The International Bartenders Association, or IBA, maintains a list of official cocktails, ones they deem to be “the most requested recipes” at bars all around the world. It’s the closest thing the bartending industry has to a canonical list of cocktails, akin to the American Kennel Club’s registry of dog breeds or a jazz musician’s Real Book of standards.

The IBA official cocktail list is the kind of list that has its own Sporcle quiz and its own Wikipedia article—an “IBA official cocktail” label even christens the top of each cocktail’s own Wikipedia infobox:

As of 2025, there are 102 IBA official cocktails, and as of July 12, 2025, I’ve had every one of them.

The journey has taken me to some interesting places, and now that it’s done, I have a little story to tell for each cocktail. I’m not gonna tell you all 102 stories, but I do want to debrief the experience. Drinking all 102 cocktails turned out to be unexpectedly tricky, and for reasons you’ll soon understand, I might be one of the first people in the world to do it.

⚠ Drink responsibly!

This endeavor involved drinking a lot of alcohol, but I did it over the course of a few years. It’s rare that I have more than a drink or two in one night (and never have I ever blacked out from drinking).

I do not recommend speedrunning the IBA official cocktail list. It’s important to know your limits, be conscious about how much you’re drinking, and drink a lot of water. If you’re struggling with an alcohol addiction, you should probably stop reading this post and talk to someone (if you’re outside of the US, you can find a helpline here).

How it started

I’m something of a list keeper. But it can be hard to decide when to start keeping track of things. So sometimes, I pick an arbitrary starting point that feels vaguely fateful, and I keep a list from that point on. For albums, it was the day I got my AirPods Pro delivered. For restaurants, it was the day I moved to New York City. For cocktails, it was the day I turned 21.

I started a note in Obsidian called Legal Cocktails, enumerating each type of classic cocktail I had consumed since I came of age. A dry martini at 5801 to usher in my birthday. A sex on the beach on an intern dinner cruise a couple weeks later.

Over the next couple years, Legal Cocktails grew to about 50 different drinks. Throughout my senior year at Illinois, my more epicurean friends Aidan and Christian would host a series of little get-togethers where they’d mix us drinks in their apartments, ranging from more pedestrian picks like the daiquiri and negroni to deeper cuts like the hanky panky and a half-decent Ramos gin fizz Christian made from melted butter.

First semester that year, I took a Beverage Management class, which was ostensibly about managing bars, but it was no secret that everyone took it because of its tasting component. The very last lecture focused on cocktails, and the tasting section featured an old fashioned, martini, margarita, whiskey sour, and the new-to-me Planter’s punch—not bad for a college class. And through it all, I was sometimes a normal college student, drinking Long Island iced teas at Legends happy hour and shitty tequila sunrises at Red Lion (I regret to inform you I deemed the Kams Blue Guy too proprietary for my list).

Some time after graduating and moving to New York City, I began to reckon with Legal Cocktails. What really counted as a “classic” cocktail? Where do I draw the line? It felt a little arbitrary. So on May 9, 2024, I decided to retcon the list into a checklist, and nix the “legal” requirement (something something statute of limitations). I had heard of the IBA official cocktail list from my time on Sporcle and Wikipedia, so it seemed like as good a list as any to base mine on.

At that point, there were 89 IBA official cocktails, and I had tried 33 of them (a bunch of the ones on Legal Cocktails weren’t IBA official, like the Jägerbomb and, weirdly, the amaretto sour). One thing was for sure: I had a lot of drinking to do.

Anatomy of a list

The IBA official cocktail list has existed for over 60 years. It was first proposed in Paris in 1960 by bartender and IBA founding member Angelo Zola, who felt the need to standardize the mess of cocktail recipes that differed depending on which bartender you asked. Zola assembled a committee within the IBA, and together, they decided on a set of cocktails that best represented the most important recipes served around the world.

The following year in Oslo, Zola’s vision became a reality, and the inaugural list was unveiled. It comprised 50 cocktails, many of which remain on the list today, but some of which (like the zaza) have gone by the wayside. That’s because the list has gone through big revisions every 10 years or so, with the IBA adding drinks they deem newly relevant and removing ones that have fallen out of fashion. (The 89-cocktail list I based my checklist on was established in the 2020 update.)

There are many ways one might organize a list of cocktails, but the IBA chooses to group them into three categories: the Unforgettables (these are all-time classics, like the Manhattan and the uhhh monkey gland), the Contemporary (these are newer, but have solidified classic status, like the Mai Tai and the Moscow mule), and the New Era (these are rising stars invented in the late 20th or early 21st century, like the espresso martini and the paper plane).

