Bitcoin wallet service provider 37coins, Inc. has decided to shut down operations after failing to gain traction in the marketplace.

Founded in 2013, 37coins provided a SMS based Bitcoin wallet service for people they condescendingly referred to (seriously) as the “unbanked” and “unteched” in (again, you can’t make this up) “developing economies without Internet access.”

Their social justice liberal guilt business plan involved (again, seriously) individuals with the Internet signing up to be a “gateway operator” to meditate transactions and to earn fee, despite the fact the service was being pitched to those in horrible “developing” countries who don’t have smartphones, or banks, or god help all those poor souls: internet access.

“Despite the best of intentions, we were unable to deliver a quality product that showed product-market fit,” a post to Medium on the closure said, before adding “We also found that SMS delivery between different carriers in countries outside the USA is unreliable.”

Decoded that means that that 37coins couldn’t deliver a product anyone wanted, and that given none of their founders have probably ever traveled outside of North America, they were shocked to discover that SMS isn’t always reliable in those countries that aren’t America, that are still developing, and don’t have internet access…apparently.

The last excuse, and possibly by far the most LOL-worthy: “Lastly, our initial objective was not possible to achieve with the amount of capital raised,” which decoded is even blind Freddy can see that a group of social justice warriors based in Sunnyvale, CA, that had absolutely no f***ing idea how the markets they were trying to cater to worked, wasn’t worth wasting another cent on.

Dumb and dumber

There are some good companies out there using Bitcoin to provide services to those people with restricted access to banking services, such as Coins.ph, but the key difference there is that these companies either work on the ground in the country they’re trying to provide services to, or in the local region, so they understand concepts such as “developing countries” having internet access and that smartphone usage is actually widespread, even in some of the really poorer countries.

All the best intent in the world means sweat f**k all if you don’t do your homework first including researching your market on the ground, particularly when you already have a condescending attitude about the people you’re trying to provide a service for coming into business.

The clowns behind 37coins pissed $525,000 up against a wall prior to closing.

The author notes that this post has been written from the Old Quarter of Hanoi, Vietnam, where his biggest gripe is that there is no 4G LTE coverage yet and he has to suffer with 3G HSPA+

Image credit: meaact/Flickr/CC by 2.0