5 - Crypto Memes Good

Episode: #5 March 30, 2020 Most people identify memes are internet images with text, or reaction gifs. Memes are much more than that; they are a tool for information transmission at the largest possible scale. Memes are little packets of data that hop from brain to brain. They can transfer data across the globe and also across time! Join David and Ryan as they explore the role that memes have in crypto, and some of cryptos best and worst memes! ----- Tools from our sponsors to go bankless: Rocket Dollar https://www.jdoqocy.com/click-9261763-13920047 - tax shelter your crypto ($50 w/ "BANKLESS https://www.jdoqocy.com/click-9261763-13920047") Monolith https://monolith.xyz/ - holy grail of bankless Visa cards Aave https://aave.com/ - money lego for lending & borrowing Zerion https://zerion.io/ - portal to your DeFi portfolio ----- Episode Actions: Subscribe to this podcast http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ Subscribe to Bankless newsletter program https://bankless.substack.com/ Give this podcast 5 stars in iTunes! Think: do you believe the right memes? ----- Subscribe to podcast on iTunes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bankless/id1499409058 | Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/41TNnXSv5ExcQSzEGLlGhy | YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/bankless | RSS Feed http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ Leave a review on iTunes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bankless/id1499409058 Share the episode with someone you know! ----- Don't stop at the podcast! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Visit official Bankless website http://banklesshq.com/ for resources Follow Bankless on Twitter https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ | YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/bankless Follow Ryan on Twitter https://twitter.com/ryansadams Follow David on Twitter https://twitter.com/TrustlessState

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front-run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Hey, David, we've got an exciting topic today, man. What are we gonna talk about?

• 0:32David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah, this episode's gonna be super fun. Talking all about memes, what they are, why they are important, how they emerge, and how they fit into a crypto world.

• 0:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, these aren't just gifs, these aren't just internet jokes. These are actually pretty fundamental. There've been a few memes going around these days. We've got the "Money printer go brr" meme. How do you say "brr," by the way? I've seen it spelled, but how do you say it?

• 0:57David Hoffman?

  If you are a follower of military aviation, "brr" comes from the A-10 Warthog chain gun that they have built into the plane. And when it comes in, it comes in and goes "brr," and then it just throws like a thousand rounds. So that's where "brr" comes from. Fun fact.

• 1:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  No way. You are way more researched on that than I thought you'd be. That's super impressive.

• 1:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I know. Yeah, that's where "brr" comes from. And it really sounds like just a "brr," and then they just got repatriated to "Money printer go brr." So it actually comes from just the sheer magnitude of bullets that can come out of an A-10 Warthog.

• 1:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, so I thought it was like the sound of a photocopier made. My grandparents used to have a photocopier. My grandpa did it in his office. And he used to get like, "brr," like that, something like that.

• 1:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's pretty close. If you guys are curious to learn more, you should go to YouTube and just type in "A-10 brr," and 100% like 10 different videos will show up.

• 1:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, so memes. We're gonna talk about memes. Before we get to it, let's just do some chit-chat. We are all getting checks this week. We live in the US, both you and I do, David. We're getting a check from Uncle Sam for $1,000. $200 each, $500 per child if you have any children. And I believe if, you know, your spouse gets a check too, if you have a spouse. Is that exciting or what?

• 2:21David Hoffman?

  Getting a check is exciting. What's not exciting is that most people getting checks are no longer getting checks from their jobs. The, if you go look at the amount of unemployment filings that have been filed in the last two weeks. The, you know, the big greens, you know, the big candle, the big green candle that spiked this week is like at least five times larger than what happened in 2008. And so this is kind of, the reason why we're getting checks is because we're not getting checks anywhere else. We have a record unemployment. And so the, the Trump administration is, is sending out, you know, $1,200 to every adult plus $500 if you have a kid to, to help compensate for this.

• 3:04David Hoffman?

  The narrative that, that I see forming is that this is just a slap in the face for what is actually needed. If this is the first of many checks, then that's one thing, but right now this sounds like a one-time check. That's taxed as taxable income, which is weird, but we'll, we'll, we'll see what happens. Money's fun, but not losing your job isn't.

• 3:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  And, and other countries are doing this as well. So this is not just a US event. This is happening with central banks and countries around the world. But, you know, where are they getting this money from? It's definitely a case of.

• 3:36David Hoffman?

  Money printer, go brrrr.

• 3:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nice, nicely done. Yeah, you know, I had a, a friend who, for the first time, I've talked to him about crypto a number of times. Never really been interested. The first time he texted me and he said, oh my God, we're getting checks. The government's printing money. What crypto should I buy? Very first time he's ever texted me and asked me that question. And I wonder what percent of this essentially temporary UBI check is actually going to end up in crypto. Obviously a lot of folks need the money. They need to pay bills. My friend fortunately is in a better position than that. And he's just wondering where he should actually store some of this, some of this wealth.

• 4:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Question like like anybody to me was like, you know, how can I get, how can I get five X? How can I get 10 X? Which crypto should I bet on? That was his question. It's just interesting.

• 4:29David Hoffman?

  So you told him to put it into XRP, the standard, right?

• 4:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Totally. It's the standard, man. I was like, it's the standard. It's a well-established meme. That means it's obviously true. You know, and then I was like, just kidding. You should put your money in Bitcoin and Ether. Some combination of both. And that's an interesting question, I think, because it made me think later in the week of, well, like, what is a good combination of crypto money of Ether and Bitcoin? If those are sort of the, you know, the recommendations.

• 5:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's your thought on that topic? What would you do? A hundred, your friend asked you a hundred dollars, David. What should I put it in Bitcoin or Ether? I've heard they're both great. What's the allocation?

• 5:09David Hoffman?

  I've had this question asked to me multiple times, and I always give two separate answers. And I tell them both answers. The first answer I say is do a 50 50 split. Because, you know, the only two crypto economic systems that exist are Bitcoin and Ethereum. Like, it looks like Litecoin is also a cryptocurrency in the same category as Bitcoin and Ether, but it's really not. And I explain to them why. I explain to them that, okay, so the very, a very core principle of every blockchain is that there is demand for block space. And only these two blockchains are, are generating any amount of fees, which illustrate that there is only these two blockchains that have demand for block space. And I'm pretty easily able to illustrate that to a newbie.

• 5:51David Hoffman?

  And I just tell them that there's only two blockchains that have scarce block space, and that's what's really important. And so a 50 50 split into Bitcoin and Ether is a 50 50 split into the two blockchains that are actually real blockchains. And then I tell them what my portfolio is, which is 100% into Ether. And then I explained that Bitcoin is an asymmetric bet versus the world, but Ethereum is an asymmetric bet versus Bitcoin, in my opinion. And so I tell them, like, those are the two. Somewhere between those two answers is a good place, I think.

