goatse

Goatse Is Now a Cryptocurrency Thing, Which Is Somehow Worse Than What It Was Originally

Somehow, this is more obscene than the first Goatse. Photo: Screenshot via goatse.cx

Last night, I received an alarming email. It was from the people who now own goatse.cx. “BREAKING NEWS: YOU can now OWN a piece of GOATSE.CX in the Ethereum blockchain!” it exclaimed. Worrying. If you are familiar with any of the proper nouns in that sentence, you are probably spiraling into depression right about now.

For those blessed enough to not know, Goatse was a “shock site,” a static website with a single grotesque image that people would trick others into clicking links to. Wikipedia puts it succinctly: Goatse’s “front page featured a picture, entitled hello.jpg, showing a naked man widely stretching his anus with both hands.” The image is notorious; the best-known of a cohort that also includes Lemon Party (don’t Google it), Meatspin (don’t Google it), and Tubgirl (seriously? I just said don’t Google it).

Goatse launched in 1999, and hello.jpg remains a stirring artifact of the decentralized, anarchic, early days of the World Wide Web. In recent years, however, Goatse has toned down its act. Users who visit the site’s goatse.cx domain (which, if you hadn’t realized, is a play on “goat sex”) are now greeted with, well, not a man stretching his anus. In 2012, the site started offering email addresses on the infamous domain. Later, it launched its own cryptocurrency.

Now, it has a new gambit, cribbing from an old-school stunt called the “Million Dollar Homepage.” In 2005, a British man named Alex Tew began selling ad space on milliondollarhomepage.com, a grid with 1 million pixels (a lot at the time, now less than half of what’s on an iPhone screen). Each pixel cost a dollar, and buyers had to purchase at least a 10-by-10 grid. Tew eventually sold all of his inventory.

Now, the people who own the Goatse domain are pulling the same stunt — except that you have to buy the space using the Ethereum cryptocurrency. “At 0.001 ETHEREUM per pixel (that’s about 10 cents) you can get a display ad and advertise anything you want, forever immortalized on the Ethereum blockchain,” the email states. “All the ad unit management happens on the blockchain. If you buy the ad slot, you own it forever (or until you transfer it to someone else).” The announcement touts that Goatse has received more than 10 million visitors since 2004, which seems kinda low if we’re being totally honest.

Should Goatse sell all of its inventory at Ethereum’s current price, it would net just over $100,000. They’ve currently sold 6,000 pixels, netting 6 ETH in the process. The few current ads are for podcasters, aspiring YouTubers, and other social media ventures — a sign of the times as much as Million Dollar Homepage’s glut of links to sites with free screen savers and wallpapers.

What a depressing reality we live in. It’s getting to the point where you can’t even run a successful site with a photo of a man stretching his anus anymore. Here’s hoping some enterprising crypto owner buys a bit of space and uploads the original anyway.

Goatse Is Now a Cryptocurrency Stunt