An Iced Tea Company’s Stock Soared After Putting ‘Blockchain’ In Its Name

Every now and then a story crops up which really hammers home that the entire economic and financial system on which we have hinged the fate of humanity and the planet is basically a bunch of a made-up bullshit which will instantly collapse the moment we all stop participating in the illusion. This is very much one of those stories.

Here it is: The Long Island Iced Tea Corp, a little-known company which makes non-alcoholic lemonades and ice teas decided to change its name to Long Blockchain Corp, which caused company shares to skyrocket in pre-market trading by up to 500%. It settled at about 275% after the market opened, but at one point the previously $23 million company was worth $138 million. All of it based on a simple name change. Of – and I stress this – a company which makes iced tea.

For those still out of the loop, a blockchain is a distributed digital ledger that can record transactions between multiple parties without the need for a central authority, and is therefore the basis of cryptocurrency. ‘

We all know that cryptocurrency is the hot thing right now, with every man and his dog pumping money into various coins on the assumption that they will keep accruing value at an accelerating rate forever and make everyone squillionaires – which will absolutely not happen, by the way. But that is more than a little absurd.

For what it’s worth, Long Blockchain (god that’s a stupid name) actually intend to continue selling iced tea and lemonade through a subsidiary, though they say they’re now focused on developing and investing in globally scalable blockchain technology solutions”. Right.

It’s worth noting that the Securities and Exchange Commission over in the U.S. has been doing their bit to clamp down on companies fraudulently trying to surf the cryptocurrency wave without having anything concrete to show for it. Just a few days ago, they suspended trading in a company called The Crypto Company citing “concerns regarding the accuracy and adequacy of information”.

You can argue ’til the cows come home about whether or not Bitcoin is a bubble – yeah, it probably is – but you absolutely cannot argue that we’re in the midst of a huge bubble of flimsy crypto companies trying to capture the zeitgeist, and moronic investors pouring all their money into them. It has a whiff of the dotcom boom (and crash) of the late 90s, when trigger-happy investors shoved all their capital into any company who claimed to be doing something with this whole World Wide Web dealio. That spectacularly exploded, and this likely will too.

Well, Long Blockchain have a shiny new website now. So there’s that. We wish them well with their diverse portfolio of sweetened beverages and pretend computer money.

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