It’s not a surprise that Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, suddenly finding himself the target of a media story, wore a slightly comical hangdog expression, and bitcoiners with Satoshi Namakomo-related Twitter names began using Dorian’s image in their profiles. Another bitcoin meme was born.
The idea of a meme is not new but with the internet, it found abundant expression. Memes are democratic: anyone can copy a digital photo, stick a couple of lines of text onto it, and send it out into the world (or interwebs, as properly in-the-know wags called it), and the funnier, the better. A classic meme in the cryptocurrency world is ‘doge’, which uses as its background a photograph of a Shiba Inu dog caught in a side eye moment. Colourful comics sans font is used to deliver a series of short messages, with deliberately poor grammar: ‘so much wow’; ‘such swag’ and so on.
Sometime in 2013, a billboard appeared outside San Francisco - paid for by bitcoin booster Roger Ver - that featured a then little-known African animal called the honey badger. It read simply ‘Bitcoin: The honey badger of money.’ Baffled viewers took to the internet to find out what exactly is a honey badger. The first thing they discovered was itself a meme: a parody of a nature documentary, which was titled The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger. As the camera follows the honey badger trotting around in the bush, narrator Randall’s voiceover goes something like this:
The honey badger’s been referred to by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most fearless animal in all the animal kingdom. It really doesn’t give a shit. If it’s hungry, it’s hungr… Ew! What’s that in its mouth? Oh, it’s got a cobra? Oh it runs backwards? Now watch this, look, a snake’s up a tree. Honey badger don’t care. Honey badger don’t give a shit, it just takes what it wants. Whenever it’s hungry it just…. Ew! And it eats the snakes….
After chuckling through that clip, many a view dug back to 2007, the source of the clips. It was a National Geographical documentary about Stoffel, a honey badger that had been impounded on a Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre north of Swaziland in South Africa. Normally, the Centre rehabilitated wounded animals and released them back into the wild, but Stoffel proved too dangerous to other animals, and was kept on the ranch, where he constantly tried to escape, and dug his way into the lion’s compound in order to fight with them, which nearly got him killed. Stoffel’s many ingenious attempts to escape his compound attracted the attention of filmmakers, who diligently tracked the honey badger’s escapades. Bitcoiners decided that Ver was right. Stoffel the honey badger was a perfect metaphor for Bitcoin.
As the bitcoin culture expanded, memes became a central transmitter for the kind of dark offbeat humour that bitcoin enthusiasts typically employed when the price started to head rapidly south following any prolonged upwards movement. A favoured method of meme artists was to take a stock photograph - a senior citizen smiling into a laptop, or a man staring over his shoulder at a passing woman while his girlfriend glares at him aka the distracted boyfriend meme - and add a line of script. The smiling senior citizen Harold has just bought bitcoin - right at the top of the market, and the text reads “My grandkids told me to invest my savings in bitcoin”.
[Chapter Eleven: Chainalysis]
