As the coronavirus continues cropping up around the world, now moving into South Korea, Iran an Italy, governments of the world are on alert. Indeed, scientists worry that we are reaching a global tipping point.
This is all great news for CoronaCoin (NCOV), an ERC20 token that burns every forty-eight hours based on the number of newly infected people + deaths.
Though called corona coin, the website name is corona token. But that website is admittedly well designed. The image used for the token are attractive and meme ready, and the idea is novel. That’s about all I have to say in terms of praise for the coin.
It’s a 4chan /biz/ meme token. Though they claim they will help ‘donate to the Red Cross’ for the relief efforts, that’s likely horseshit, and as of now is just a ‘promise’. The dev of the coin could just say that they tried to donate but were rejected and thus absolve themselves of any promises.
The token was airdropped to users that had ETH in their wallet at 100 per wallet. There are currently 7,604,871,717 tokens, over 693 addresses. The largest WHALE has about 15 million NCOV, a nice amount should the token ever accrue in value and actually be bought/sold on a major exchange. Most wallets just hold the 100 token amount from airdrops. It does not seem there is any real traction for this token, aside from the few hundred holders.
The most dubious part of this token is the moral question of setting a deflationary token based on the number of people infected/killed by a deadly disease. The Corona Virus outbreak has seen a replay of the obviously racist ideas against the Chinese, a standard trope being that they are carriers of disease. It did not take long for much of the world to regurgitate this. (No, the disease didn’t start with batsoup).
Does CNOV token add to this hysteria? Not directly, but it plays on the images of ‘corona chan’, an Asian female avatar of death. I’m not one who things any representation of an anime character automatically means the meme wielders are orientalist bigots, but we’re talking about /biz/ here, so, the cesspool is real.
The real moral question that this token poses is: is it right to profit off death?
Well, I’m of the opinion that all capitalist profit is derived from the exploitation of the working class by seizing surplus value generated by the labor process, so the question itself is a bit moot. The world already does profit off stolen labor. Wall Street is entirely dependent on the wealth of weapons contractors. London would fall apart overnight if the world’s laundered money stopped flowing through it.
My point is, whatever moral qualms can be said about NCOV can be said about our economic system as a whole. If you have a problem with NCOV basing its deflation on the infection rates of the corona virus, then you should have a serious problem with, for example, any attempt at introducing budget items that help the poor in the United States immediately are stopped under the grounds of ‘budget deficits’ but there has never been any question when it comes to increasing the military budget. The military budget for 2019 was $693 billion. Where was the outcry for ‘reducing the debt’? Where was the outcry for profiting of death?
NCOV is just upfront with what it claims to do.
Will it be profitable for you? DYOR and make your bet. All I can say is that there is a non-zero chance the virus will continue spreading. And some people are up 500% off their initial.
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