Hawk Tuah wasn’t the first to have a crypto-scam. Virtually all new crypto-projects are just a way to fleece starry-eyed ideologues from their money. Promising not just endless wealth, but anywhere from the end of the Federal Reserve to TFD (Total Fed Death.)
Christmas Eve, 2018 Eso drops this landmark announcement. Freedom New or FNET will be coming by Christmas of next year. “What is FNET” you ask? “Can you explain it in English do I don’t have to listen to Eso?” Sure, even though this was before Eso decided to speak in The Mars Volta lyrics.
FNET will be a mesh networking alternative internet with a peer-to-peer backbone based on cryptocurrency. You’ll get a “Pineapple” wifi router which will connect to other pineapples and create a network where you can access the new internet. This will not only be free from censorship because the state is not controlling it, but because everything you do on it will be on a blockchain it will mine a new cryptocurrency. And it will be open source!
On the face, there are a ton of problems with this idea.
1. Mesh networks are a really neat idea, but they can’t create a new global internet. They won’t even create a good continental internet outside of maybe Europe. If you’re connecting wifi routers that means you need a series of routers connecting major population hubs. North America is sparsely populated
Everywhere there’s black are areas you can get this service. Anywhere there’s black separating it from other light parts is where you’re not getting it. And we’re talking about wifi ranges. So you may still be in the light area but not get a signal. Think about how some homes need wifi repeaters because the wifi doesn’t reach from one end of the home to the other. New York City has mesh networking projects but it only works because New York is so densely populated you can pull it off. That is not true for a city like Los Angeles, which while populated, might not get as much wifi crossover. It certainly won’t work in the suburban areas of metroplexes. But lets say you magically solve this problem by having super pineapples that get a 300-mile rage or something, I can’t connect to anyone in Europe. This also assumes wide adoption. That enough people will know about it and buy one of these pineapples to participate. This alone should be the death of the project, but wait! There’s more!
2. Crypto is SLOW and BULKY! Not only is it slow, it’s slower at scale. The bigger it gets the slower it gets. Even with other layers like The Lightning Network, every piece of data you’re sending across needs to be on the blockchain. When you go to DrugFoxSearch.bit to look up where you can read Eso’s new word salad book, it needs to send out a request for the data and that needs to be confirmed by miners, then it can be sent to you and put on the blockchain. Then you have a blockchain that has a record of not just people transacting currency, but all browsing history and content. Who’s gonna mirror THE WHOLE INTERNET for people on the network to use?
3. It’s a massive security hole. Sure, crypto is using some pretty solid cryptography but it doesn’t solve you from a few vulnerabilities like social engineering and rubber-hose attacks. And because your entire web history is on this, you set a pretty high bounty for your cryptographic keys. Not even your browser history tells me everything you said you people on websites.
4. It’s by Eso who’s unable to wash himself, speak coherently, or finish the last project he did.
The Scam
Eso has been taking money from his now-defunct Patreon, YouTube, and from users in his Discord to fund this project. People who called this project “vaporware” were scoffed and laughed at.
They did full “updates” letting us know how the project is going and asking for money and support with their “developer.” Do you know a good way to really show your work on an open-source project? Uh.. put it on GitHub so we can actually see the work?
After 5 years of begging for money, promising in multiple videos and live streams that the revolution is coming and begging for money we get the “announcement” of its demise. Do we get it on his channel? No. We get it on a small channel called Civil Offense with 200 subs.
In it they explain that anyone can make it if they just know the idea and wanna toss some simple code on it. This begs the question, why couldn’t Eso and you do it in 5 years with the donations you got?
So what did Eso do with all of this money? Who knows. What we do know is that while they LARP online about doing agorist counter-economic projects to end the state both online and offline, they’re really just sitting around doing drugs and not showering according to people who met them in real life.