Most of the list comprises pretty normal cocktails that a good bartender would recognize. But some immediately struck me as esoteric, or hard to obtain for one reason or another—like the Canchanchara, which calls for Cuban aguardiente; the Spicy Fifty, an oddly specific recipe with red chili pepper in it; and what I saw as the final boss of the list, the Ve.n.to, with its arcanely formatted name and a recipe centered on grappa and a hyper-specialized “chamomile cordial.” All of them, nonetheless, had a Wikipedia page (no matter how small), their inclusion on the list alone serving as a badge of legitimacy.

I was slightly convinced the Ve.n.to was planted on the list by Big Grappa, and as far as I could tell, it was only served at one bar in middle-of-nowhere Italy (the Spicy Fifty, one in London). But I had a list to complete, and nothing was gonna stop me.

Smooth sailing

For a while, checking cocktails off the list was easy. It was just a matter of going to bars and restaurants (which, like any other yuppie, I was already doing), scanning the menu, and hoping to find a classic cocktail I hadn’t yet tried. A boulevardier at Kelly’s. A Champagne cocktail at Antler (one of my early favorites, a nice blend of bitters and bubbles).

A formative moment early in the quest came at Uncle Charlie’s Piano Lounge in Midtown with Ming and Alina. A divey gay bar with no menu? Sounded like a perfect opportunity to check off some drinks! I scanned through my list to find something simple to try and order, went up to a mustachioed bartender, and asked, “could you do a caipirinha?” He replied, “nah, we don’t have cachaça”—a reality check—and I said, “alright, I’ll just do uhhh an Aperol spritz” (one of my old reliables).

After crushing my spritz, I went back to the same bartender. Still determined to check some boxes, I asked for a mint julep. “I’m afraid we don’t have mint,” he laughed, “you fancy boy!” Unwilling to settle for another spritz, I scurried back to Ming and Alina and asked them what to do. Alina suggested, “why don’t you just show him the list and see what he can make?”

So that’s exactly what I did. Back at the bar, I briefly explained my mission to the bartender, handed him my phone, and he scrolled through the list. “Oh, I can do a few of these,” he said, “You’re cool with any of them?” “Yeah, whatever you can make,” I replied. Soon enough, I had a lemon drop martini in hand. (Alina tried mine and then ordered one for herself, but the bartender asked her, “Is that for your friend or you? If it’s for your friend I’ll make him something new!”)

After gleefully finishing the lemon drop (and singing “Y.M.C.A.” at the mic), I returned to the bar one last time. The bartender greeted me, “What’s next for you, fancy?” I handed him my phone again, told him to “surprise me,” and emerged with a New York sour, which he explained was basically a whiskey sour with a red wine float. Sometimes all you have to do is ask.

On our way out that night, the bartender bade me farewell—”bye, fancy!”—and I had a new favorite service experience of my life.

Monkeying around

The monkey gland, that one odd duck in the Unforgettables section, was my white whale for a while. Obscure even to a seasoned bartender, it taught me that you can’t go ordering every drink on the list willy-nilly. At another dive, my friend Michael went up to the bar and asked point-blank, “two monkey glands, please!” You could imagine the bartender’s confusion.

A month or so later, at Gage & Tollner with fellow cocktail enjoyer Malaika, we were bantering with the bartender about my list. He had also never heard of the monkey gland, but he was curious, so we explained it to him, and the conversation moved on.

Just as my rusty nail and Malaika’s French 75 neared completion, the bartender plopped down two cocktail glasses in front of us, each half-filled with a pinkish-orange liquid. “Two monkey glands,” he declared.

They were pretty good—the orange and anise flavors complemented each other surprisingly nicely, but also, they were free, which makes everything taste better.

London calling

I kept cruising through the list. A naked and famous at Death & Co. (where the naked and famous was invented). A Clover Club at the Clover Club (where, I learned, the Clover Club was in fact not invented).

Then in November, I was in London for a two-week work trip. This would mark a significant turning point in my journey, for multiple reasons.

