The strange story of marmots and crypto

Ten years ago on twitter, I kept getting messages from a guy called Preston Byrne about marmots. Marmots are basically the biggest squirrel in the world. Americans also call them woodchucks, although a woodchuck is a specific type of marmot, meaning all woodchucks are marmots, but not all marmots are woodchucks.

They are most populous in North America, Europe and Asia.

Preston was constantly posting pictures of marmots related to cryptocurrencies.

Yes, marmots.

Why?

Because back in the early days of blockchain mania, when every conference had someone explaining how putting something “on the blockchain” would revolutionise everything from bananas to banking, Preston developed the marmot metaphor to be an antidote to all the things advocates were saying and then invented the Marmotcoin.

Marmotcoin wasn’t really a cryptocurrency. That was the point.

Preston had noticed something important about the blockchain industry. The moment intelligent people heard the words blockchain, token or decentralised, they often stopped asking the obvious questions.

What problem are we solving? Why does this need a blockchain? Why does this need a token? Why would anyone buy it? And, perhaps most importantly, why wouldn’t a perfectly ordinary database do the job?