Earthcoin logo, as the project used it in 2014.

A search of the archive

EarthcoinWas it a thing? Was it a scam?

Earthcoin (EAC) turns up 36 times across the WCN, Mad Bitcoins, Bitcoin Group and Ugly Old Goat archive, between January 2014 and July 2022. It arrives as a lapel pin, becomes a donation tier, and then spends eight years as one of the half-dozen names reached for whenever the shows want to say altcoins die. On the second question the archive is unusually clear, and the answer is no.

By volume this is almost nothing: 36 items out of 692,072 is a rounding error, and 15 of the 36 are the same list of dead coins recited over and over. But the mentions are not scattered noise. They fall into two tight clusters with a three-year gap between them, and the same object means opposite things on either side of the gap. That shape is the finding.

01  ·  MethodWhat was searched, and what counts

The first stop was the Brain archive, 692,072 items with a full-text index over transcripts, tweets, likes, Facebook exports and the screenshot OCR corpus. Three query forms were needed, because Whisper does not spell the coin consistently: earthcoin (17 items), the two-word phrase "earth coin" (20 items, no overlap with the first set), and getearthcoin (one further liked tweet). That is 38 items. A separate pass over llm-wiki/data.json (1,934 WCN and MB episode records) and the 485 TBG transcript mirrors found nothing the database had missed.

Two of the 38 are discarded. A BlockCon panel on 12 October 2017 is discussing Nexus Earth, an unrelated project. A chat joke on 5 September 2018 concerns Middle Earth coin and J.R.R. Tolkien. Neither is Earthcoin. That leaves 36.

Who said it

These transcripts have no speaker labels — they are Whisper output, one undifferentiated stream per episode. Tier A: the programme's own machinery points forwards to the speaker, or it is a single-voice programme. Tier A−: the machinery points backwards — the turn ends in a hand-off, so the speaker is the one running the running order; or third-person elimination leaves one name. Tier B: the roster is known from the show's own cold open, but which person spoke the line is not established, and nothing is named. Every quote below prints its grounds.

02  ·  Was it a thing?Three weeks in January 2014

Earthcoin enters the archive on 16 January 2014, in a Mad Bitcoins round-up of new listings on Cryptsy. The reason he has heard of it is not the technology.

The same episode is where the question “was it a thing” gets complicated, because the show announces a standing arrangement that bears directly on why Earthcoin got covered at all.

That is disclosed openly on air rather than hidden, and it is a statement about the show's incentives, not about Earthcoin's conduct. But it is the context the 27 January segment sits in, and a reader asking how seriously the coin was taken deserves to have it.

Eleven days later Earthcoin gets its full segment and a slot in the episode title — the only time in 1,934 catalogued WCN and MB episodes that it appears in a title. Roughly three minutes of specs delivered straight. Note that even in the enthusiastic segment, the technical description is not a recommendation.

So: how seriously was it taken? The honest answer is that in the archive, Earthcoin is never assessed on its merits by anyone. Its selling points as presented are a charity mining pool, a list of odd things you could buy with it, and a pin. The one substantive technical remark — “bizarre… it's complicated” — is not a compliment. That is the whole of the enthusiastic period, and it is about three weeks long.

03  ·  The artefactsWhat physically survives

The logoThe mark the project used through 2014 — a leaf forming a lowercase e, inside a blue circle. The same image was the avatar on two separate Earthcoin accounts. Source: @getearthcoin profile image, uploaded Feb 2014; identical to @EarthCoinNews. Reproduced for identification.

The episode27 January 2014 — the broadcast on which he said “I'm even wearing one today”. A round lapel pin is visible on his right lapel. Source: local archive, tube/thumbs, MB_20140127_lKb9roV42jU.

The pin, such as it isThe lapel detail at maximum enlargement — about 23 pixels square in the source. A round pale badge is unmistakably there. The resolution does not permit identifying it as the Earthcoin pin, and this report does not claim it does. For the pin photographed properly, see the maker's own photo. Crop of the above. 8× upscale, no other processing.

04  ·  Was it a scam?Four different claims, kept apart

“Went to zero”, “was abandoned”, “was hyped” and “was a scam” are four different allegations, and the archive supports three of them about Earthcoin and not the fourth. To test this rather than assert it, every one of the 25 transcript items containing the word was scanned for fraud vocabulary — scam, fraud, ponzi, rug, stolen, criminal, pre-mine, insta-mine, pump and dump, shill, fake — within 900 characters of the mention.

Three items matched. In all three, the word attaches to a different coin.

The sharpest evidence is a single passage from 31 May 2018, because the speaker draws the distinction himself, in one breath. He has been describing Paycoin's marketing at a Miami conference — produced television commercials, branded booths, a bag of swag.

One honest limit on that conclusion. Absence of an allegation in this archive is not a finding about Earthcoin's conduct in the world — it is a finding about what four shows said. Anything about the project's actual fate beyond these transcripts would be outside context, and this report does not reach for it.

05  ·  Other voicesGuests, callers and the chat

These were panel and call-in formats, so Earthcoin came up with other people in the room. They are a thin seam — most mentions are host monologue — but the outside voices are the ones who assessed it rather than simply listing it.

The most substantive is Chris Ellis, a named guest on Bitcoin Talk Show #4, answering a viewer question about whether “green coin” environmental claims are nonsense. His answer groups Earthcoin into that category and then makes a structural objection to the entire class of project.

