The Power of Bitcoin Memes. Bitcoin Tech Talk Issue #223

To the moon. Number go up. Bitcoin fixes this. Run the numbers. Have fun staying poor. Few understand this.

If you don’t recognize these phrases, you probably aren’t on Twitter. These are called memes and they make up a significant part of the Bitcoin culture. They are effective because they’re easy to remember, quickly understood and hav a deeper meaning than most people realize. Memes are rhetorical, that is, they use language effectively. Unfortunately, so is a lot of advertising and much of that is meaningless. The temptation, then, is to dismiss memes the same way we do ads, as meaningless fluff to be discarded.

That would be a mistake. The reason is because memes aren’t like ads. They thrive not on paid placements, but on their effective summation of deeper concepts. In other words, there’s dialectic behind the rhetoric which perpetuate them. With that in mind, I’ve taken a crack at explaining the deeper meaning, or dialectic, behind all these memes.

“To the moon” started as a way to describe the stratospheric heights that we expected Bitcoin to go. There’s also the idea that the moon is something to achieve, somewhere to go that’s difficult, referencing the Apollo program and requires a lot of effort to get to. In other words, there’s work to be done, not mere passivity in the midst of the development of this community. It’s a call to participate and do something and not merely watch. The moon is a destination that we can aspire to get to.

“Number go up” is a way to describe the reality of price. Unlike “to the moon", it’s a daily, monthly, yearly reality that essentially shuts up the naysayers. Saying this phrase is much like saying “scoreboard” to the trash talker whose team is losing by a large margin. Anyone that criticizes Bitcoin and compares it to a ponzi, tulips, beanie babies, myspace or whatever has to contend with the reality that the price goes up. Any criticism that doesn’t at least explain the price having gone up for 12 years is ultimately lacking.

“Bitcoin fixes this” is a way to describe Bitcoin’s apparently magical powers in fixing different ills in society. It’s more a commentary on how much fiat money has corrupted civilization as it currently exists than anything else. The meme is a call to think about just how corrupted incentives have become because of fiat money and how Bitcoin changes them. Exploring that is a rich vein of discovery and the reason why I titled my podcast after this meme.

“Run the numbers” describes the process of auditing which can be done on Bitcoin easily. It’s something like “verify, don’t trust”, but more effective because it’s verifying numbers which are quantifiable. The meme calls out the levels of trust and therefore centralization involved in projects where the numbers can’t be verified and is effective for that reason. The lack of hard proof is a symptom of the inherent trust and therefore possible fraud that could be hiding.

“Have fun staying poor” has an excellent explanation by Udi Wertheimer who created this meme. It’s a call to stop coddling your friends and family that won’t get on the ark. At a certain point, you have to shake the dust off your feet and move on.

“Few understand this” describes how so much of what we know in Bitcoin is not accepted by conventional wisdom. This includes a lot of things, like Austrian economics, ethics of liberty, the consequences of fiat money and so on. It’s a reminder that many of these beliefs are things we need to explain to others and that relatively speaking, we are very early and in the minority.

Any others you find effective? Send them my way so I can do more of these for a future newsletter.

Bitcoin

Jonas Nick has an interesting taproot ring signature proof of concept. If you’re not familiar with ring signatures, it’s a signature from one of a number of keys without knowing which one. This is used in Monero, for example to hide which outputs are being spent. With taproot, you can prove that you have some amount of funds without actually revealing which output you have. This can be important to prove a certain amount of reserves and could have interesting applications.

Core 0.21.0 is out, Bitcoin Magazine has a nice overview. Among other features are descriptor wallets, which hopefully will make time-locked UTXOs more popular and compact block filters (aka Neutrino), which should allow for much less exploitable light client support than BIP37/bloom filters. Taproot/Schnorr has been deployed as code, but won’t activate just yet. We’ll have to wait until 0.22 for that, most likely.

David Venturi has put together an impressive newbie Bitcoin guide including all the practical nuts and bolts of Bitcoin. The level of depth is really well done and he gives you solid expectations on how long it’ll take you to custody your own Bitcoins, for example (90 minutes). Highly recommended for the people that want step-by-step instructions to do various things. I hope he makes a video to reach even more people.

Economics, Engineering, Etc.

Dergigi has a thought piece on how Bitcoin is a good measure of time. The main thing I got out of the article is the idea that ledgers have the important additional quality of sequence or time which physical commodities like gold do not. In a sense, by adding sequencing or time as a property, Bitcoin allows trade across time natively which gold cannot. Very interesting ideas in the article and well worth studying.

Dan Held argues that Silicon Valley doesn’t get Bitcoin. His argument is that Silicon Valley is anything but contrarian and there are dominant narratives that VCs fall into, which are hard to get out of. Essentially, they’re all shopping for fancy drills and evaluate everything only in terms of how good a drill it is. I agree with his take and look forward to a day when VCs aren’t in such a herd mentality.

Morgan Stanley now owns 10.9% of MicroStrategy. This is not a surprise as there aren’t that many options to get Bitcoin exposure. Getting direct Bitcoin exposure would make more sense, but this is probably easier to get through their lawyers.

BitMex is starting to screen for illegal activity with Chainalysis. I’m not happy with this as these tend to almost always come at the expense of the customer. Not only will customers get wrongly caught in this web, but this screening will likely impose a higher cost for everyone at BitMex. That said, this is probably a move to ward off government regulators. As this blog post from Chainalysis shows, this type of screening can and probably will be used politically.

Lyn Alden has written a post on why Bitcoin is not a ponzi. This is one of the biggest criticisms of Bitcoin from nocoiners and she does a good job. I would bet bitcoins to billon that very few such nocoiners will seek out such articles, though, so send it to them!

There’s now a paper on how to exploit DeFi. I honestly wonder why these academics don’t just do this for a living.

Podcasts

My podcast this week was with Preston Pysh. We talked about investing, how it’s changed the past few decades, why it’s in some serious trouble and why Bitcoin is poised to do very well in this macro environment.

My new book making the moral argument for Bitcoin is out! I did one interview with Coin Compass, another with Aleks Svetski and another with Tone about the book. I did three more that are not in the Bitcoin space, one with Rambling Mind, another with Conversations That Matter and another with Dan’s Babble.

My more secular moral argument has been made into a listen by Guy Swann.

My other books are here.

Fiat delenda est.