BitMEX CEO: On the Evolution and Importance of Crypto Memes

Article translation: Block unicorn

Article translation: Block unicorn

We landed in Mandalay, left the airport, and started our trip to Myanmar. It was December 2012, and save for a few wide-eyed tourists, the airport and neighborhood felt empty — like a perfect Alfred Hitchcock movie set.

After passing through immigration, we left a gleaming but deserted airport, hopped into a 1980s car, and drove down a deserted highway. The taxi reminded me of my dad's car, which my brother and I used to call the "goodbye" car (because it could break down at any moment). This is a certified basketball. We share a four-lane highway with a guy who drives a bullock cart. Besides, it was midday during the work week and there wasn't a single person in sight when we went into town.

Me and my best friend - my would-be K-pop star/NBA player hedge fund bro friend. The last time he drove to the basket, he was driving his SUV to Staples Center. He decided to join me on an obligatory two-week vacation to explore Southeast Asia. In the first two weeks of December 2012, we reached Jakarta, Bali, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Myanmar (Mandalay, Inle Lake, Bagan and Yangon) and completed a journey through Sri Lanka.

My son is very good with the internet and has done a lot of research on how to travel in Myanmar. Ten years ago, many things we considered almost basic human rights did not exist. There is no mobile phone service, little to no internet connection, and no ATMs. They only accept physical dollars, but one has to be careful - as some serial numbers are not accepted. Wrinkled or torn bills are also not accepted - so we stuff all our cash in books so the bills are flat and brittle.

Once you get past the lack of modern connectivity and financial services, what's left is a country full of potential, beautiful temples and great hospitality. We're going to a new city every day in order to cover as much of the country as possible in our short time. We spent our final days in Yangon, the country's commercial capital. During the British colonial era, the city once known as Rangoon was one of their most prosperous colonies.

Located between India, Thailand and China, Myanmar has a deep-water port leading to the Andaman Sea, which is of great geostrategic value. The country is also rich in precious stones (such as rubies and jade), natural resources (they have large untapped reserves of natural gas and oil), and a large young population (perfect for crafting gadgets that are sold on Amazon for sale). low wages). However, for various reasons, these blessings were not fully utilized, and the country survived for decades.

Wherever you are, the cultural and linguistic artifacts of the ruling empire permeate your life. December in Yangon is no exception. One of the most surprising aspects is the number of Christmas decorations in and around Yangon. Myanmar is a Buddhist-majority country with a large Muslim minority. It is not a culture or a country built on Judeo-Christian values, or integrated into the global economy to such an extent that people consider a secular consumer holiday like Christmas to be practicable.

Despite all of these factors, I heard all the classic Christmas tunes. I love you forever, Maria! I see snowmen, bells ringing, and Santa hats in tropical dusty cities. Many bar hostesses wore drab red and white outfits to signal their belonging to the global end-of-year ritual.

The Judeo-Christian Liberal Democratic Empire ignored Burma, but the people there still absorbed some of the most important cultural aspects. Every society practices rituals and holds festivals to celebrate death in one year and rebirth in another. Established population practices say a lot about who really rules a habitat.

When a people group shares similar cultural values, they share assumed beliefs and practices that do not require direct support. Winning people's hearts is more important than your ability to project momentum. People who occupy foreign territory and are not defeated accept the victor's culture can be quite an expensive schmuck.

Every organizational structure, whether nation-state, religion, or cyber-state, needs to acquire and retain users. The transmission mechanisms of the virus of belonging are cultural and linguistic. It's much easier to retain users into your value system if they share the same assumed beliefs as the culture that wants to assimilate them. So as we attempt to completely reorganize the world with stateless money and permissioned networks of decentralized public blockchains, the culture of these networks will be as important as the price and technical quality of the coins.

The first thing any colonist does is destroy the connection of oppressed people to their heritage. They shed their traditional clothing, changed their names, and uprooted their language. They then ensured that the populace grew up wearing the "proper" clothes, using the "correct" speech, and believing in the "true" God.

Everything came from something, and cryptocurrencies were a reaction to a fiat currency-driven, debt-based financial system and centralized, top-down captive nation-states. It doesn't do it out of the box in its own language and culture, but it has started developing its own version, very different from what it claims to object to.

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Crypto Meme (MEME)

Lest you doubt the power of memes, just look at Elon Musk. Tesla as a company should be a huge zero, but Elon is one of the best meme artists this world has ever seen. Someone said to me that his group only makes dank memes. Elon is worth hundreds of billions of dollars because his memes are so important.

Like viruses, memes infect the minds of their hosts with narratives that are easily understood intuitively and passed on to the next victim. The propagation mechanisms of social media allow memes to quickly infect many hosts.

We forget how powerful pictures are, but remember how all major global religions got their start. The world's major religions gained users at a time when books were expensive and most people were illiterate. Priests used pictures to build structures—the equivalent of today’s memes—to tell laymen the tenets of their religion.