That is the closest the archive comes to anyone evaluating Earthcoin's premise, and the verdict is not that it was fraudulent — it is that it should not have been a currency at all.

The other named outside voices are briefer. Philip, a caller from Ghana, prompts the 7 August 2018 pump-and-dump answer by asking what happened to BitConnect — it is his question that puts Earthcoin into a sentence about market manipulation, and the manipulation described is done to such coins. Derek J Freeman co-hosts the 13 August 2014 show where the 300-to-five-satoshi collapse is stated, and a caller using the handle crypto2crypto is the one asking about altcoin valuations that day. A guest addressed as Abihl on 9 August 2018 is discussing multi-coin wallets when the host observes that the coins you would have wanted one for — “mega coin and earth coin and tarot coin” — are all dead.

And the last Earthcoin mention in the entire archive is not his at all.

Eight years on, the dead-coin litany has escaped its author and is being recited by someone else on the panel, in the same fixed order.

06  ·  The turnMarch to August 2014

By early March the altcoin market has rolled over, and Earthcoin shows up in the archive's most interesting single line — someone on Good Morning Bitcoin describing having bought it early and failed to sell the top. That someone cannot be identified. The programme has two voices on it that day and the transcript has no speaker labels, so the most quotable sentence in this whole report is also the one sentence in it that nobody can be named for. It is reproduced because it is evidence about the show; it is not evidence about the host.

That caution matters, because the archive does establish a weaker but real fact in his own voice. On 20 May 2014 he replies to a follower from his own account: “I still have my earthcoin pin. and my megacoin one. I like pins.” What is documented in his own voice is the pin, not the position: the archive nowhere establishes that Thomas Hunt personally held Earthcoin.

By August the price talk has hardened into a warning, and this one can be named.

A fall from 300 satoshis to five, stated flatly, with no suggestion that the January segment was a mistake and no retraction of it either. That is the closest the archive comes to a reversal, and it is not much of one: the tone is the same tone, applied to a worse number.

The donation tier

Between those two points Earthcoin quietly becomes infrastructure. Twice in 2014 — on 21 April and again in one of the 21 October livestreams — it appears in the altcoin donor readout, one unit at a time, between Chinacoin and Cryptsy points. (Punctuation added; the transcript of this passage is an unbroken run of words.)

That is the donation-for-coverage offer of 16 January, closing its loop in April. The thinnest mention of the year is 6 June, where Earthcoin is one of fourteen coins supported by a newly approved Facebook tipping app. After the October livestreams the archive goes quiet on it for three years and three months.

07  ·  2018–2022The list

Earthcoin returns on 27 January 2018 and never again appears as a thing in itself. From here it is a name in a list — always the same list, with small variations: Megacoin, Terracoin, Feathercoin, Peercoin, Primecoin, Earthcoin. Fifteen of the 36 mentions are this list.

On 24 June the list is deployed as an argument rather than a lament, answering a chat comment from a newcomer asking why Adam Meister is “always bagging on alt coins”.

A week later the press catches up to a fact the show had been repeating for four years, and the point being made is a technical one, and the right one: the fatal event was not the price reaching zero but the mining network switching off.

The list also becomes a joke. In the Working Man's Bitcoin Cruise sketch — recorded with the Ugly Old Goat and present in three archive copies between September 2019 and January 2020 — the pitch is altcoin timeshares: “Feather coin is a very popular coin. Or you can get you mega-coin. We have Earth coin, Terra-coin, and one coin.” — quoting the Ugly Old Goat copy of 11 October 2019, the cleanest of the three transcripts. The sketch is a two-hander and the lines are not separable, so nothing is named.

08  ·  Every mentionThe full table

All 36 genuine items, in order. The 2022 TBG episode is held in the archive twice, once as a WCN transcript and once as a TBG mirror; it is one episode.

09  ·  What the archive showsRead against the record

Earthcoin did die, and the later mentions are correct about it on the merits. There is no case here of being wrong about something that later mattered.

What is interesting is quieter. The January 2014 coverage is not a bad call so much as a category error the archive later corrects in public. The reason Earthcoin got a segment and a title slot was never a technical judgement — it was an enamel pin, a charity pool in Sydney, alligator meat, and a standing offer that donating a coin improved its chances of a video. The show was covering altcoin culture, and in early 2014 no distinction was being drawn between covering a coin and endorsing one. By 2018 that distinction is the whole point of bringing Earthcoin up, and what makes the later segments persuasive is precisely that the speaker was there, wearing the pin.

Three further things the table shows that a summary would hide. First, the reversal is not an event — there is no episode where he says he was wrong about Earthcoin, and the 2018 passages never mention that he once gave it a title slot. The correction is implied by repetition, not stated. Second, by 2018 Earthcoin has stopped being a coin and become a word: a fixed, almost liturgical phrase recited fifteen times across four and a half years, until by 2022 another panelist is reciting it too. Third, and most surprising given how freely these shows used the word “scam” about other projects — Paycoin, BitConnect, pre-mined launches — nobody ever used it about Earthcoin. It was allowed to have simply failed.

The pin is the only part of the story with a documented happy ending. In May 2014, with the coin already down some 80% from its January peak and three months before he put the fall at 98% on air, he still had it, and said so. No photograph of it survives.

10  ·  SourcesEverything cited, with links

Every episode, tweet and image this report draws on. Links were checked on 14 October 2026; where one no longer resolves that is recorded rather than hidden, because the disappearance is part of the record. Nothing here is a reconstructed or guessed URL — where no link could be established, the entry says so.