For one, I was able to check off the Spicy Fifty, one of the list’s most perplexing inclusions, by going to creator Salvatore Calabrese’s own Velvet bar at the Corinthia hotel, seemingly the only place in the world where it’s served. The bar was truly posh—before I had my drink (which was great, though I kinda wished it was spicier), I was greeted with a complimentary tray of candied almonds, olives, and blue corn flatbread. But this luxury was juxtaposed with an extremely cursed cocktail menu, featuring an AI-generated image for each drink (and one AI-generated Nelson Mandela quote):

I hit up the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel, London’s oldest extant cocktail bar, for an angel face (which was invented there) and a painstakingly garnished horse’s neck. I got a corpse reviver #2 at the confusingly similarly named Bar Américain. Turns out “American bar” just means a cocktail bar, as opposed to the city’s many beer-centric pubs, because cocktails are an American invention. That’s what I call a cultural victory.

But the most important bar on this whole journey, and my new favorite bar in the world, was Satan’s Whiskers in London’s Bethnal Green neighborhood. I went there on a whim, per Malaika’s recommendation, not realizing it would be a godsend for someone trying to complete this list.

The thing about Satan’s Whiskers is that their printed menu, focused on classic and modern classic cocktails, completely changes every day. This means the bartenders have an encyclopedic knowledge of the cocktail canon, and they have the ingredients on hand to make any of the 900 drinks they rotate between.

At first, I scanned the menu and didn’t see anything I needed for the list, so I panic-ordered a Jungle Bird (which wasn’t on the list, but I had heard of it—it was great). Then I decided to venture off the day’s menu: “Do you know a… brandy crusta?” Without hesitation, the bartender Ollie said, “sure, I can do that!” and confirmed I wanted a sugared rim. Next, I had a Tipperary, which he explained was an odd flavor combination that they’d only really list on their menu on an unpopular day (Mia, another bartender walking by, chimed in, “Tipperary Tuesdays!”). I capped off the night with an Alexander—​“gin or brandy?”—a brandy Alexander, which made for a perfect dessert cocktail. It all felt unreal, like a bar created in a lab for the sole purpose of me finishing this list.

A spanner in the works

A couple days later, I was checking in on the IBA official cocktail list website, and I could not believe my eyes. There were new cocktails on the list.

It felt like a bad dream. Still in an unfamiliar city, having just been to this magical bar, now confronted with these freaky new cocktail names on a list I had grown so accustomed to. Wasn’t the last update only a few years ago? (Since then, I’ve had several actual nightmares of the IBA adding anywhere from a few to a few hundred new drinks to the list.)

To be precise, there were now 102 IBA official cocktails, up from the previous 89. 3 had been removed from the list (including the golden dream, which I had gotten at Attaboy, long live the golden dream), and 16 new ones were added (including the Jungle Bird I had just had at Satan’s Whiskers, nice). I coped by tweeting through it, seemingly the first person on the internet to discover the update.

In reality, and I only learned this several months later, the day I discovered the update was the exact same day it was added to the IBA website. What I didn’t know was that there had been news articles about the update 8 months earlier, but they were all in Italian because the update coincided with a new 101 IBA Cocktails book, published exclusively in Italian for whatever reason (the book inexplicably leaves out the fernandito, fernet and Coke, maybe because 101 sounds more fun than 102).

It was no longer true that every IBA official cocktail had its own Wikipedia page. A few of the new ones did, like the sherry cobbler, the porn star martini, and the South Side (which had previously been added and removed from the list), but now the list was sprinkled with red links. Most of the new ones were pretty legit modern classics, but one stuck out like a sore thumb.

It was called, bafflingly, the IBA Tiki. A Google search revealed almost no information about it. Its recipe had 9 ingredients, including gengibre (just Portuguese for ginger) and two specific Havana Club rums, which are illegal in the United States thanks to Cuban sanctions. Step aside, Ve.n.to, there’s a new final boss in town.

I later learned that the drink’s recipe was commissioned by the IBA for their 2022 World Cocktail Championship, which was held in Cuba and, naturally, sponsored by Havana Club. For some reason, they saw fit to make it cocktail number 101 in their 101 IBA Cocktails book, and now it’s forever enshrined in cocktail history.

***

That night, I did the only thing I could do, and I went back to Satan’s Whiskers. In fact, I ended up going there four nights that week, checking off an obscene 13 cocktails within their taxidermied walls. The bartenders had, obviously, never heard of the IBA Tiki (and didn’t have those rums on hand), but they knew plenty of the other new additions off the dome.