• 6:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  I totally agree. I don't have a strong opinion on, you know, for people who are new to the space, on what percentage to allocate to what. It depends on risk tolerance. What I do have a strong opinion on is, you know, trying to keep them away from XRP the standard. And I definitely do that in all of my advice. But everyone's going to find the right answer in terms of allocation between those two. And it really depends on what you think about the future and your risk tolerance and where you want that asymmetric upside. Both good stuff. All right, we should, why don't we get into it then today? But before we get into the topic of memes, which is super exciting, crypto has the best memes, by the way, let's talk about our sponsors.

• 7:11Ryan Sean Adams?

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• 7:54Ryan Sean Adams?

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• 8:13David Hoffman?

  All right, our second sponsor, Monolith. If you want to have a little bit of Ethereum in your pocket, you need to get your Monolith DeFi card. The Monolith DeFi card is a Visa card that looks like all the other Visa cards that you've ever owned, except the difference is, is that there's Ethereum inside of it. Last, last episode, we talked about the different M1, the monetary layers of Ethereum. DAI is Ethereum's M1, and the Monolith DeFi card allows you to tap into Ethereum's M1 wherever Visa is accepted, basically all over the world. So go to monolith.xyz to get your DeFi card.

• 8:54David Hoffman?

  This is specifically for our European listeners at the moment, but when they come to America, you know I will be the first to sign up. And so if you want to spend your DAI and put some of the world's economy onto Ethereum, it is your duty to go to monolith.xyz and get your DeFi card so you can spend your DAI out in the real world.

• 9:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that crypto has the best memes. I think there's a lot of compacted wisdom. I think you can be taught the ways of crypto and the wisdom from previous generations through some of these memes, and there's other memes that you should be wary of. We're going to talk about that today in our meme episode, but we should start maybe with a, with a definition, David, because when people hear the word meme, I told my wife we were going to do an episode on memes, and she was like, what? Like, you know, those internet jokes? Like, what's a meme, though, David?

• 9:47David Hoffman?

  I'm pretty sure a meme is a GIF with text on it, or a still photo, and it's a funny joke that makes me blow air out my nose. Is that what a meme is?

• 9:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's what she thought. Right? So that's, that was, that's the common definition. That's what we think of when we think of a meme. But the, the idea of a meme and memetics was actually birthed in the 1970s by a gentleman by the name of Richard Dawkins, which we'll get into in a little bit. But what a meme is, more fundamentally, it's, it's not a GIF, it's not just an internet joke, it is a thought or behavior that spreads within a culture. So a thought or behavior that spreads within a culture. So memes can be images, memes can be behaviors, learn traits, behaviors.

• 10:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Memes can be slogans. They are compact units of information that have an aspect of virality. And they become pretty powerful because of the most important and most interesting large-scale communication tool that humanity has ever devised, which is the internet. That is essentially a meme propagation tool. What else is a meme, David?

• 10:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, memes go all the way back. The whole idea of how to conceptualize a meme should kind of relay itself as a mind virus. So you can go all the way back to like just religion and spirituality as like kind of the early semblances of memes. People believe in religion. They have belief or have faith in this idea or concept, and then they share that with others. And so this idea spreads from brain to brain and lodges itself in there. So like a meme is very much like a virus in that it packages up information and then it is easy to spread and share.

• 11:42David Hoffman?

  And so that's why the internet and memes are actually so well intertwined because the information, the internet is a platform for free and cheap data proliferation and a meme is a small bundle, a small little packet of information that goes from brain to brain. And it's something, good memes, there are definitely good memes and bad memes, right? Good memes are things that are easy to understand and that everyone can relate to. And that's why memes on the internet, which we often think as jokes or, you know, little cartoons or pictures or gifs, the reason why good memes spread and bad memes die is that good memes are relatable. Everyone can immediately understand a good meme.

• 12:26David Hoffman?

  And the bad memes are the ones that people don't understand. And so a meme is this thing, is this culturally relevant thing that is spread that we can all look at and be like, haha, I relate to that. And bringing this back to like today's context, money printer go brr? Is something that is a funny packet of information that is easy to spread and all of us can relate to it right now because we are all looking at the money printer going burr at this present moment. And that's why money printer go burr. It communicates a ton and it's easy to spread and it is the current topic of conversation and the internet is proliferating that right now.

• 13:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  The cool thing about that meme too is the money printer go burr like, I mean, who created it? We have no idea.

• 13:11David Hoffman?

  No idea.

• 13:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, it's something that really emerged out of our collective conscious, but there was probably somebody out there, right? One person or maybe a bunch of people at the same time who came up with that idea. And that's why memes are so interesting is because they're essentially a decentralized system, just like cryptocurrencies are. Decentralized and permissionless. Anyone can create a meme. You don't have to ask permission. If you want to create a new word, for example, and you know, words, language, those are meme expressions as well. If you want to create a new word, you don't submit a form to Webster's dictionary and have them add it, right? It's more like Webster's dictionary has to catch

• 13:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  up with the words that humans create and they add new ones every year. And so, all of these words are created by individuals in a permissionless way to describe something. And the way they propagate is other nodes on the network, other humans' brains have to actually download the meme and accept it or reject it. And so, it's decentralized and permissionless in its creation, but it's also decentralized in its propagation. Humans can decide whether or not to accept a given meme. And if they reject it, you know, then it's kind of gone. If enough of them reject it, it's gone. But if enough of them accept it, it becomes established. And then it can become even embedded even deeper into the fabric of society as well.

• 14:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, 100%. And making this a little bit more tangible, I want to turn to Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene, where he talks about the fundamental base layer of any human is one gene, right? And all these genes connect to other genes to create your DNA. Well, what is the cumulative human body is just a collection of genes? And each gene is something that is trying to get itself replicated and shared over and over and over again. And the idea of the selfish gene is that each gene is motivated. It wants to survive and it needs to survive by, A, being a good gene, something that is

• 15:27David Hoffman?

  beneficial to survival. So, you know, this particular gene makes you more muscular, it makes you run faster, it makes you think better. These genes survive and they spread in the physical world via reproduction. And memes are the same thing, but memes are this intangible layer on top of consciousness, right? Memes require consciousness. We all need to be able to understand and spread information. And so memes are like genes, except they are part of the culture, they're part of the information that we share and understand as a culture. So memes are really spread across time, across people in specific cultures.

• 16:11David Hoffman?

  Memes are really the genetic makeup of culture.

• 16:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, there's definitely an element of survival of the fittest for memes. Memes can have a lifespan, so, you know, some last days, weeks, months, some last years. They can also mutate, so they can become other things. And they absolutely have to survive in their environment, or they die. But the ones that do survive, the fit ones, they can become almost a shelling point of sorts. David, maybe, do you want to describe what a shelling point is?

