Mike Judge’s hit TV series “Silicon Valley” has always had a special relationship with cryptocurrencies. Even back in 2014, the follow-up to the pilot had the nihilistic grindcore-loving Satanist character Gilfoyle suggest a Bitcoin payment for his coding services at the data compression start-up “Pied Piper”. A few episodes later, when the crew requires a powerful data server, the strangely-likeable passive-aggressive Canadian brings racks of video cards from what looks like a cryptocurrency mining rig and builds “Anton”.
These fine details have been there since the very beginning, but it wasn’t until the fifth season that the producers revealed their interest in crypto. The new opening credits (See image above) now feature the headquarters of Coinbase as the building gets erected by bitcoin and a nearby crane spins litecoins and ethers too. This was all over the crypto news in late March, also reported by CryptoGlobe, and caused a lot of buzz and speculation within the community.
As season 5 progressed, the character Gilfoyle had confirmed his bullish Bitcoin tendencies by revealing that he runs a mining operation for which he set up a hilarious grindcore profitability alarm. Though the joke was hilarious throughout the episode, it still didn’t live up to the expectations that the crypto-friendly intro segment generated… Until now!
In Ep7 Se5 Silicon Valley finally features ICOs!
After all, there’s a reason why they feature the Ethereum logo in the opening credits: after Richard Hendricks makes the poor decision of helping the cold-blooded CEO Laurie Bream make use of a big chunk of the Pier Piper network (and the offering recklessly gets sold to the highest bidder), the folks need to figure out a way to pull out of this bad deal. Jared Dunn suggests that the cost of the operation is no less than $1.6 million, so the builders of the new decentralized internet once again need to find a way to get funding.
“You want an alternative to Laurie Bream? Well, it’s Pied Piper Coin”, says the crypto-bullish Gilfoyle, thus becoming the character who introduces ICOs in the series. As the CEO of Pied Piper, Richard feels a little reluctant and decides to seek advice from his long-time friend and investor Monica. As it turns out, the former assistant of the late Peter Gregory isn’t too keen on ICOs and suggests the folks to talk to none other than Russ “radio on the internet” Hanneman.
In a hilarious scene, Russ implies that he failed to succeed in all of his 36 ICOs and finds a justification that’s really fitting for his egocentric competitive character: “It’s not always about money, sometimes it’s about wisdom”.
These are the details that you can find in the teaser promo HBO has given us, and it’s going to be interesting to see which blockchain Gilfoyle uses to issue the tokens for the Pied Piper ICO: is it going to be Ethereum’s, NEO’s, Cardano’s, or NEM’s?
Episode 7 of the current Silicon Valley season is definitely going to be the most interesting for the entire cryptocurrency community, as the entire premise revolves around a planned Pied Piper ICO. Is it going to end just as tragically as Russ Hanneman’s attempts? Well, we’re definitely going to watch the episode air on Sunday, May 6th 2018, and follow up this report with a more in-depth analysis!
If you’ve missed the teaser promo, you may watch it here
