many believers in the blockchain’s potential.
The objective of the projects was not to develop blockchain technology but to make enticing promises in order to sell their tokens. Unfortunately, in the short run, they succeeded. However, it appears much more difficult today for speculative tokens to sell projects with all sorts of made-up values, but it is also clear that there is still a lot of misconceptions in connection with the blockchain. You do not need to dig deep to see how many different approaches there are when it comes to the interpretation of decentralized data storage. Hundreds of off-chain based projects talk about how transparently they can store their users’ data.
I have recently been reading articles on the world-leading media sites stating that off-chain based data storage is more decentralized than its on-chain counterpart since, when it comes to off-chain storage, you do not have to see each other’s data because the data is not in the block. In other words, according to them, off-chain is more decentralized because you do not need to synchronize the entire network. No joke! I seriously come across these types of opinions.
Going back to the beginning of my writing, I am not surprised that I believed for a second that the “Toilet Paper Token” was a real thing. Frankly, I had a good laugh about it afterwards. But sadly, in this author’s opinion, the joke had a much deeper root than buying up toilet paper due to Covid-19. Unfortunately, people have lost a tremendous amount of money over the past years because of “Toilet Paper Tokens”. All of these tokens have contributed to making a joke and disbelief out of the greatest innovation of the 21st century: the blockchain.
At the ILCoin Development Team, we believe that the true value of projects is not determined by the enticing promises they make but the practical achievements they deliver. For years, we have been working on solutions that can make blockchain-based data storage faster, more secure, and more efficient. So far, the results of this approach are the RIFT Protocol and the Command Chain Protocol; technologies that have earned the recognition and certification of Palo Alto Networks.