• 16:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, sure. So I'm going to give you a list of three numbers, Ryan, and I want you and the listeners to all pick the same number. Are you ready?

• 16:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 16:55David Hoffman?

  7,342, 204, 1.

• 17:00David Hoffman?

  Now I want all the listeners to pick one of those three numbers.

• 17:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I got mine.

• 17:05David Hoffman?

  You got yours?

• 17:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep.

• 17:06David Hoffman?

  Okay, was it one?

• 17:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yep.

• 17:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and I bet all the listeners also probably picked one. And so that's what a shelling point is. If you, the idea of a shelling point is, is this point that we all can agree to choose without actually needing to communicate with each other. And so this actually is very relevant to things like game theory. This is, a shelling point is how you break the prisoner's dilemma. If you have a shelling point between you and your other prisoner, you can coordinate without having to communicate. And so shelling point is something that just people automatically choose as default just because of what it is.

• 17:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, do you want to know why I picked one?

• 17:49David Hoffman?

  Why'd you pick one?

• 17:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, it's, first of all, it's the easiest to remember, right? The other ones were not. I can't even recall them now. You just said it, and I can't recall the first two. But the second thing, and I think this compounds it. If you were to ask the question, now Ryan, what, which of the three numbers do you think everyone else is most likely to pick, right? Then it would have been hands down the number one. Because, you know, that, that, that, it's obvious. I think memes are very, like, some memes are very obvious in terms of which, which ones individuals and humans would prefer. And I think that's an example of that. And some of these, you know, become so deeply embedded into our society that we don't even notice them. You know, they're just like, they're just like common sense.

• 18:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, some of them, some memes even can become so embedded, they become almost institutional, right? There is a gentleman who wrote one of my favorite books. You've read this too, David, the book Sapiens, Yuval Harari. And he talks about human beings as a storytelling species. One of the big distinctions from kind of the animal kingdom. All of humanity's sophistication, its civilization, its society, maybe is partially rooted in its ability to... Share stories and to believe in those shared stories. He calls them shared narratives, or he calls them myths. And that's what human beings are really great at.

• 19:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're like biologically adapted to share stories and to believe in myths. And once society shares these myths, once there's a collective belief in these myths, they can form some of our most important underlying institutions and technologies. When I say technologies, I'm not talking about, you know, technologies like computers and science and advanced technologies. I'm talking more about the softer technology that is underneath all of our civilization and all of our society, you know, things like money, things like government, things like, you know, the constitution as an example of a protocol technology we've talked about several times.

• 19:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  So these things become embedded and they become almost common sense and they become almost indisputable. They win these like network effects within a society and they're very difficult to change at that point and we don't even notice that we believe in these shared memes. We just operate as if everyone else obviously does.

• 20:15David Hoffman?

  The cool thing about memes and the inside of the context of humans telling stories is that, you know, we tell stories to pass information, right? So like Ryan, I know a secret that this grocery store down the street actually has toilet paper in stock, so you should go take advantage of that. But memes-

• 20:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, do you really?

• 20:33David Hoffman?

  No, that was just, I just made that up.

• 20:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, because I need some toilet paper.

• 20:38David Hoffman?

  But memes are a way of our ancestors to communicate with the current set of people. It's a communication mechanism across time. In the same way that money is actually something that develops across time, memes and information cross, across time as it's shared by culture to culture. And that's really why the Bible is actually so incredibly important as a log of memes. The Bible is this book that is a fable of stories, is a set of stories that are supposed to teach you a lesson. And that lesson is- The Bible is just this collection of short stories and lessons to be learned that can be shared and propagated as memes. So the Bible is just this meme book.

• 21:23David Hoffman?

  It's this meme book of sharing all the important things that our ancestors have learned that is worth transcending through time.

• 21:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. It's all the memes are the wisdom of our ancestors, the wisdom of humanity, really, like passed down to us from generation to generation. Very powerful. You know, I had a friend of mine who said, you know, when asked, like, what's the meaning of life? He said two things: to spread my genes and to spread my memes. You know, like, I don't know if that quite does it for me as far as, like, life fulfillment, but there is an element of truth that those are the two things that human beings biologically do, and they really do well. So if you were to, like, ask an alien, what do humans do? The alien might say something like that.

• 22:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, they spread genes, right, biologically, and then they spread memes, which are these societal beliefs. And through those two things, they've actually become pretty powerful. Because memes are incredibly, incredibly powerful, right? They're almost like a way to program a society. They're also a superpower is that they're reflexive in nature, some of them, anyway. Do you know what I mean by reflexive?

• 22:41David Hoffman?

  I could use some elaboration.

• 22:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  So some memes are powerful and become more powerful and more true the more people who believe they're actually true. I'm not sure if this is a property of all memes, but it's certainly true of some memes, like the meme of money. You know, something becomes more like a money and exhibits higher moneyness when the more people believe it's a money. And so this, like, this feedback loop of you believe the meme and you get other people to believe the meme, and the more that they believe the meme, the more the meme actually becomes true, and then the more people who believe the meme. There are a few memes like that that can become incredibly powerful because they're

• 23:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  reflexive in that way. And they also can exhibit really high network effects. So once a money becomes embedded, like the US dollar, for instance, is now an embedded money meme, it's really hard to disrupt that. And it's really hard to, you know, because you essentially, you have to get all of the other nodes on the network, these are human brains, to go, you know, replace their money meme with another meme. And typically, that happens over decades and generations, which is incidentally why I think we think that the crypto movement is not going to happen overnight, right? The money meme actually has to shift. Some of this will be generational change. This will play out over decades.

• 24:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah, absolutely. So, speaking of crypto, why are we talking about memes, Ryan? Like, what does this have to do with anything?

• 24:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, okay, so I think that one of the most interesting ways to actually learn crypto is through the memes that folks in crypto have created over the years, right? Maybe we should start by talking about some like non-crypto memes first that are really good, and then talk about the, you know, the crypto memes that are also good and have really, you know, held up well. We talked about Money Printer Go Brr, right, at the outset. How about this meme, "It's Just the Flu"?

• 24:45David Hoffman?

  "It's just the flu, bro."

• 24:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, just the flu meme.

• 24:49David Hoffman?

  Just the flu. Yeah, that one is, like, that's like an offensive meme. That's a meme that's supposed to make fun of all the other humans who actually do think that it's just a flu. And it's a shaming meme. This meme is, this meme is all the people that are taking coronavirus seriously and shaming all the people that don't take it seriously. "Ha, ha, ha, it's just the flu, bro." Like, we're all making fun of those people collectively through this meme to shame them into going inside and quarantining themselves. Like, that's what that meme is supposed to do.

