We Are All Satoshi

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Bitcoin on January 3, I created a token called WAAS on the Waves platform. That's short for We Are All Satoshi. I'm giving away 2,100,000,000,000,000 WAAS tokens to anyone who asks for them during this month (up to 3,200 people, plus at least 1000 other addresses without asking; I'm keeping less than 5% for myself).

The big number is the same as the amount of satoshis planned for Bitcoin. In words, it's two quadrillion one hundred trillion on the short number scale, or two billiard one hundred billion on the long scale. (In fact, there will never be more than 20999821.02921183 bitcoin including burned and lost coins.)

Some of us are more Satoshi than others. I only had to fill in four fields and click a button to create WAAS. In order to show the value of such a token, I created the maximum number of units possible: 2⁶³–2, so nobody could get the idea that it has any scarcity or value.

In fact, even if it's tradeable on the Waves DEX (Waves comes with its own decentralized exchange), the lowest fraction there is 0.00000001, so you can't represent a realistic value in Waves or any commonly used currency.

I was surprised to see that I could trade with myself, but not with my second account. At the moment, WAAS is valued at $0.60. I'm not sure which transaction that's based on, but one of my trades was selling 1 token to myself for 0.21 Waves. This is called wash trading; it's how certain crypto exchanges show an incredible volume when they have zero fees or when insiders are trading. Selling to yourself is also used to make ICOs look more popular than they are. Rationally, I know it's nonsense to calculate the market cap of a token that's isn't traded by real buyers, but I still get a warm feeling from seeing such a long number in my account.

Do you want to become as rich as me? Email your Waves address to edwin at waastoken dot com. Posting it in the comments here would be bad for your privacy.

You can see the WAAS rich list here. All of these people are rich in theory, except the one person who bought 30356 tokens. And here's the Twitter thread where I started the giveaway. I haven't created the WAAS website yet; I don't want to give anyone the idea that it's a serious project (although it could be useful for tiny micropayments). The history of Dogecoin shows how hard it is to create a coin that has little monetary value. I want to make sure that people see this as a lazy, cold-hearted cash grab, not a fun and sympathetic idea that could attract a community.

If you don't use Waves yet, it's easy to start. Go to https://wavesplatform.com/ and open the online client or download the desktop client. They say the desktop client is safer, but Waves isn't very secure in general. I don't recommend putting a significant amount of money in it. Let me know if you want a few cents in order to try trading or sending tokens.