It was also there that I discovered my love for the Porto flip, the only IBA official cocktail to contain egg yolk. I wasn’t sure if Satan’s Whiskers would be able to make one, but Mia’s face lit up when I ordered it—she had a soft spot for flips, and once I took a few sips, I knew it was one of my new favorites too. (On the Sporcle quiz, the Porto flip currently sits as the single least-guessed IBA official cocktail.)

I left London with a new favorite cocktail, a new favorite bar, and a napkin listing 6 bars Mia recommended in NYC.

82 down, 20 to go.

The final stretch

At this point, it was exceedingly unlikely to stumble upon the remaining cocktails on a bar menu. It was now a matter of seeking out particular bars that offered each drink, or failing that, going to really good bars and hoping they could whip one up.

Such was the case with one new addition, the Brazilian rabo de galo (literally “tail of the cock,” or “cocktail”), which I ordered off-menu at the bitters bar Amor y Amargo to excellent effect—I’ve since had two more of them at actual Brazilian restaurant Berimbau, and I’d easily place it next to the Porto flip as a favorite on the list.

I knocked out the Canchanchara at The Rum Bar BK, which miraculously had one on their menu. I got the new Chartreuse swizzle and pisco punch at the ice-obsessed Dutch Kills, which captures the Satan’s Whiskers magic as well as any bar I’ve been to in New York City.

I was this close to booking a trip to Italy for the Ve.n.to, when suddenly, googling “chamomile liqueur nyc,” I came across Santi, a new Midtown Italian restaurant that just so happened to have the exact right grappa and chamomile liqueur on hand. I went there with Alina, and the bartender, Emanuel, had never heard of a Ve.n.to, but he was determined to make me one—he even went on a wild goose chase to fetch a grape from the kitchen as a garnish, before coming back with some delicious vanilla poached pears. Impeccable service, tasty drink, and cheaper than a flight to Italy.

The last several drinks were more of a crawl than a sprint, many of them an exercise in explaining the recipe to a bartender in the least annoying way possible. An improvised paradise at Montréal’s Cloakroom. The very obscure Don’s special daiquiri at Paradise Lost. A Russian spring punch, a British creation I really should’ve gotten at Satan’s Whiskers, at Dear Irving.

And then there was one.

Let’s have a Tiki

Up until this point, I had acquired every cocktail by ordering it at a bar (or a makeshift bar at a friend’s apartment). But for the 102nd and final cocktail, the IBA Tiki, that wasn’t gonna work. Too obscure, too many ingredients, rums too illegal in the United States. So I took matters into my own hands.

The plan: gather all the ingredients, batch-prepare some IBA Tikis, and throw perhaps the world’s first IBA Tiki party. Incidentally, my 24th birthday was quickly approaching, so I even had an occasion for the celebration.

The rums, of course, were the hard part. I can’t exactly explain what I did in a blog post, but let’s just say we were about to have some of the most faithful IBA Tikis that had ever been made in the United States. (Shoutouts to my mom and my sister, who both played instrumental roles in the operation.)

The rest of the ingredients were straightforward enough. Amaretto, check. Luxardo maraschino, check. Frangelico (hazelnut liqueur, which the IBA Tiki is the only IBA official cocktail to include), check. The juices and purée and gengibre, check. All that was left was to put it all together.

And so I did. On Saturday, July 12th, 2025, my 24th birthday, about 20 people gathered in a modest Brooklyn apartment. For the crowd, we prepared an industrial-sized IBA Tiki in the vessel of choice, a borg. But for my personal drink, I mixed it myself using a cocktail shaker my mom got me for my birthday, and I served it for myself in a highball glass. After carefully garnishing the cocktail (for the Wikipedia picture) and making a speech to the attendees, it was time to drink it.

The IBA Tiki was great. Everyone agreed it was great. It was sweet, sour, nutty, and gingery, and we went through two full borgs of it. It may be a completely contrived recipe, and it may or may not deserve to be on the list, but one thing’s for sure: it was a fitting end to the journey.

Closing time

102 cocktails, 7 states, 3 countries, and 1 surprise update later, my work here was done. But you can’t drink 102 cocktails without learning a few things along the way.

One thing I learned is that the IBA official cocktail list is a weird list. But that’s probably bound to happen when you try to represent the whole world of cocktails in one list. The list might be a helpful guide for a bartender aiming to be well-rounded, but in a practical sense, for normal people just going to bars and ordering drinks, it’s not all that useful.

