But for all his big plans, Harris failed to even get a booth selling grilled corn and barbecue at the national powwow, where he was hoping to pitch the coin to fellow Lakotas.

He couldn’t keep his MazaCoin team together, either. In April, AnonymousPirate, who once called Harris his “spiritual brother and best friend," left the team allegedly due to disagreements over his use of a pseudonym.

“I told him he had to come out with his real name if we wanted to be serious about it,” Harris recalls. “He wasn’t too keen on that.” (AnonymousPirate declined to comment for this story.)

Even Nick Spanos, who once championed Harris, has revised his expectations. “He’s fucked,” he laments, then catches himself and strikes a more hopeful tone. “It’s not a waste; it’s still alive. He’s a smart guy.”

Half a year from its frenzied inception, the founder of MazaCoin found himself up to his elbows in suds and grease, working as a dishwasher at a local chain restaurant for $10 an hour. He is still struggling to convince vendors to accept the coin in exchange for goods or services both in Rapid City and on the reservation in Pine Ridge. Despite its triumphant debut, MazaCoin is nearly worthless, trading at $0.000078 (as of Sept. 10), valued only by traders who play on the daily fluctuations of altcoins.

“You have a catch-22,” Harris says. “You have people with MazaCoin with nowhere to spend it. You have retailers who are like, ‘We’ll use it once people have it to spend.’”

If Harris only wanted to invent another cryptocurrency, he’d be perfectly emblematic of the crypto scene: unfailingly optimistic, technologically obsessed, and supremely self-assured. But he breaks with the movement in his motivations – he seems to genuinely believe in using MazaCoin to improve his local community, rather than to enrich himself or subvert the state. His apparent good intentions haven’t been enough to rally his tribe or even keep the project afloat, but Harris is unfazed by MazaCoin’s slow progress.

“Now all the hype is gone, and it’s time to get the real work in,” he says. “We’re only six months old. We’re still in an era where we can kind of have our ups and downs.”

Perhaps in another place like Silicon Valley, Payu Harris might have more ups. On Pine Ridge, he is at best misunderstood; at worst, regarded as a snake oil salesman. In the cryptocurrency scene, his coin struggles to make its case. Without the support of either community, it’s all too possible that MazaCoin will join the other non-entities at the bottom of the altcoin graveyard.

“If the tribe’s going to sit around and not take advantage of the technology, that’s their choice,” Harris says. “But we’re going to see how far we can go with it, whether it’s going to be another tribe, country or continent.”

The next day, Harris wakes up to an email from the online coin exchange. MazaCoin was not delisted; a technical glitch caused its disappearance.

MazaCoin lives to trade another day.