• 25:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right. And it's definitely effective in terms of its ability to, to spread virally, right? So, but, but, but another, I think, aspect of a meme, and, you know, this one is no exception, it Actually has to, has to, in the long run, anyway, be true. So, you know, it's easy to say, "It's just the flu, bra." Like, at the beginning of coronavirus. And maybe before the deaths and the hospitalizations, a lot of folks will kind of download that meme and propagate it. But over time, if that meme becomes less true, and, you know, we realize that, wow, our workplaces are closed, our schools are closed,

• 26:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  people are dying en masse, the mortality rate is higher than the flu, then that meme starts to lose its relevance and starts to die. It's no longer fit for its environment, so it no longer gets passed on and no longer gets embedded in human consciousness.

• 26:17David Hoffman?

  And the "it's just a flu" meme is going to die when coronavirus dies. Because "it's just a flu" is locked into coronavirus, right? Like, we're not going to be saying "It's just a flu, bra" in five, 10 years. Like, it's only relevant for as long as coronavirus is relevant. And so this is a meme that is good now, but it's not going to serve us any purposes later. And so, you know, it's going to, you know, be eventually a thing of the past into the future.

• 26:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. And it compresses a lot in those four words, "it's just the flu," right? I think, actually, Trump is a master meme maker. He's created, like, several memes, and I think this is through sort of repetition, listening to his audience, and he's able to do this. But it accounts for a lot of his political success, in my mind, that he's able to get these memes together and to propagate them and compress a lot of information in, like, three-word memes, like "build the wall" or "lock her up," right? Like, these memes convey a lot of underlying information to the groups who have tribal affinity with them.

• 27:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  And they're very viral, particularly on the internet. These quick three-word memes can spread like wildfire and propagate very quickly. And, you know, I think politicians, some politicians, might underestimate the power of memes, but we're really living in a meme-centric world now.

• 27:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, absolutely. Donald Trump's biggest boon to his success is his mastery of the three-word meme. He speaks simple words in a simple way for people to understand, and he really just sets up memes to be born into existence. He's a master memester. The other really good meme that's outside of crypto that's come out recently that I think is a really good case study is Epstein didn't kill himself. And this is one of my favorite memes because it just shows the sheer power of the internet, where the wealthy and the elites do their whatever with Epstein. They kill him, or they kidnap him, or whatever conspiracy theory you believe that I'm on board with.

• 28:37David Hoffman?

  The internet acknowledges it. Like, while any one person can't do anything, we can at least use memes, the meme Epstein didn't kill himself, to create universal recognition without needing to actually trust the authority or instance of one person's statement or whatever. The Epstein didn't kill himself is the human collective mind agreeing that Epstein didn't kill himself, and also sharing and spreading that information as a middle finger to the elites that did whatever they did with Epstein.

• 29:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so that meme itself, Epstein didn't kill himself, that means so much more than the four words Epstein didn't kill himself, right? I mean, what does that actually mean? It's more like a, I guess, common man against the plutocrats and oligarchy that is organizing society and bending it to their will. It's like, it means so much more than the actual statement, I think.

• 29:40David Hoffman?

  Totally. It's an absolute acknowledgement that this is being covered up by the powers that be, whatever those powers are. It's an acknowledgement that we don't actually know much more than that, but we do know that it is not the only part of the story. The least interesting thing about Jeffrey Epstein is that he died. That's not really... The fact that he died is not the story. The story is how he died and how it has been told to us and how we actually think of it. And that's the fact that we have to say what... Something that happened didn't actually happen. The Epstein didn't kill himself. It's the didn't word. It's the something else happened. And look at that something else.

• 30:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, so David, I've got a list of crypto memes here that we should go through. Some of these have been successful and have held up. They've survived. They've been the fit ones. And they have collective generations of crypto people to like, they're passing down that information from the wise crypto people of ages past. Others have been unsuccessful. But I want to ask, you know, what you, what you think each of these, each of these meme. Let's start with the general crypto memes here. Here's one that I'm sure almost everyone listening has heard of. Hoddle. What does that mean? What's the meme?

• 31:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Hoddle came out of this guy, I believe on the Bitcoin Talk forum, who was drunk posting during the 2013 crash. And he said like, fuck it, I'm hodling. I don't care. I'm going to hodl through, you know, I'm a strong, strong hodler. I'm going to hold my funds. Hoddle is this call to a lack of action. It's where most things are called to action. And Hoddle is saying, hey, don't do anything. The idea is that there are whales that manipulate the markets. There is volatility that will crush your spirits. But if you can hold on for dear life, which some people think is what Hoddle stands for, even though I think that is something that got appended after the fact.

• 31:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's like a meme, that's like a meme within the meme, that hold on for dear life. Like added that later.

• 31:54David Hoffman?

  Right. It's a, it's a called, it's a unifying rallying cry that we are all going to hold and we are all going to be the buyers of last resort. The whole, a common thought experiment I like to run with, with people that think that Bitcoin can go to zero is that if Bitcoin does go to zero, there will be so many buyers that it can't be at zero. And if you are a hodler, you are saying that you will buy Bitcoin and hold it no matter what the price. You will buy Bitcoin at $1,000. You will buy Bitcoin at $500. You'll buy it at $100. You'll also be buying it at $100,000 and you will hold that shit until the end. It's basically saying that you are, you are in Bitcoin until it either goes to the moon

• 32:39David Hoffman?

  or it crashes and burns. And you are going, willing to do one of those two things.

• 32:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I don't think it has to be just applied to Bitcoin. It can certainly be applied to other crypto monies who face this volatility. But it's certainly birthed in the Bitcoin community. The Bitcoin community is fantastic at memes. It's got a celebrated history. But yeah, I totally resonate with this meme. I think it's true, and I think it's useful advice for people who are just entering crypto. It kind of sounds stupid. It kind of sounds silly, but like, hoddle. When price drops 90% in a bear market, which it can tend to do in crypto, the volatility is intense. Or 50% in one day. I mean, that happened two weeks ago.

• 33:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  You don't panic, you hoddle. I think that's sound advice and something that crypto newbies could learn from, for sure. How about this one that applies to all crypto as well? Number Go Up.

• 33:41David Hoffman?

  Number Go Up is a great meme. So the very surface level of this meme is a communication tool to newbies, saying that we are here for number to go up. We are here to get rich. We are here to get wealthy. We want our own personal finance number to go up, and we do that by buying crypto and holding it. Now, there's actually so much more to this if you peel back the layers, because a lot of people, and me included, believe that the fundamental objective of these crypto-economic systems is for number to go up. If Ethereum succeeds in pulling some of the economic activity from the banks, from the central banks, from the member banks, from payment merchants that are charging 3% on

• 34:25David Hoffman?

  every transaction, if Ethereum takes all of that business and puts it on Ethereum for reduced middlemen, reduced fees, the number has to go up. And that's true because of economic bandwidth. So listen to that episode if you don't understand why. That directly relates to Number Go Up. Number Go Up is a... The number is a metric that measures the success of these things. And so when number goes up, literally, the ecosystem is more healthy. Security is stronger. We have more runway into the future. So not only is it illustrating the incentive to buy these things and be a part of the crypto economic system, but they also illustrate why it's so important to do that.