So from my research and my interactions with dozens of bartenders, I recategorized the list into a spectrum based on name recognition and ingredient availability. It’s probably an oversimplification, and the perspective is definitely US-centric, but I think it makes for a good starting point if you’re wondering what to order:

Between the Canchanchara, IBA Tiki, Spicy Fifty, Ve.n.to, and the relative obscurity of several others, you really have to be trying hard if you want to drink all 102. As far as I could find, no one else online has done so, at least not since the update that brought the IBA Tiki along. (It seems possible that someone high up at the IBA has tried one of everything, but I bet they made a lot of them themselves.) (Update after posting: it looks like some folks on Reddit have made their way through the list!)

When I first embarked on this journey, I didn’t really know what I liked in a cocktail. Now I know I like bitters, and egg whites, and silky, stirred drinks on a big rock. I’ve learned I have an affinity for Porto flips and rabo de galos. And I’ve learned that Satan’s Whiskers is the best bar in the world. (I also wrote its Wikipedia page, plus ones for the Jungle Bird, the Chartreuse swizzle, and the IBA Tiki. There’s still work to be done on many of last year’s additions!)

A common refrain at the IBA Tiki party was, “now that you’re done with cocktails, what’s next?” Well, I’ve gotten pretty good at drinking cocktails, but now that I have some mixology equipment, I might as well start making some. And while I’m at it, I can venture into the endless expanse of cocktails that aren’t on the IBA list.

I may be done with one list, but I’ll never stop checking boxes. I’m ambiently working my way through the NYT’s 100 Best Restaurants in New York City (18/100) and their 57 Sandwiches That Define New York City (18/57). I want to visit all 50 states (42/50) and all 63 national parks (12/63). Who knows, maybe I’ll try to pet every dog breed (???/292) or learn every tune in the Real Book (???/400).

But the IBA official cocktail list (102/102) is done and dusted. Until the next update, that is.

Chris Welch, writing for The Verge, “Spotify Is Going to Break Every Car Thing Gadget It Ever Sold”:

Unfortunately for those owners, Spotify isn’t offering any kind of subscription credit or automatic refund for the device — nor is the company open-sourcing it. Rather, it’s just canning the project and telling people to (responsibly) dispose of Car Thing.

“We’re discontinuing Car Thing as part of our ongoing efforts to streamline our product offerings,” Spotify wrote in an FAQ on its website. [...] The company is recommending that customers do a factory reset on the product and find some way of responsibly recycling the hardware. Spotify is also being direct and confirming that there’s little reason to ever expect a sequel. “As of now, there are no plans to release a replacement or new version of Car Thing,” the FAQ reads.

Car Thing was initially made available on an invite-only basis in April 2021, with Spotify later opening a public waitlist to buy the accessory later that year. The $90 device went on general sale in February 2022 — and production was halted five months later.

No word in Spotify’s Car Thing bricking FAQ about when they’re dropping support for Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. Oh, that’s right, they never supported any music services other than their own, despite having spent the last decade petitioning their home-turf European Commission to secure unfettered pay-no-commission access to platforms created by Apple and Google. It actually worked for them with Google.

Spotify and European Commission supporters are likely to respond to the above by arguing that Car Thing is totally different from the iPhone and Android. Car Thing was never popular at all, and iPhone and Android combine to form a duopoly that controls the entire market for phones. “Gatekeepers” must play by different rules to rein in their gatekeeping power, and Car Thing was by no means a gatekeeping platform.

That’s all true, but what do you think Spotify planned to do if Car Thing became a hit product? Do you think they planned to open it up to competing streaming services after it became popular? I doubt it. And if you think they not only would have opened Car Thing up to competing services, but would have done so without charging significant commissions or fees, I have a bridge to sell you.

To be clear, I think it’s fine for companies to create hardware exclusively for the use of their own services. And of course I also think it’s fine (great, in fact) to create hardware that is open to third-party software free of charge. But it’s also fine to create console platforms where third-party software is subject to fees and commissions paid to the platform owner. Spotify’s anti-App-Store rhetoric would lead you to believe that Apple only began extracting 30/15 percent commissions from in-app subscriptions after the iPhone became a dominant platform.