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HODL

Close the fucking door! That was an exciting episode; it's a shame last season was so tough. (HODL)

Link to article explaining the origin of HODL

Many people own Bitcoin at ridiculously low prices, only to sell it when its value appreciates significantly. However, the significance of 2013, 2017 and 2021 is worlds apart, buying Bitcoin for a few dollars and still holding it when it rises 60,000 times requires great belief,This is the essence of HODL.

On paper, you see 90% or more drops in value of cryptocurrencies, so feel more confident about HODLing. The battle cry of HODL is designed to give cryptocurrency holders the confidence to hang on and ride out volatility.

Any new technology will experience erratic results, and speculators and developers need to HODL if the ecosystem is to grow. The vortex of technological advancement will shake all but the most faithful. A culture of HODL'ing is critical to ensuring a large following sticks with the movement and stays engaged when the going gets tough.

Cryptocurrencies are never for the faint of heart,Especially if you frequently check the prices of the coins in your portfolio. Engaging in the activity without proper faith in the HODL culture is a recipe for bipolar disorder.

Money printing machine Go Brrr....

This is the original version of the classic meme, which has spawned many different permutations since.

This change in particular surprised me—i like the internet. It is undeniable that the global financial crisis in 2008 and the "rectification" of central banks created fertile ground for the birth of Bitcoin. Central banks — and the governments that empowered them — responded to the Great Recession and every subsequent crisis by printing money. Printed money favors select affiliates and financial asset holders, and those whose income consists primarily of wages are squeezed out.

That's the nature of this meme. It was a rallying cry for all those outraged by the hypocrisy of a government that supports market-based economic policies but inflates citizens to pay for bad business decisions by financial services institutions. Gains from privatization and losses from socialization - I'm not sure what economic "ism" that is, but if it were a religion it would certainly be there.

I touch on some aspect of central bank-backed monetary inflation in nearly every article I write. This is because the main driver behind the pathological returns the crypto market has experienced since the COVID crash in March 2020 has been the massive money printing created by central banks around the world.

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idiot salary

The mainstream financial media loves to write a rags-to-riches story, and it goes like this:

1. Cryptocurrencies are discovered by the average person earning an average or median income for a given country.

2. The individual begins day trading.

3. They grabbed some shitcoins that went up 1,000x in a few weeks.

4. Suddenly, they're worth millions.

5. Now they can quit their boring jobs and join the ranks of upstarts.

A follow-up story that is often published during a bear market is this:

1. Once upon a time, a man became a cryptocurrency billionaire.

2. Then, the market drops 90% and they lose everything.

3. They had to go back to work for that man. (sad face)

There is another popular recurring story about people turning thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency into millions or billions over the years due to their HODL'ing due to price appreciation. Again, these stories suggest that these people will now live a different life completely away from the daily patterns of salaried or hourly workers.

Do well in school (meaning good grades; actual knowledge accumulation is not the goal), get into college (hopefully the massive debt you or your family incurs will be worth it), and then hopefully gain gainful employment, making you Or overshadowed by the costs incurred by your supporting family. This is the life our modern global society preaches.

That would be a good strategy if the money printing presses of the world weren't running. Central banks are determined to generate inflation that exceeds wage growth for the average worker. Ever since Nixon removed the global reserve currency from the gold standard in 1971, getting a fixed salary has been a fool's bet, and the only way to stay ahead is to speculate in financial asset markets.

The message is summed up in this meme that disparages the work of fast food worker Wojak, who was once a crypto millionaire before he got bored and had to start frying burgers all over again.

There's nothing wrong with flipping burgers or any other job that pays minimum wage. The dignity of this work is only stripped away when your government destroys the value of your labor by aggressively printing money to plug holes in the balance sheets of spendthrift companies that should go bankrupt rather than bail out.

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bored ape

“ape’ Is imitation, oh oh so hot. Any successful fictional idea of ​​creating an organizational form such as a state, religion, or currency requires apes, and we follow and follow others.

The parody trading ethos is an expression of a sometimes careless attitude toward asset allocation within the crypto ecosystem. When you go into a program, the amount of research or critical thinking is minimal. You quickly keep up with the herd and hope to get out before crowd tastes change. This is the essence of aping. If you spend too much time doing actual research, you'll miss the pump by a few X's.

Those who successfully mimic the crowd, or predict where the crowd's attention will be directed, can command huge sums of money. No wonder Boring Apes Yacht Club is one of the most successful and traded NFT projects. It is a visual representation of the spirit of many traders within the ecosystem.

dog money

Shiba-Inu's are too cute to be distressed, apparently they are not the most obedient dogs, but DILIGAF (Latin for "love").

Jackson Palmer decided to see what happens when you combine worthless technology with a picture of a cute dog, Woof Woof... Here comes Dogecoin.