• 35:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know, I think, and I'll admit, this was my take on it earlier, when I first started getting into crypto. Number go up at first seems like it's just like a greedy Wall Street thing to say, right? Like, yeah, I'm just here for the money, basically, right? I just want the, you know, it's kind of a brainless, like, as long as the price is going up, I'm happy. But the way you just articulated it is the way I've come to understand it a bit more, because the number is essential to the security of the underlying network. Ethereum as a trustless economic system is a lot less interesting if its market cap

• 35:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  is $10 billion versus a market cap of $5 trillion. And that's because at $10 billion, it can't be an open financial system for the world. You know, it can be a niche, interesting experiment that a bunch of geeks kind of run, but in order to provide the economic bandwidth and the economic security for an entire permissionless, trustless, open financial system, the number has to go up. And if it doesn't, then none of this is really consequential to the world. So it's not just a, like, you know, we're greedy, we want more, so number goes up. There is an element of that, but it's also like, the health of the system and the impact

• 36:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  of the system on the world depends on number go up.

• 36:43David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. The number is a scorecard. It is the high score. It's the health report of the system. And the cool thing is, that number can always be higher. And the greediness and how these systems run on greed and how these systems run on people's blockfolio number going up is the thing that makes the health of the system also go up. These are the same numbers that we're talking about.

• 37:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, I think the Bitcoin community is way more comfortable with number go up as a meme than the Ethereum community. And I feel like the Ethereum community should embrace it a bit more. And maybe the sweet spot is somewhere right in the middle, where you're kind of comfortable with it, but you're not like just comfortable with pure, unadulterated greed. You also have to like build stuff that changes the world, too. Yeah, that's my take on it. But let's take a minute and talk about our sponsors, David. So I want to talk about Aave today. Aave is a DeFi protocol that you guys absolutely have to check out. It's a way to lend or borrow on Ethereum. So what does that mean? It means you can put DAI inside of it. So you can take DAI that you have, which is a stablecoin.

• 37:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  It will magically transform that DAI into an asset called a DAI. That a DAI is then earning interest for you. A fantastic way to get started on DeFi and get started in the bankless path is going to Aave and making this happen. Start lending out DAI and earning interest on it. You can also borrow against your ETH in the Aave protocol. Cool thing about it is they offer fixed rate loans. So not variable loans that change, but fixed rate. Developers can check out their flash loan products and protocols. They have recently been integrated into things like DeFi Saver, which is a way to help manage Maker CDPs.

• 38:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Flash loans are super interesting tech. Go to Aave.com and start depositing crypto and earning and borrowing. That's Aave.com, A-A-V-E.com.

• 38:48David Hoffman?

  As you are moving into the bankless world, it's helpful to have something that you're familiar with to help ground you in this new revolution. Xerion.io can be your front page to your asset portfolio. Instead of logging into your Wells Fargo or your bank account as you are used to, Xerion serves that same purpose, but for crypto and with a much better user experience and user interface. At Xerion, you can add all of your wallets and then they will be aggregated into a Single portfolio of all of your assets from all of your wallets and give you a nice beautiful chart of the value of your assets across time as well as a breakdown of the percentage of

• 39:30David Hoffman?

  your portfolio. But that's not all. You also have access to a bunch of financial services all in the same spot. If you want to exchange one asset for another, Xerion uses a combination of DeFi protocols to make sure that you are making the best trade. So you can swap Ether for DAI and it can be routed through Uniswap or Kyber or ZeroX to make sure you are getting the best trade on that particular exchange. You can also invest into Uniswap liquidity pools and also lending protocols. So you, instead of having to go to uniswap exchange or compound.finance or wherever you want to achieve your financial transactions, you can instead just go to xeron.io,

• 40:13David Hoffman?

  add all your wallets and do all of your financial, personal finance activity there.

• 40:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk more about some more Bitcoin specific memes because the Bitcoin community, this is a community of meme masters themselves. So let me give you this one. Bitcoin is digital gold.

• 40:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so that's another meme for newbies where I think if you talk to some of the more advanced Bitcoiners, if you will, that they will actually push back against the digital gold narrative. It's a great tool to onboarding people what Bitcoin is in relation to other assets, you know, provably scarce, stock to flow, you know, permissionless, uncensorable asset, and money that was picked by the people for the people, not a money that was, you know, engineered and, and captured and put upon by force to the users of the world. And so in that sense, Bitcoin is digital gold is a great way to communicate something that is very similar

• 41:11David Hoffman?

  to Bitcoin that everyone understands. So it's easier to get people to understand, you know, okay, what is internet money? What does that actually look like? Where, where it starts to break down, where some Bitcoiners will add some changes is that, you know, we don't actually know what the market cap of gold is, but we do. We don't know how much gold supply there is, but we do know the Bitcoin supply. And you know, with the Bitcoin, if the gold price goes up, well, more gold will be mined and added to the supply. But if Bitcoin price goes up, that does not happen. And so there are some nuances to this meme that Bitcoiners would bring up. But like as a tool for getting newbies on Bitcoin as digital gold is a great meme.

• 41:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and it's interesting. So, you know, some people in the Bitcoin community, early Bitcoiners sort of supported this meme and propagated it. But it's become more deeply embedded in the institutional world, too. I was, you know, looking at some commercials, I don't know if you saw these sometime last year from Digital Currency Group, and they're literally running commercials talking about Bitcoin as the new gold, right? They were showing, there's this guy with a wheelbarrow of gold bars, right? And he's running around the street and it just looks ridiculous. And they're talking about like, look, this is the 21st century, this is the internet.

• 42:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, we need a digital gold on the internet. So that meme, while it started with a small niche group of people, has kind of spread to be adopted, really, in the institutions. They would have laughed at it, you know, five, five years ago even, and now they're starting to embrace it. And I think five, 10 years from now, it'll become even more established in the community that these crypto monies such as Bitcoin are like a, a digital gold. Even if, even if the technicalities aren't quite perfect, it's, it's been a really successful meme. How about this one? Bitcoin fixes this.

• 43:12David Hoffman?

  So this one is one of those that has such a massive amount of information wrapped up inside of it. Bitcoin fixes this. The meme is so aggressively pressed by Bitcoiners that they just memed it into reality. The idea is that Bitcoin can fix so many of the world's problems. And if you talk to the right Bitcoiner, they will take you through a, and sometimes a pretty coherent step-by-step case as to how Bitcoin as a monetary system will lead to the curing of cancer. This, this, and they are 100, they are 100% serious when they say this. And, and sometimes I'm, I'm compelled by it as well, at least to listen to it. The, the idea goes like,

• 43:56David Hoffman?