But that’s not what happened at all. When Apple announced the iPhone in 2007, Steve Jobs stated that their goal was to achieve 1 percent market share of the phone market by the end of 2008. At the end of 2008, they surpassed that goal, hitting a whopping 1.1 percent market share:

1. Nokia, 38.6%
2. Samsung, 16.2%
3. LG, 8.3%
4. Motorola, 8.3%
5. Sony Ericsson, 8%
6. RIM, 1.9%
7. Kyocera, 1.4%
8. Apple, 1.1%
9. HTC, 1.1%
10. Sharp, 1%

2008 was also the year the App Store launched, with support for free apps (no commission charged to developers) and paid apps (30 percent commission). Apple added subscriptions in early 2011, with the same 70/30 split. All of the iPhone’s subsequent success happened with that App Store commission in place, and that commission has only gone down over time — most notably, for Spotify, by dropping the commission from 30 to 15 percent for subscription renewals after the first year, starting in 2016.

The number one free download from the App Store in 2008 was Pandora Radio, a music streaming app. Other early hits included Last.FM and AOL Radio. But when Spotify announced they’d submitted their first version to the App Store in 2009, it was an open question whether Apple would allow it. Paid Content: “Spotify Waves iPhone Buzz Under Apple’s Nose” and “What If Apple Blocks Spotify’s iPhone App?” BBC News: “Spotify has been called an ‘iTunes killer’ because of its ease of use and its comprehensive, free library of millions of songs.” TechCrunch: “Spotify in the iPhone App Store – Will Apple Approve It?”

And my guess:

But so the big question is whether Apple will accept the app, despite the fact that Spotify is clearly a competitor to the iTunes Store. They should. For one thing, competition is good for Apple. For another, I think rejecting Spotify from the App Store could result in an antitrust investigation from the EU.

Apple did, of course, accept Spotify into the App Store. They eventually added the ability for third-party apps to play audio in the background too. I was wrong only in thinking that allowing Spotify into the App Store could avoid antitrust scrutiny from the EU.

So let’s be clear about Spotify’s position: It’s OK — for them at least — to create a new hardware platform with no support at all for third-party software, but not OK for another company that owns its own music service to create a hardware platform that offers access to any and all competing services, but charges a commission for access, if that platform becomes popular. Once sufficiently popular, it’s only fair to allow Spotify access to those platforms free of charge, despite the fact that Spotify never allowed third parties access to their own platform at all, and built their own success through access to the App Store, at a time when the iPhone had single-digit market share for phones and low-teens market share among “smartphones”. Got it.

I went on a small journey the last couple days to find the original Netscape Navigator “meteors” animation. This one has a special place in my head and heart because it is so clearly connected to my memories of discovering the web as a kid. Here it is in its original 60×60 px glory:

I started out doing some web searches that turned up several versions. One was promising but far too big: 400×400 px. Worse, after some shoddy resize attempts, the “pixels” had become rectangular.

This would not do.

I continued searching, hoping to find the original animations. I found someone’s mirror of Netscape 5.0 on Github. Then I found some very old versions of Mozilla on a Mozilla FTP server. Sadly, the animations had been stripped out of these archives. :(

Frustrated with hitting several deadends, I complained to Tess and wondered aloud if anyone might have the original images stashed away somewhere. She quipped that if anyone did, it would be Jamie Zawinski.

A little later, I posted about it on Mastodon.

And wouldn’t you know it, a friend tagged @jwz asking if he had it, and a few moments later I got a reply from Jamie himself.

If you don’t know, Jamie Zawinski is well-know for working on several important software projects in the ’90s. He worked on Netscape Navigator, built and maintains Xscreensaver, and several other things. Nowadays, he owns and runs DNA Lounge in San Francisco.

There are a lot of neat bits of web browser history on the page he linked – totally worth a quick look over – but most important to the quest at hand, it had that Netscape meteors loading animation.

The original one has some small artifacts on the left side of frame 10 that render as red and orange pixels. These bothered me enough that I made a version that replaces those pixels with ones that match the surrounding pixels. Here’s the modified 60×60 one and a bigger 240×240 px one, for good measure:

I felt bad about the April Fools' joke so over the weekend I whipped up the game so no one was disappointed.

The Case Against Crypto

These days so much of my free time is booked with calls to explain to people outside the software industry why crypto assets are such a destructive force and why I support forceful regulation to halt this financially corrosive enterprise from spreading further into markets. I basically have to repeat myself on the basic arguments for every call covering the same basic monetary theory, American history and technical limitations. Thus I’m going to summarize the basic argument so we have a reference and I don’t have to keep repeating myself all day.

1. The technology does not solve a real problem.

The crypto project has had 13 years to try and find a problem to solve. It has not found one.

The real world has fundamental constraints that make the technology unworkable, whenever it has to interact with the outside world the benefits of decentralization disappear and the solutions end up simply recreating slower and worse versions of processes and structures that already exist.

