Ice Tea Company Rebrands as 'Long Blockchain' and Stock Price Triples (arstechnica.com)

The Long Island Ice Tea Corporation is exactly what it sounds like: a company that sells people bottled iced tea and lemonade. But today the company announced a significant change of strategy that would start with changing its name to "Long Blockchain Corporation." From a report: The company was "shifting its primary corporate focus towards the exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology," the company said in a Thursday morning press release. "Emerging blockchain technologies are creating a fundamental paradigm shift across the global marketplace," the company said. The stock market loved the announcement. Trading opened Thursday morning more than 200 percent higher than Wednesday night's closing price. The company isn't getting out of the iced tea business. "The Company will continue to operate Long Island Brand Beverages, LLC as a wholly-owned subsidiary," the company writes in its press release. The new blockchain efforts are only in their "preliminary stages," the press release says, and will likely involve investing or forming partnerships with other companies. One potential partner is providing "blockchain infrastructure for the financial services industry." Another is building a "new smart contract platform for building decentralized applications."

Comments

Fools and Money.

[Zorro]

Soon to be separated.

Re:Fools and Money.

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes sense, really. Anyone that is willing to invest money in crypto is probably willing to throw it away on this stock too.

Re:Fools and Money.

[Oswald McWeany]

Soon to be separated.

It's all a gamble at this point. They're fools if they think a company will continue to grow just because they have blockchain in their name. They're not fools if they think other fools will think that and get in early to take the money from the fools.

If they're investing to feed off the other fools, they're gamblers, not necessarily fools.

Re: Fools and Money.

[ArmoredDragon]

Sort of. The underlying premise behind blockchain is a good idea, but Bitcoin will never work for its intended purpose, and so it will probably crash really hard. In fact this may even trigger the next recession just like the dot-com bubble did. Probably won't happen for a year or two, but it will happen.

We can call this the bitcoin bubble, even though many other popular ones (ethereum, bch) have the same problems. But like the dot-com bubble before it, the premise isn't bad, it's just people are creating these business models that won't ever go anywhere. Once the hype dies off, we'll begin seeing more stability, and a rise in currencies that aren't dependent upon miners and have low/no transaction fees.

In my opinion, keep an eye on decred and/or IOTA, or currencies like them, as the model they use makes them viable as a currency rather than as a mere financial instrument backed by nothing.

Ah, the "Serial Entepreneur"...

[ErichTheRed]

Anyone who's done any work for typical small-to-medium businesses owned and dominated by one person could see this coming a mile away. When I was starting out I worked for a couple of MSPs that were quite obviously pet projects for the owner. People like this will chase after anything that looks like they can squeeze a few bucks out before the bubble pops. It's just a personality trait -- they're hard-wired to chase money and will bounce from thing to thing picking up the crumbs, and seem naturally attracted to scammy business models.

A perfect example where I live is solar panels. There are dozens of fly-by-night companies who've set up shop alongside the big boys like Harvest Power and SolarCity. Every single one is just trying to sell sell sell enough people on overpriced equipment and service until the tax credits get repealed. When that happens, oops, business goes bankrupt and they move on. Federal tax credit on solar is 30% on equipment and installation, so every single one of these companies is marking the price of systems up by at least a few percent beyond that, and are directly taking advantage of the fact that most people are too dumb to understand how their taxes are computed. They just see "OMG huge tax credit" and sign up...and people like this Long Blockchain guy get to live large another day.

Yeah, it's 1999 again

[SlaveToTheGrind]

Just substitute "blockchain" for "dot com."

Quoting Mencken

[hey!]

"No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby"

Not so new

[Deadstick]

There used to be a railroad in the eastern US called the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, "air line" being a railroad term for "as the crow flies". Its stock price had a tendency to follow airline stocks.

Reminds me of Snap Interactive isn't Snap Inc.

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Recently I read that only 15% of Americans actually own stocks. It would appear that maybe some of those 15% don't really know what they are doing. Earlier this year before Snap Inc. (parent company of Snapchat and other programs) did its IPO, an unrelated company named Snap Interactive suddenly started having a lot more interest in its stock because people thought it was the parent company of Snapchat. Snap Interactive didn't even do anything to deceive anybody. People just wrong assumed they owned Snapchat. What's sad is that they could do just a small amount of research via searches on Google, Bing, etc. and determine that Snap Interactive wasn't the owner of Snapchat, but heck, it's just easier to buy stock on speculation rather than check stuff so let's do that.