The Long Island Iced 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."
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 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 former Long Island Iced Tea Company is following the lead of other companies that have seen their value skyrocket after announcing blockchain-related moves. One small financial technology company saw its value skyrocket after it announced a blockchain-related acquisition. In October, a biotech company saw its value skyrocket after it renamed itself "Riot Blockchain."
Iced tea company rebrands as "Long Blockchain" and stock price triples
$24 million iced tea company says it's pivoting to the blockchain, and its stock jumps 200%
Update: Bitcoin Tumbles Below $14,000 as Investors Face ‘Reality Check'
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Last month we covered the story of the Long Island Iced Tea Company rebranding itself as Long Blockchain as part of a broader shift in corporate strategy. The company's stock price tripled over night.
On Friday, we got the first concrete details of the company's new blockchain strategy. Long Blockchain planned to raise up to $8.4 million with a stock offering and then use some of the money to buy 1,000 Antminer S9 bitcoin mining machines. The machines would be "installed in a world-class third-party data center experienced in cryptocurrency mining and located in a Nordic country."
But today Long Blockchain announced it was scrapping the stock offering. The company says that it's still planning to buy bitcoin-mining hardware. However, Long Blockchain says that it "can make no assurances that it will be able to finance the purchase of the mining equipment."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Friday December 22 2017, @02:24PM (8 children)
So they figured there was enough really stupid rich people and stock brokers that would buy anything if it was just branded the right way -- after all they have experience in this field already from selling bottled water (or ice tea). A fool and his money are soon parted ...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 22 2017, @02:36PM (7 children)
Just beware of the crash when this bubble bursts. Hopefully that'll happen with the R team in office. It'll yet again take the whole stock market with it.
Goddess, people are stupid.
Out of curiosity, does anybody have a timeline of the dot com bubble or the housing bubble? It would be good to know the amount of time it takes for something like “dot com” or “subprime” to become trendy in the investment world, become horribly over-valued, and then crash. 4 years? 6 years?
I've already moved some of my retirement savings to money market so hopefully I don't get caught with my pants down this time around. It's interesting how having an R team president causes investors to become manic, but I think the depressive symptoms may settle in next year. Reality always asserts itself.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 22 2017, @04:21PM (3 children)
> 4 years? 6 years?
My impression is that the cycle time is getting shorter & shorter, driven by faster/wider communication. Or maybe it's being driven by shorter attention spans. Up until this bump with bitcoin & blockchain, it was looking like bad car loans were going to be a big factor in the next crash(?)
Anyway, came here to say,
Turtles are old hat, it's clearly tulips all the way down now
(there isn't much of anything supporting the earth anymore).
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday December 22 2017, @06:25PM (1 child)
Looking more like crying Snowflakes all the way down.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 22 2017, @06:53PM
I dunno, libertarians don't support much of anything let alone an entire world.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday December 23 2017, @10:47AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday December 22 2017, @06:46PM
If anyone definitively knew how long a bubble would last, they could make a ton of money in that prediction:
1. Go long on the assets in the bubble until the predicted end of the bubble.
2. Sell, then go short just before the bubble bursts.
Many people have tried this. Most of them don't succeed.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday December 23 2017, @10:36AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 23 2017, @11:37AM
In each case, most of the action happened in the last two years. When you have high levels of exponential growth or even superexponential growth, the last bit contains most of the growth in an absolute sense.
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Friday December 22 2017, @03:01PM (10 children)
This might have gone over some peoples' heads, but the name was already a joke. A "Long Island Ice Tea" is a mixed alcoholic drink in North America that originated during prohibition. It has a deliberately misleading name. It's often used by "clever" people to "fool" non-drinkers into accepting an alcoholic drink (or so goes the rumor - never seen it done successfully in person).
I don't know if its a purely American joke or not, but was surprised to see no reports mentioning this.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Friday December 22 2017, @03:04PM (4 children)
Can verify ... have seen done successfully in person. Ah, we all still talk about it :)
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Friday December 22 2017, @05:24PM (3 children)
That's a pretty dumb joke. Did you just throw away the drink after that person noticed the alcohol after the first sip, or was it a Hollywood/SFV miracle where the person who was against something totally embraces it after being tricked ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 22 2017, @06:08PM (2 children)
Or was the duped person not able to tell there was alcohol? Some long islands mask the alcohol taste pretty well, and if someone has no drinking experience it could just taste a bit off.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Nerdfest on Friday December 22 2017, @06:13PM
I think he claims he couldn't tell. Still talks about what a great night out it was though.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday December 22 2017, @08:04PM
Oh yeah, I ordered one on my 25th birthday (I am normally completely teetotal, and let me tell you, with 2 jobs one of which is food service, teetotal is hard...) knowing what it was. It went down nice and easy, and I really could not tell it was alcoholic from the taste. ...the way the sidewalk kept tilting, now, that was a pretty good clue :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday December 22 2017, @04:09PM (4 children)
The explanation I've heard is that when properly made, it's supposed to taste like iced tea, even though there's none in it. Wikipedia claims it's because the Coke gives it an iced tea-like color.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Friday December 22 2017, @05:35PM (3 children)
Must be more than one recipe, I don't think there's Coke in the version I was shown.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday December 22 2017, @05:48PM
There are dozens of recipes, but all that I've seen have a splash of coke.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday December 22 2017, @05:50PM
Inasmuch as there's more than one recipe for the vast majority of cocktails, sure. I mean, Wikipedia cites the International Bartenders Association recipe, so seems legit.
http://iba-world.com/cocktails/long-island-iced-tea/ [iba-world.com]
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Friday December 22 2017, @07:13PM
The long island has more variants than any other mixed drink I know of. My personal favorite is the blue motherfucker: Sprite and blue Curacao in lieu of coke.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 22 2017, @03:24PM
Soylent is so late to this story that the stock crashed and bounced halfway back in the time it took you to publish.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Friday December 22 2017, @03:52PM
Anyone familiar with the history of the East India Company and British Hong Kong's banking and silver & cash crops trade will tell you there are any number of plausible reasons for a tea company to show interest in bitcoin post-Brexit.
compiling...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 22 2017, @04:34PM (1 child)
Expect trendy trend follower and expert cocksucker Michael David Crawford to change his company name to Soggy Blockchain today.
(Score: 5, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday December 22 2017, @11:26PM
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