It's fitting that meme guru Elon Musk's most talked about cryptocurrency is Dogecoin. Worthless technology plus shady memes have created billions of dollars in value for a car company and a cryptocurrency, it's that simple.

Many of the highest value coins are deliberately not focused on technology, as if the founders of these projects thought to themselves, "How can I make technology and still get people to buy coins?" Buyers of these "meme" coins are happy to go underground Dig a hole and burn energy (read: money) for no good.

correctcorrect"should pay some money manager for learning CAPM and other theories of no empirical value in college? Just buy an objectively technically worthless cryptocurrency, jacking up its price beyond belief heights, and then laugh as the global elite wavers about how stupid they are to buy Dogecoin.

While the technology of memecoin does not further the cause of decentralization or sound stateless, it is the spirit of crypto,first level title

feel good person

No article on crypto memes and culture would be complete without a discussion of Pepe the Frog.

For whatever reason, Crypto took a cute frog and turned it into a mascot. Pepe and the memes using his image demonstrate how a community can change the conversation about a symbol if they all collectively agree that it means something to them.

Using Pepe as an example, what other symbols can we use to make our own? This symbol only has value because we collectively decide it has. As with most ideas and myths, they cease to be valuable when the number of adherents dwindles. We have the power to give legitimacy to anything as long as we act together.

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how to communicate

The above small collection of important culturally encrypted memes tells the world who we are, what we believe and what we despise. But that doesn't help us connect with those who haven't heard the joke. The language of cryptocurrencies needs to adapt to the higher purpose we aspire to.

With the task of making an encrypted religious text, what does it consist of? How do we create a small but impactful collection of memes, phrases, and stories so that anyone can pick it up and talk in a few hours like members of their tribe for years?

Jargon-heavy language just creates another privileged club for those who "get it." It is not inclusive and does not help recruit new members. What we don't need are languages ​​that take years to master. Working on the trading floor, the most valuable thing you learn is how to communicate. It both speeds up transactions within the group and creates a separation between the professionals and the unwashed masses. However, learning the language is for the thousands of professionals who are "fortunate" to work in the marketplace. This is no recipe for a successful global movement.

Unfortunately, you don't need to own cryptocurrencies to live a fulfilling life. In contrast, learn your spoken and written language. In order to fit in, you have to be able to communicate. If everyone around you speaks a certain language, you must take the time to learn it. The most important part of early childhood education is learning the language of the society in which you live. Language is somewhat non-intuitive. We sit in classrooms learning rules that don't make sense for the sole purpose of exchanging ideas with others who speak the same language.

My Mandarin didn't improve to a certain degree because as an adult I have more discretion in how I spend my time and rote memorization is not my favorite activity. This is not demeaning language at all. Those who learn English later in life have to deal with a whole set of irregular grammatical rules and verb conjugations with zero logical meaning. I was lucky that I learned the Common Tongue to rule the Empire as a child rather than as an adult.

Let's not assume that people have to learn our encrypted language in order to fully participate in the culture. We must approach this question from the perspective of an emerging religion wishing to challenge society's dominant thought patterns. It's been done before, and success comes from creating simple but viral memes that, on the one hand, attack the flaws of dominant belief systems, and on the other, show that a bright and fulfilling future is easy if you believe in it get.

The COVID pandemic is largely of our own making. However, various lockdowns and money printing in almost every country has people spending more time on the internet and annoyed by the rampant inflation that central bankers are creating. This is the basis for the encryption revolution to change more people's hearts.

A minority can be very powerful when paired with an apathetic majority. Nassim Taleb describes this in detail—how the preferences of minorities can influence the policies of the majority, even when they make up a low single-digit percentage of the sample. As a minority of voices, we, followers of Lord Satoshi Nakamoto, can punch above our weight.

But we had to create a language that was very different from what was before, and that was also easy to learn. I'm not a linguist, but if we can reflect ourselves on how we describe ecosystems, and try to simplify and create more digestible terms, then the path to larger groups can be made easier.

The biggest challenge will be reducing our use of words and phrases in legacy systems that have specific concrete meanings but loosely describe specific cryptographic concepts. An example is the jargon "blue chips", which is used to imply a premium, high-value financial asset such as a stonek or a work of art. When the TradFi system was formed in the early 20th century, it evolved specifically. We need a term equivalent to cryptocurrency to denote high value, it also has an organic backstory unique to our culture. We must challenge our influencers to adapt their language to our specific crypto culture so we retain the power to define who we are and the stories we believe in.

When those without crypto still embrace the culture, spread memes, and speak the language, success is at hand. When baby boomers start talking about how they got it because their Procter & Gamble stock was secured and some accounting statements were restated, we know that the virulent crypto culture is at the right level. We can all invest in spreading our culture of excellence by being thoughtful about how and what we communicate. As many of you readers gather around a conifer that is not native and thank each other by giving gifts, please take this as a reminder of the power of culture and work to add value to the encrypted expression of its beliefs system.