Finally uniting devotees of cryptocurrency with devotees of rapping clowns who believe scientists are liars under one umbrella of guileless faith, Juggalos now have a Bitcoin to call their very own. JuggaloCoin has been dubbed by its proprietors “The Most Insane Coin In Crypto History”—a tall order for a currency where nearly half a billion dollars can be irretrievably lost, all thanks to an exchange founded by Magic: The Gathering fans. But like everything Insane Clown Posse, JuggaloCoin’s “insanity” is a form of totally wicked, carefully monetized brand loyalty.
As outlined by founder Papa Nutt (whose ROI on ejaculation puns remains robust), JuggaloCoin is all about keeping it in the Juggalo family, ensuring every one of its users that their funds are going to someone who is “down with the clown,” and not to businesses whose positions on the clown are, at best, vaguely defined. In the short term, Papa Nutt is hopeful that both vendors at the annual Gathering and the official ICP online store will begin accepting JuggaloCoin, eventually to be followed by “Juggalo charities.” and soon, “the entire Juggalo universe dealing in JuggaloCoins.” And of course, there’s the more immediate satisfaction of “sending coins to a Juggalo in need,” as Juggalos reach out to their fallen brethren and supply them with the digital money to buy the “Fuck You I’m A Juggalo” sweatshirt that will lift them up again.
And while some might see the invention of JuggaloCoin as a slippery slope to illicit behavior, based on nothing more than a cursory reading of anything ever written about Juggalos, Papa Nutt says he is “deadly serious” about only using JuggaloCoin for legal transactions. Instead, he recommends using “a currency that’s the choice of drug dealers worldwide—the United States Dollar,” while reserving the JuggaloCoin solely for the transactions you want creating a virtual paper trail of your Insane Clown Posse fandom.
To that end, it should be noted that—like the belief in cryptocurrency in the first place—you have to make a demonstrable leap of faith for JuggaloCoin, which is decidedly not for posers who aren’t down with the clown or unregulated forms of exchange. To take part in “The Hatchet Drop,” a mass distribution of JuggaloCoins that will put some 470,890 of them in circulation by giving them away, you have to tweet your JuggaloCoin address along with the hashtags #JuggaloCoin and #CoinsForFam, as well as “some visible evidence you are a Juggalo.” Much as most banks require two forms of identification, JuggaloCoin asks for “a profile pic of you in facepaint,” though it will also accept a photo of you “holding or wearing Hatchet Gear.”
Still, if you think it’s as easy as putting on an Insane Clown Posse shirt, just to acquire coins of theoretical worth so that you may one day use them to purchase an Insane Clown Posse shirt, think again. “These are coins that rightfully belong to the Juggalo Family. If someone is pretending to be a Juggalo just to get coins, that’s basically stealing from the Family. PUBLICLY. Trust me, that’s not something you want to do,” Nutt says of this hypothetical threat to his hypothetical trade system, and the hypothetical response you should hypothetically be worried about.
But if you’re twisted enough to get involved with a digital currency based on the fucking miracles of a monetary system with no fixed value, there are also currently 217 slots available to non-Juggalos in the “Insane Coin Posse,” a rare opportunity for people who aren’t Juggalos to give them their money and interact with them anyway. “You don’t have to be black to support Civil Rights, and you don’t have to be a Juggalo to support the Juggalo Family,” says Papa Nutt, expert in equivalent exchange rates.
As of press time, all slots are still available.
[via The Guardian]