base network — file reopened

maxcoin

$MAXCOIN

In 2014 two people took a television host's joke about being naked on air and turned it into a Bitcoin fork. The genesis block was mined live, on camera, in front of an audience that had no idea what it was watching. This is that name, back onchain.

contract · base 0xb20000000000000000000057b754cfd33e493f01
buy on base basescan dexscreener
The Maxcoin token: a white M with a struck vertical stroke, struck into a blue coin
the mark, minted 0x0000000000000000

01

genesis

How a punchline acquired a hash function.

  1. dec 2013

    the bet

    Max Keiser, host of the Keiser Report, jokes on Twitter that if a coin carrying his name ever reaches a billion dollar market cap, he will present the show naked. He is not writing a specification. Someone reads it as one.

  2. jan 2014

    the build

    Keiser asks publicly whether anybody can fork Bitcoin for him. Jordan Fish — @cobie, a university student at the time — replies, and builds it with Luke Mitchell and a group from his university. SHA-256 comes out, Keccak goes in. A celebrity coin, years before anybody used that phrase without wincing.

  3. 28 jan 2014

    episode 555

    Keiser Report 555, titled Launch of Maxcoin. The genesis block is mined on air by the man the coin is named after. No presale. No deck. A studio, a camera, and a hash landing in real time.

  4. 2014 →

    the forum years

    Thread 438150 on Bitcointalk. r/maxcoinproject on Reddit. Pool operators, block explorers, miners, arguments, a logo. The paper trail was never taken down and you can still read all of it.

  5. now

    back onchain

    $MAXCOIN on Base. Same name, same joke, different chain. Everything on this page that is history can be checked in the archive below; everything that is a token can be checked onchain.

02

the fork

What the 2014 chain actually was — with the builder's own account attached.

base protocol
Bitcoin, forked
hashing
Keccak-256 — SHA-3 family — in place of SHA-256
signatures
Schnorr. Cobie's claim: the first coin to use them
block time
Shorter than Bitcoin's
launch
Proof of work. No premine, no dev allocation, no VCs
original ticker
MAX
genesis
28 January 2014, mined live on air
built by
Jordan Fish (@cobie), Luke Mitchell and a group from Fish's university
named for
Max Keiser, Keiser Report
status
History. This site is the Base memecoin, not the 2014 chain.
@cobie
“1st coin to use schnorr signatures (which bitcoin later adopted btw)”

Eight years later Cobie walked through the whole build in a thread: Keiser asked on Twitter whether anyone could fork Bitcoin for him, Cobie — then at university — answered, and the group shipped a Bitcoin fork with a shorter block time and Keccak-256. No premine, no dev tokens, no funding. He says the mining launch was competitive enough that he ended up with none of the coins.

read the thread on x

03

episode 555

The only token launch that needed a wardrobe clause.

A billion dollar market cap and I do the show naked.

the tweet, paraphrased — the one the fork was built on

Every launch since has been a livestream, a countdown, a bonding curve. This one was broadcast television. The host mined the first block of a chain named after himself, live, while explaining on air what a block was.

The market cap condition was never met. The wardrobe was never tested. The chain kept producing blocks anyway, which is more than most launches from that year managed.

04

archive

Primary sources. Read them before you believe anything here.

bitcointalk · thread 438150

the announcement thread

The original launch thread: pool talk, mining troubleshooting, and every argument that came with it.

bitcointalk.org reddit · r/maxcoinproject

the subreddit

Where the project lived once the broadcast ended. Still standing, still public, still readable.

reddit.com x · @cobie

jordan fish

Co-creator. Went on to do other things in this industry, most of them louder than a Bitcoin fork.

x.com/cobie

05

onchain

One address. Verify it somewhere that is not this page.

contract address · base

0xb20000000000000000000057b754cfd33e493f01

06

acquisition

Four steps, no ceremony.

  1. 01

    get a wallet

    Any EVM wallet does the job. Coinbase Wallet, Rabby, MetaMask.

  2. 02

    fund it on base

    Bridge or buy ETH on Base. Leave a little spare for gas.

  3. 03

    paste the contract

    Use the address above. Compare it character by character against Basescan.

  4. 04

    swap

    Set sane slippage, confirm, done. Nobody here is going to tell you the number.

everyone else is on x

The account posts. The community is where the rest of it happens.

@maxcoinisbased x community