Despite that, for the last thirteen years these projects have done nothing but scam people by creating synthetic asset bubbles for gambling and destroying the environment. There are fundamental limitations to the scalability of blockchain-based technologies, and every use case is better served by another simpler technology except for crime, ransomware, extralegal gambling, and sanctions evasion; all of which are a drain on society not a benefit. Taken as a whole the technology has no tangible benefits over simply using trusted parties and centralized databases.

Crypto coins are simply speculative gambling products that only create a massive set of negative externalities on the world. It is introducing artificial volatility into markets untethered to any economic activity and creates an enormous opportunity cost where the only investment opportunity is as an economically corrosive synthetic hedge against all productive assets. This is not innovation, this is technical regression and flirtation with ecological disaster in a time when we cannot afford to gamble our planet’s fate on pyramid schemes and dog memes.

2. So called “cryptocurrencies” aren’t actually currencies, and cannot fulfil the function of money.

Money exists to exchange for goods and services in an economy. It is created to mediate the exchange of goods so that we have a common unit of account we can trade instead of bartering goods directly. Money needs to have a reliable and stable value compared to a domestic basket of common goods and services, in order to achieve that the supply of the money needs to be controlled by a monetary authority which can expand or contract the supply according to market fluctuations.

A dynamic money supply is a fundamental necessity for a modern economy. A small amount of inflation discourages hoarding and incentivizes investment into productive enterprises which grow the economy and produce prosperity. Conversely a static fixed money supply encouages hoarding, and is inflexible in times of crisis because it does not allow intervention. Economies do not stabilize themselves and require active intervention to curb recessions.

In an environment in which multiple currencies can commingle there is a perverse incentive to create counterfeit currency or to create parallel currencies. Counterfeit currencies dilute trust in commerce, create counterparty risk and catalyze crime. Parallel currencies introduce exchange risk and create artificial barriers to commerce. The optimal solution within any economic region is to thus have a single currency with a single authority to control the supply, protect against counterfeiting and lower barriers to commerce by discouraging other systems through creating demand. The only possible entity that can fulfil this role is the State and it creates demand for a single currency by requiring citizens to extinguish their obligations to the state in that currency. A single currency and single monetary authority is the inevitable role of the state because of its singular monopoly on taxation and justice.

Historically commodity-based money (so called “hard money”) was based on backing by metals and was used extensively in the 18th and 19th century. Instead of vesting power in democratic controls, it instead vested power in non-elected international parties who could source, mine and mint metals. Under a gold standard, inflation, growth and the financial system were all less stable due to trade imbalances. This led to frequent recessions, larger swings in consumer prices and perpetual banking crises. When these events occurred in one part of the world, the distress would be transmitted more quickly and completely to others and thus created a politically unstable, unequal and more violent world. We saw this in the Gilded Age of the 1870s to 1920s in which hard money created a world of massive wealth inequality, thus ultimately leading up to the speculative market manias that lead to the Great Depression. The United States ultimately devalued its currency with the policies of the New Deal which slowly decoupled the dollar’s dependence on gold and which led to an era of economic growth and prosperity. Conversely Europe largely did not engage in these corrective policies and this era saw the rise of populist strong men and fascists who promised to correct the wealth inequality of the common man, and ultimately plunged the continent into the most violent period in human history.

Money is always going to be inseparable from politics. As much as some libertarians want to believe that value should be determined by a God-given order independent of the will of men, they cannot escape the logical and historical contradictions at the heart of this idea. The fixed-supply ideas of deflationary coins like Bitcoin fundamentally misinterpret the properties of fiat money as bugs when they are in fact features. The crypto project contains unresolvable logical and economic contradictions in its stated purpose. State controlled money embeds control and accountability for fiscal stability and market intervention in the democratic process where it inevitably and rightly belongs.

3. The history of private money is one of repeated disasters that destroy public trust.

Even playing devil’s advocate and assuming cryptocurrency could function as money—which they can’t—we come up against the hard limitation that everytime private money has been tried in history it creates a form of corporate feudalism coupled to a toxic environment that encourages fraud and discourages commerce. The lessons of history are quite clear on this issue because the United States flirted with such a system back in the Free Banking Era from 1837 to 1863. In this time period there were hundreds of private entities that went about issuing their own private bank notes allegedly created one-for-one with state bonds.

