The website goatse.cx (don’t worry, it’s safe for work) has a fraught and storied history beginning with an image of a skinny man holding his asshole open so wide that you can see the crimson red of his insides.
That image, originally hosted on goatse.cx, scarred many youngsters exploring the web in the late 90s and early 2000s and became a fixture of early internet culture. Since then, the domain has reportedly changed hands and struggled to find a purpose, pivoting in several surprising directions. The latest: apparently launching a bitcoin-based cryptocurrency called Goatse Coin.
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Read More: Someone Hacked a Billboard in Atlanta to Display Goatse
The main goatse.cx domain currently redirects the visitor to members.goatse.cx, which displays a page asking you to sign up for updates on Goatse Coin. “Goatse Coin is a brand new Bitcoin-alternative cryptocurrency that is currently in development by Goatse.cx and will be launched shortly,” a short message on the site states. “If you are interested in getting notification at launch, please leave your email below.”
As Tor developer and cryptographer Isis Lovecruft pointed out on Twitter, the tangential connection to the infamous ass-gaping image arguably makes Goatse Coin a literal “shitcoin,” a derogatory term for spinoff bitcoin-based cryptocurrencies.
There are many good questions that can be asked of Goatse Coin: What’s the point? And who’s behind this? The first question I’m tempted to answer with, “Who cares?,” because there’s a ton of bitcoin spinoffs and most of them are irrelevant. The answer to the second question is that nobody knows who currently runs goatse.cx. However, an email sent to the address that the domain was registered under didn’t bounce back, so somebody is likely on the other end. We’ll update if we hear back.
But most importantly: Is the plan to launch a coin… real? It might not be.
In January of 2014, after a stint in launching a goatse-themed webmail service, the goatse.cx website briefly displayed a message announcing the impending launch of a Goatse Coin. It had the same name and logo as the coin currently being advertised by the site, and a brief description on the page described it as “The Goatse cryptocurrency.” All in all, it sounds like the same concept.
It’s unclear what happened to the idea of Goatse Coin way back in 2014, but it didn’t take off. A month later, in February of the same year, goatse.cx pivoted to promoting an existing joke cryptocurrency called Dogecoin with a video message from someone (possibly an actor) posing as the site’s lawyer. By 2015, the goatse.cx site had pivoted again and was promoting a service that would allow anybody to host a subdomain on goatse.cx. That message was on the site until at least May 25 of 2017, archives show.
On June 28 of 2017, someone claiming to be the owner of goatse.cx posted on the popular discussion message board for bitcoiners called Bitcoin Talk. In the post, the self-described owner of goatse.cx sought input from experts on how to launch a cryptocurrency.
“Post in here if you are interested in working with me or PM me,” the post states.
“If you hate the idea please feel free to post here also. I think this will be huge: Goatse Coin. Keen to talk to work with people who have launched a coin before.”
The thread failed to take off, and the only post from another user flatly accused the coin launch of being a likely scam.
Whatever is going on here, it certainly appears that the legend of goatse—the cavernous shitpipe that introduced millions of innocents to the petulant exhilaration and repulsion of Online—is far from over.
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