  Bitcoin fixes the monetary system. The monetary, the fixed monetary system fixes the financial system. The fixed financial system can more accurately allocate resources to different places. The places that had previously inefficient capital now have efficient capital allocation. And then we can start to actually innovate and build things that we weren't previously able to innovate and build. And that's the fundamental thesis of Bitcoin fixes this. You can take any part of the broken economy and, and, you know, it's anything that has to do with inefficient capital allocation. And then Bitcoiners will say that Bitcoin fixes this. The, the, a good example of, of this is right now is, um, for politicians inside of the

• 44:38David Hoffman?

  United States, they never ever have to talk about fiscal responsibility. They can, they only can talk about what they want to do for Americans and how much money they want to spend because there's no limit on what politicians can spend. They can just print money as we have, as we are seeing right now. The government will just increase the debt ceiling. The Federal Reserve will just print more, um, print more cash. And so politicians are never really held accountable to, to what they want to promise. And Bitcoin fixes this because if the, if the monetary system is not in the hands of the government, then, and it's in the hands of the people, then the government can't print money because they can't print Bitcoins. And so that's an example of how Bitcoin fixes this.

• 45:19David Hoffman?

  But when you see it being used on Twitter, it's three words that are easily shareable that say just like Bitcoin solves all these problems. Bitcoin solves all these problems. And the thing is that people actually believe this. A lot of, a lot of people actually believe it.

• 45:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  So yeah, I, I definitely think there's an element of truth in the Bitcoin fixes this meme. The, the place where I think my, my node doesn't fully download it is when it's applied to strange things like Miley Ray Cyrus's twerks. I heard Safedine Amous, the gentleman, uh, the gentleman behind the, the book, The Bitcoin Standard, um, he apparently hates Miley Ray Cyrus and her contemporary dance moves. And he thinks that if we restored the world to a Bitcoin standard, uh, we wouldn't have such Fiat style dance moves in, in contemporary society. So that's where the Bitcoin fixes this loses me, I think, a little bit.

• 46:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  And, uh, sometimes it's, it's, it's applied in, in very strange and odd ways. How about this one? I think this is a, a pretty smart meme, um, stacking sats.

• 46:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Matt Odell made stacking sats and that is a similar meme to Hoddle. Stacking sats, first it's an alliteration and that means it's good to share and spread because you know you can just hashtag it on Twitter. But stacking sats, it does a lot of things all at once. So again memes are little packets of information, right? So not many people know that Bitcoin is divisible, not many people in the outside world. So a satoshi is the bottommost, the lowest denomination of Bitcoin. And if you stack them, you get more of them. And so it's a reminder that Bitcoin, it can actually be divided into eight decimals.

• 47:04David Hoffman?

  And you want to stack responsibly, you want to dollar cost average your buys into Bitcoin over time. And so you want to stack a small amount of sats together over and over time. You want to dollar cost average into the smallest denomination of Bitcoin. And a lot of Bitcoiners get frustrated when they are bringing people on to crypto and they say, hey, you should buy some Bitcoin. And then people are like, Bitcoin's really expensive. It's $8,000. I'm going to buy this XRP thing. It's only a quarter. And so sats is a reminder or a teaching tool that you can actually buy a fraction of a Bitcoin. And one satoshi is actually .001 pennies.

• 47:45David Hoffman?

  And so if you liked that XRP asset that was a quarter, you'll even love a satoshi, which is, you know, a fraction of a penny.

• 47:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's a really clever meme and I think there's definitely some good advice embedded in it, particularly the idea of dollar cost averaging in. If you're going to buy ether, if you're going to buy Bitcoin, dollar cost averaging in is not a bad way to do it. So you stack stats or you stack Gue, doesn't have the alliteration, that's the ether, you know, lower denominated ether. And you do that on a weekly basis. That's, that's a great way to buy into the system. How about the meme of 21 million? So that's not only a monetary policy, it's also a meme, isn't it?

• 48:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the 21 million meme, it's, it's more of a hard cap meme, right? Like the 21 million isn't really that special, but it's just a reminder that there is a concrete number that can be shared, right? Like you know exactly how much Bitcoins there are and you have no idea how many dollars there are. So the fact that you can share the number, there are 21 million Bitcoins and be perfectly correct in that statement, also conveys a large amount of information all at once.

• 48:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do think it's useful to have this meme in the Bitcoin community as well, because it embeds itself as part of the social fabric and the social consensus layer. So that if somebody ever tried to propose a 25 million hard cap Bitcoin, or a Bitcoin with 21 million plus 1% issuance per year, they wouldn't be able to do it, because the 21 million meme is so strong, and the people who believed in that meme would not download the software and run the nodes. So it's also important as a kind of embedded in the social consensus layer that ultimately protects these systems at the base level. These memes can actually protect the economic security

• 49:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  and preserve the decentralization of these systems as well. Let's talk about one last Bitcoin meme, because I think it's interesting, and then we'll jump to Ethereum memes. And this is the meme of altcoins. I view the meme of altcoins as a defensive meme that Bitcoiners put in place, emanating from circa 2013-ish, when all of these forks of Bitcoin started happening. And there was the question out there, as well, if anyone can fork Bitcoin, anyone can create their own coin, then why is Bitcoin valuable? How could it ever become any sort of money for the world, when effectively it's subject to unlimited inflation? When anyone can create their own altcoin?

• 50:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so Bitcoiners came up with this meme to essentially preserve the notion that Bitcoin was separate. It was the king coin, the real coin, the primary coin, and everything else was an altcoin, is the implication. And that meme has been pretty effective. I consider it sort of a defensive meme for Bitcoin and Bitcoiners to stand on their guard against any competing monetary coin. What's your take on it?

• 50:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the altcoin meme, altcoin is, is, if you really want to demean someone, you won't call them by their name. You'll just call them, "Hey, guy!" Like, "Hey, dude!" And then that's what Bitcoiners are doing. They're just saying like, "Okay, that massive pile of just shitcoins, let's call them alts. Let's call them altcoins. They don't even, they don't even deserve a name." And I, I, I think it started as a practical, pragmatic approach back in the early days. And now it's kind of been adopted as like a, like you said, an offensive strategy from Bitcoiners to just attack the legitimacy or viability of all these other systems. However, I kind of agree with that. Like, we should probably just not, not like,

• 51:32David Hoffman?

  XRP, the standard, doesn't deserve a name. Like, we don't need to name it. And so a lot of these things, like all these small, small little chains, like Bitcoin Gold, Litecoin, they're not even worth talking about at some point in their progression. I don't even, I don't even bother to talk about Bitcoin Gold, except to talk about how it's, it's a fork that's failed. When we talk about Ethereum, like, I don't even consider Ethereum in the same league. And so a lot of Bitcoiners will say that Ethereum is an alt. But to me, an alt on Ethereum is any ERC20 token. And Ether is the only real asset on the Ethereum network. Everything else is an alt to Ethereum. So it really depends on your perspective, right?

