Ah yeah, the Tea Crate rebellion. I remember those times. I forgot most of the details but it was centered around the Americana sim.
I logged in last night and I still have screenshots of the countdown when Americana went down. That was a great sim. There was a replica of Fenway Park. A whole neighborhood with a diner and a fire dept. Great times.
Back then the system was much different. There was a monthly fee of $14.95, there was no tie in with real life cash (which made for a much much less greedy community), and you were taxed for every prim you rezzed. Land was very easy to grab and if you had the L$, you could have a huge piece of property and rez a whole more prims.
I even wrote some auto rezzer scripts that would automatically create a high rise building on the fly.
I remember me and Charlie Omega would go to the sandbox and do some physics experiments by linking chains across the entire sims and then turning the physics on. We crashed many sims back in the day. Good times.