I think I may have told this story before in some other context, but, here it is again for crypto. When I was first out of college, I went to work selling wireless phones out of a kiosk in a mall for a Sprint. At the time , Sprint was fairly new to the wireless phone business and because of this had a lot of young people working for them, which at times left for some fun stories.
The incident that I am talking about today has some relevance to what is going on in the crypto world, but, I also thought at the time it was just hilarious. An IT guy at corporate was leaving the company and had access to send a companywide email. He sent out a very innocuous message to the entire company saying, “I have enjoyed my time here at Sprint, but, today will be my last day. Good luck.”
Now, what nobody knew was that he was able to make the email system turn every reply to this into a reply all. So, when we all got to work that morning, there was already twenty or thirty emails clogging the system. Each saying either something like “Good Luck” or “I think you sent to this to the wrong person, I don't know you.”
As the day went on, it got worse and worse with messages clogging up everyone's email. Then, managers and executives started chiming in. Each replying to say stop replying to the email. Each causing more and more chaos as people replied trying to explain why they replied. Each time, the emails went to the whole company.
Finally, a top senior executive replied all. He seemed very angry and once again told everyone to stop replying. As you can guess, this had the same results, people replying all to tell him why they didn’t know they were replying all.
Not sure why IT couldn’t stop it, but, it only died out once everyone that was going to reply did, or people lost interest. For the next week, you would see one trickle in by someone that had been on vacation, but, even that eventually went away.
I think this story has relevance in the crypto world as we have seen jumps in prices based on nothing more than one post that gains traction, even for the wrong reasons. Think of Musk talking about Doge. Even if people were "dogging" him for hyping a joke coin, it still had millions of people talking and thinking about it, driving the price up. Just like my example of people trying to stop a rogue email, people warning against sh#tcoins, were having the opposite affect. Hopefully, we are passed the price of crypto being driven by anything other than solid concepts. Not even Musk should have the power to do this.
