Welcome to the new Alt-Cracks column on its new day: Thursdays. The main reason for the move is because I am selfish. I want the clicks and the eyeballs that come from bored crypto-maniacs browsing Cointelegraph while pretending to work. Those views are important to me, because as a writer, I am constantly seeking validation and arbitrary viewership and sharing numbers is the only measuring stick we have in the online publishing industry.

This week we have the NSA thwarting KoreCoin Anon VoIPA calling system, a BlueCoin Giveaway lasting until Halloween, a potential scam jumps on the drug-backed coin bandwagon and Dogecoin gets a very large merchant.

KoreCoin Adds Anonymous VoIP

While most of the cryptoworld is focused on making a secure chat program, KoreCoin has made the old fashioned way of communicating, noises made with our mouth, secure from NSA snooping as well.

KoreCoin's killer feature, just released this past week, is its Anonymous Voice over IP calling system. Yes, you can send messages, in text, through the same system, but that has been done before and will be done again. What is special here is that KoreCoin's calling features are completely secure (so long as KoreCoin's Tor integrated Network remains secure) something that has not been the case for Americans since Congress required that telecommunication companies make it easy for law enforcement to tap phones.

If you are at all concerned about the NSA, GCHQ or similar organizations snooping on your private communications, KoreCoin might be something you should look into.

BlueCoin Will Pay You For A Mascot

BlueCoin wants to get on the cute mascot bandwagon, and they are giving away three million BlueCoins (0.46 BTC at current rates) to the community member that designs the best. Running from October 31st (That's Halloween for you non-Westerners) until November 30th ,the winner will be decided by the community in a week long voting process.

The submission must be 100 % original, be submitted with five different angles and use colors complementary or identical to the BlueCoin's current logo's colors. They are looking for something like a cross between the Reddit Alien and Stitch from the Disney movie Lilo & Stitch.

First and second runner-ups will get rewarded as well (to the tune of one million and 5,000,000 BlueCoins respectively) so if you have any artistic talent and a bit of time on your hands, get drawing!

Mushroomcoin Looks Like A Hallucination

I came across Mushroomcoin on an alt-coin focused news sites. For a moment is seemed interesting, but only for a moment because it was quickly apparent that the developers are not who they say they are.

Mushroomcoin is attempting to piggyback on the success of the various Cannabis-themed Coins that have had so much success lately. But while Marijuana recently became legal under state law in two States, psychedelic mushrooms are not legal anywhere in the U.S. when prepared for human consumption. There are a few countries where the sacred mushrooms are legal, but with no merchants listed, the entire thing seemed fishy.

It didn't take long for Bitcointalk users to start calling the Pre-Announcement out on its bullshit. The images posted on the announcement page are all stolen from Psychedelic mushroom enthusiast sites. That, combined with no Proof-of-Developer, no escrow, no details on which shops will support the coin (they claim four, but give no further details) and a whitepaper that has more grammar mistakes than facts is seems to scream “scam!”

While I won't be covering every scamcoin that comes along, this one did get a bit of media attention and with the recent growth of Marijuana backed coins, a magic Mushroom backed coin may appeal to some investors and psychonaughts. The developers may yet turn things around, but I am willing to bet a fully colonized mycelium cake against a spore print that no one will ever buy magic mushrooms using Mushroomcoin.

Twitch.tv Throws Dogecoin A Bone

Finally, we have big news for Dogecoin users. Twitch.tv now accepts Doge for subscriptions. I have to admit, I totally called it wrong when it came to Twitch.tv and e-sports in general. I, as a lifetime gamer, never imagined a world where people would spend their time (and Doge) to watch other people play video games.

I was wrong. Earlier this year, Twitch.tv surpassed Facebook and Hulu to become the third largest consumer of bandwidth (behind only Google and Netflix) during peak hours. Which may have had something to do with Amazon buying Twitch for nearly a billion dollars. Clearly, I underestimated the appeal of watching other people play.

Being attached to such a large vendor, even if it is one that also takes Circle K gift cards for payment, caused a jump in price, with Doge regaining the value it lost over the weekend and then some.

That is all for this week. If you feel like your coin's story fell through the cracks, feel free to contact me at [email protected] or reach out to me on Twitter @iandemartino. As always, no coin, company or community can pay their way into this article. News needs to be relatively new and cannot simply be a summary of your coin's features in order to be considered.