The problem with these so-called wildcat banks is that their reserves were not always verifiably backed and were thus subject to runs on the bank in which customers could not access their funds. The second issue is that unlike public money which is universally accepted at par, the wildcat bank notes had a massive secondary exchange market where notes from different banks would not trade at par. A dollar note from Wyoming bank could be worth $0.60 to a note from a Nebraska bank and these values would fluctuate depending on market conditions. As a merchant this would make business rather complicated as you would be forced to purchase goods in one set of notes, accept notes from customers and give change in a different set of notes. This was great for bankers who had access to non-public information and could arbitrage these notes for their own profits, but for the average person it was a terribly predatory and exploitative system. Private bank notes are a needlessly complicated, risky and inefficient way to run an economy and this was remedied by the National Bank Act of 1863. It was a truly terrible idea.

History tends to rhyme with itself, and today we are flirting with the same bad ideas of the past. Except now instead of wildcat banks we have wildcat tech platforms with the same aspirations. They don’t want to interface with public money, they want to become issuers of private money themselves. A fully vertically integrated form of company scrip that they issue to their investors, employees and customers to create not just a walled garden, but a walled garden where every path has a toll booth that takes only their coin. The elephant in the room that no venture investor in these projects wants to talk about is that creating private money, just like in the wildcat banking era, is a license to print money by creating markets for these coins/notes with massive position and information asymmetries baked into the design. These kinds of private money regimes are just as exploitative today as they were in the 1800s, and the so-called “web3” notion of embedding this form of institutionalized corruption as a first class structure into the internet is a terrible idea that ignores the lessons of history.

4. Crypto assets are all unregistered securities.

When we logically deconstruct the crypto narrative by tossing out the phoney populism and cult-like structure of faith in economic absurdities, we end up with an inescapable conclusion that fits firmly within our existing regulatory framework. Crypto assets are simply unregistered securities on ventures whose stated aspiration is to develop technology to become digital wildcat banks. They’ve just synthesized their corporate equity and alleged notes into one financial product.

Cryptocurrencies aren’t currencies and have no mechanism to ever become currencies. They are effectively unregulated securities where the only purpose of the products is price appreciation untethered to any economic activity. The only use case is gambling on the random price oscillations, attempting to buy low and sell high and cash out positions for wins in a real currency like dollars or euros. Yet crypto cannot create or destroy real money because unlike a stock there is no underlying company that generates income. So if you sell your crypto and make a profit in dollars, it’s exactly because a greater fool bought it at a higher price than you did. So every dollar that comes out of a cryptocurrency is because a later investor put a dollar in. They are inherently zero-sum by design, and when you take into account the casino (i.e. exchanges and miners) taking a rake on the game then the entire structure becomes strictly negative-sum. For every winner there are guaranteed to be multiple losers. It’s a game rigged by insiders by hacking human psychology.

For cryptocurrency to have any real utility, the volatility needs to cool off. If that were to happen, there would be little reason for the public to speculate on cryptocurrency prices, given that there would no longer be the potential for massive returns. The smart money exits, the liquidity disappears and the bubble collapses. This is the inevitable fate of all cryptocurrencies, and we see this reflected in the simple fact that the median return on all these thousands of flash-in-the-pan coins is zero. Every crypto coin is just on a random walk to zero by a different path.

The argument laid out in this article is a quite complicated edifice, and requires a large amount of knowledge at the intersection of several fields of study that, quite frankly, the public should not have to concern themselves with learning to safeguard themselves against fraud. Public money should just work for most people without them having to be concerned with the details. This is ultimately where cryptocurrencies tap into the ignorance, desperate faith in technical solutionism and political resentment of the public and weaponize it for the aims of these libertarian private money charlatans to engorge themselves. These guys aren’t building a new financial system, they’re just lining their own pockets.

History repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. The wild economic oscillations of yesterday’s gold standard is today’s dog meme mania. Human nature is remarkably invariant through the ages and if we don’t learn the lessons of history then we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of past generations. This time around If we’re very lucky then crypto assets simply end in a market crash and a series of progressive New Deal-like reforms to our financial system. If we’re unlucky then they accelerate the expansion of a shadow financial system used to enrich the already wealthy, increase wealth inequality to historically unprecedented levels, decrease faith in democracy and further fan the flames of populism. These trends ultimately converge to leave humanity’s fate to the wild oscillations of market manias, charismatic demagogues and strong men who promise to save us from ourselves. And we’ve seen how that story ends.