• 52:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. And I, I do think that Ether is sort of fighting to become not an altcoin in the eyes of Bitcoiners, who will continue to play that defensive, offensive strategy of calling it an altcoin. In my mind, it's kind of clearly not. Bitcoin and Ether are kind of the, the most widely accepted and spread monetary assets. And maybe everything else at some level competing for that is an altcoin at this stage. That's my take on it. But let's talk about some successful memes in Ethereum. So this is one that you created, which is, is, is kind of interesting. Like, you're the, the author of a very successful Ethereum meme, the meme of money Legos. Can you talk about that?

• 53:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, everyone knows Legos, right? So we all, no one needs to have Legos be explained to them. And we all understand money, right? So money is not something that we really need explained, even though it turns out we do. But at a high level, we all know what money is. And so what happens when you take money and Legos and you put those two visualizations in your brain together? You kind of get this view of this like open landscape. You have this floor, you have all these Legos on the floor and you have this, all this space to build and now you just want to build something. Except now on Ethereum, we're doing that same Lego activity that we all did as a child that we're all familiar with, but now we're doing it with money. And so somehow the money Legos meme, regardless of whether you understand Ethereum or not,

• 53:45David Hoffman?

  you get this image of constructing things with many different parts and you can reorganize and reorder and recombine these money Legos into different structures. And sometimes those structures are just a pile of garbage where it just makes no sense. But sometimes those structures are skyscrapers and cars and airplanes and whatever you can really construct. And so the money Legos meme illustrates that Ethereum is this open sandbox environment for creation of and integration of many different parts. And it all has to do with managing money. These are financial structures. These are financial things that are being built and combined together.

• 54:28David Hoffman?

  And the more Legos you have, the more possible opportunities there are. So the more different Legos that are designed, the more tools you have in your toolbox to build some new structure. And all of that is wrapped up in two words, which is money Legos.

• 54:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think it's a super successful meme and also it has a high degree of visual componentry to it. I've seen people take that meme and create physical Legos with different DeFi protocols on it and sort of stack those up, do that in physical form, but also do that visually in graphics. And it's super effective to convey the composability aspect, the ability to string these DeFi protocols together and create really interesting new money systems and economic systems. Let's talk about another Ethereum meme that I think has been somewhat of a fail. I'm interested in getting your take, but that's the meme of Ethereum is a world computer. What's your take on that?

• 55:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it was created before we really knew what Ethereum is or is going to be. And so it was this kind of shot in the dark illustration of what Ethereum is. It is this computer that is this single global computer that can be accessed from anywhere. However, that kind of makes more questions than it provides answers. Like, what does that mean? Is there only one computer? Is that's everyone's using the same computer? How does that work? What does this computer even do? Why do I need a global computer instead of the computer at home? What's the benefit of a single global computer versus, you know, just the one that I'm used to, or the phone in my pocket?

• 56:07David Hoffman?

  And it doesn't even have any sort of a value component in there as well. It was, I think, the world computer meme was created before a lot of people accepted that blockchains and crypto protocols are inherently about money and value management. I think a better meme would be a world economic computer. But again, that doesn't really illustrate much. That kind of just is, is something for people that already understand, not for people who are looking to gain an understanding.

• 56:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I totally agree. I think the meme was best exemplified in a contrast versus Bitcoin. So with Bitcoin on the network, there's not a lot you can do with Bitcoin. You can't, you can't program it. It's more like a calculator. But with Ethereum, that has the ability to, you can, you can create programs inside of it. There's almost, it's almost the difference between a calculator and a smartphone in terms of different applications that can be created, money applications that can be created inside of it. In that way, it's, it's kind of a bit more like a computer versus a calculator. But then people started taking that too far and they started thinking that Ethereum

• 57:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  would have the capabilities of a

• 57:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  A cloud compute system like Amazon Web Services, AWS, and would be this decentralized internet platform. And in my mind, anyway, that meme kind of led people astray into this Web 3 vision of a decentralized internet, which is probably years away. What Ethereum is really well-suited for today, given its transaction throughput is relatively slow, is not a replacement for Amazon Web Services and cloud compute, but as a replacement for traditional financial settlement layers like Fedwire and like our central banking

• 58:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  system and, at some level, like our commercial banking system. So, yeah, a partial fail, and I think the meme has died a little bit over the last couple of years. But let's talk about a meme in Ethereum that has maybe had a bit of a resurgence or a renaissance or kind of a new creation. That's ETH is Money.

• 58:28David Hoffman?

  So ETH is Money came out of, the very beginning came out of this Bitcoin boom conference in Texas, I believe, where Michael Goldstein, who is a Bitcoiner of Bitcoiners, was presenting, kind of as we are now, presenting the Bitcoin memes and the strategy for marketing Bitcoin for, quote unquote, "memeing it to the moon." And this is the strategy that many Bitcoiners have believed is how Bitcoin will become successful, is that all the Bitcoiners are going to chant the Bitcoin memes until the whole world gets it and then Bitcoin will be worth a trillion dollars. And so during this presentation, Michael Goldstein was talking about this, how we are going to meme Bitcoin into existence.

• 59:13David Hoffman?

  And he went through the general principles of, you know, the components of memes and how they spread. And he also, at the same time, was poking fun at other communities who can't meme very well, which is something that you'll see on crypto Twitter and in crypto debates, where, you know, one side will call the other side "bad memers." And that's a huge insult because if you're a bad memer, your crypto chain isn't going anywhere. And so meanwhile, Michael Goldstein points his finger at the Ethereum community and talk about how they're bad memers. And that they're going to fail because they can't meme anything into reality. And then he also provides this recipe for how to meme something.

• 59:54David Hoffman?

  Mainly three words, good was the thing that came out of his, was his big lesson. And so Ryan, you watch this and be like, wow, thanks, Michael Bitstein. I'm going to take this and run with it. Watch this and you go ETH is money. And then, and then this, what I just think has happened is that you just lit this fuse, which has led to this powder keg. That Michael Bitstein left and the powder keg is all of these, the Ethereum community that is looking for some sort of narrative to rally behind. About with what ether is and why, why we want, and what its role is in Ethereum. You, and because you created this meme, you said ETH is money.

• 1:00:36David Hoffman?

  And you started, you started sending that out in through your messaging, through your articles, through your Twitter. And then like, like clockwork, the Ethereum community, in my head, I'm just picturing the seagulls from, from Finding Nemo. Like ETH is money, ETH is money, ETH is money. And that's how it spread and boom, ETH is money. And that's how it got created. And now everyone assumes ETH is money. Now there's swag, there's merchandise, it's on ETH hub. Everyone is repeating ETH is money. So Ryan, tip of the hat for taking that, that lesson from Michael Bitstein and running with it.

