An Eiffel Tower to sell to you

NOSHIT
3 min readApr 22, 2022

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paseven // shutterstock

It was the faraway year of 1925, and the con-man Victor Lustig, sitting in a hotel room in Paris, was reading the newspaper about the Eiffel Tower. This massive rustic structure had been built in 1889 and was meant to be dismantled in 1909.

The structure was built by the engineer Gustave Eiffel and came in handy as a tourist attraction and radio tower. However, now that its greatest supporter Mr.Eiffel was dead and it needed extensive repairs and maintenance, the state was considering dismantling it.

Where most would see a desperate situation, Victor saw a great opportunity. He would sell it! He printed some documents that appeared to be from the Department of Post, Telegraph and Telephone, the department in charge of public buildings. Then he got himself a fake ID, posing as an employee of this department.

Next, he sent letters to five iron salvage companies, whose representatives he met at a luxurious hotel. There he “explained” the situation of upkeep and the condition of the rusting structure. The government, he said, had no choice but to dismantle the tower, and because this was a potentially controversial action, he asked them to keep this secret.

To make it even more official, he targeted his victim, an up-and-coming businessman André Poisson and even asked him for a bribe to grant him the bid. Since it was widely known that government employees were corrupt, it all seemed legitimate to Mr.Poisson.

As promised, Victor announced to the gathered representatives of salvage companies that Mr.Poisson was the winner. He got the cash and headed for Vienna, while Mr.Poisson was laughed out of the Department of Post, Telegraph and Telephone when he went with the fake documents to claim the tower.

What made Victor Lustig successful was that he always relied on people’s greed to scam them. For example, during a boat trip from London to New York, he built a couple of “money-printing machines” for card boxes and sold them for 20$ each. Since they took up to six hours to produce a 100-dollar bill, he was long gone by the time the proud owners of the said machine had discovered the scam.

Fraud, and people looking for creative methods of fraud have been around long before computers were around. If you ever wondered why “Ponzi scheme” is named as such, it is because of Charles Ponzi, who promised investors a 50% return for investing in international mail coupons.

So it is no wonder that 98% of the thousands of new cryptocurrencies launched by initial coin offerings during 2016–2018 were either scams or just downright failures. Even today, the absolute majority of new projects either fail or turn out to be scams or pump and dump schemes. Well, as they say, shit happens!
True, it happens, but we at NOSHIT are making a serious attempt to stop shit from being the norm of the new cryptocurrency projects. For this web3 has been a blessing. Based on the incorruptible blockchain, all parties will be satisfied through smart contracts, no matter if circumstances or feelings change. Web3 is the ace under our sleeves because a third party does not control it, and all the contracts are open-source.

NSH organization’s services are offered through web3, our coin, our platform, NFTs, and the NSH token smeller. Everything is in the open, everything for all to see. Of course, corporations will not cease to commission negative articles about web3. Probably because they still have an Eiffel Tower to sell to you.

Written by:
Hunter S. Shitson
@GonzoShitson

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NOSHIT

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