• 1:01:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you know, I think Michael Bitstein is a brilliant, and many Bitcoiners are a brilliant meme artist, to be honest. Like his, his ideas in that presentation are, are kind of fantastic. You know, I'm not actually sure if I was the first to say ETH is money. I don't know. And that's actually kind of like cool that we don't really know who the originator of it is. Maybe a bunch of people started saying it at the same time. Anthony Sauciano, Eric Connor, you know, you, others. I think it was, it's kind of a community recognition that, hey, ETH is not just. A gas or an oil. That was an early meme, I think, from the Ethereum as a world computer days.

• 1:01:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  It actually has the same cryptocurrency attributes as Bitcoin does. It is a hard money. It has a supply that's subject to a monetary policy of minimum viable issuance. It's being used as a money in the Ethereum community. ETH is money. It's just as Austrian an idea, and again, we're talking about Austrian, the economists, not the country, as Bitcoin. And so I think that some Ethereum community were initially resistant to ETH as money because it's not 100% accurate, right? ETH is not a medium of exchange and a good unit of account right now, and it's sort of a very volatile store of value.

• 1:02:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  But it does have this monetary premium property, and it is the base money of the Ethereum community. So I think the Ethereum community has started to accept the meme and propagate it, and it's been successful in disbanding this notion that ETH is just a utility coin. And the reason it's stuck is because it's true. Nodes have downloaded it in their brains, and they've accepted it as true, and they've decided to propagate it. If it wasn't true, it would be an unsuccessful meme. It would be something like XRP the Standard, which is a failed meme that will be relegated to the dustbin of crypto history that no one really cares about right now. Let's talk about another meme.

• 1:03:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is the meme of DeFi. And DeFi stands for decentralized finance. We refer to DeFi a lot in bankless and the podcast and other places. Talk about the DeFi meme, David. Do you like this meme?

• 1:03:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so I like DeFi. DeFi is great. DeFi as a word, as a four-letter word, is

• 1:03:47David Hoffman?

  Good for if you already understand what it is. If you can hear the words decentralized finance and think of what decentralized finance actually is, like Maker Dow, Compound, DAI, etc., then you don't need the meme. Who does need the meme are people outside of crypto that if they hear DeFi, they're like, what the fuck is that? And then if they hear decentralized finance, they're like, what the fuck is that? And so DeFi is great as a colloquial tool of spreading communication for people that already understand it. I preferred open finance, which does start to put some idea of what it is into people's brains that hear it.

• 1:04:28David Hoffman?

  Open finance as opposed to just finance implying that normal finance, the finance that you're used to is closed finance. So therefore, what's open finance? That was a, that's a more, that's a better packet of information. But open finance unfortunately lost and DeFi is here to stay.

• 1:04:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah, op fi doesn't work. I also liked permissionless finance, but that would be PFi. And you know, no one wanted to go with that for some reason. I don't know, just didn't have the meme quality.

• 1:04:58David Hoffman?

  You don't want, you don't want dope fi of decentralized open finance?

• 1:05:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Look, I kind of like dope fi, but that didn't seem to stick either. And that's the thing with memes is sometimes you just have to capitulate. I totally capitulated on DeFi. I now, I call it DeFi and even if it's not the most accurate, it was a better meme and it won. And that's what tends to happen. It survived. Let's talk about some memes that are not winning or are maybe dying or are less accurate. Here's a meme from the early days in crypto. Litecoin is the silver to Bitcoin's gold. What do you think about that meme?

• 1:05:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, silver and gold, something we can all relate to. We all know that if you get first, you get silver, if you, or excuse me, if you get first, you're, you get the gold medal, and if you're second, you get the silver medal. And so saying that my blockchain X is going to be the silver to Bitcoin implies that, you know, you're not going to be as powerful, as valuable, but you'll be still be pretty valuable. And so you're worth buying. The way that that breaks down is that Bitcoin is divisible to eight decimal points. So why do you even need silver in the first place? And so it was a great tool to market Litecoin back before we really understood these things. But now Litecoin and the silver to Bitcoins

• 1:06:18David Hoffman?

  gold is kind of dying. No one really understands what the value proposition of Lightning is when Bitcoin both has the super high market cap and Lightning Network. Like, why do we need it? And so as, as the truth goes, so does the meme.

• 1:06:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I definitely place it in the dying meme category, though there are still out there some, some Litecoiners who will tell you that Litecoin is silver. So there's still a community that stands behind that meme. There's not much of a community, but there are still some folks that stand by the XRP the standard meme. But to me, that is a total fail. But do you remember in 2017, when that meme was propagated all over the crypto community?

• 1:07:02David Hoffman?

  Are we talking about XRP the standard?

• 1:07:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely.

• 1:07:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah, XRP the standard, the standard for all banks to use. Every single bank is going to use XRP. It will be the way that banks transfer value between other banks. XRP will be the substrate asset for all banks to transfer value. And this meme really got propped up by, by Ripple Labs, because their whole value proposition was partnering with banks so that they can use the XRP currency. And the Ripple Labs maliciously or accidentally or naively helped to foster that meme. They said they released partnership after partnership when banks were really just kind of experimenting. They were probably just like,

• 1:07:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, go away Ripple. We'll see, we'll try it out and see if it works. And then Ripple Labs goes, we have a new partnership. And then the XRP Army goes, XRP the standard, XRP the standard. In reality, banks have no interest in transferring the US dollar denominated values inside of a volatile, stable cryptocurrency that is used by a handful of people. But XRP the standard was something that was chanted by armies and armies of people during 2017 and is very likely the reason why the price jumped to the degree that it did.

• 1:08:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure how high in market cap they, they got. They flipped Ether a couple of times, at least twice. And I, I know that they got somewhere close to 100 billion, at least, XRP did. It's now since inflated. And the, the problem with XRP the standard, as well as the issues you mentioned, is that just because, e- even if the, the network itself, Ripple Labs' network, that has XRP on it, becomes a standard for banks, which again is, it doesn't seem to be moving in that direction. But even if that occurs, you know, what, what's the value accrual mechanism for XRP? That doesn't mean that XRP necessarily needs to be valuable either.

• 1:09:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I, I think that is a dying meme, but who knows? Some community could adopt it and try a resurgence and, and fire it up again. Hopefully crypto has moved on from some of these failed memes.

• 1:09:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  We should talk maybe for a second about why memes and crypto intersect so much. Why are they so important in the crypto space?

• 1:09:31David Hoffman?

  Crypto is an internet-based phenomenon. And remember, the internet is a platform for the cheap and free spreading of information and data. And information and data is what a meme is. And we need, these two platforms, crypto and memes, are using the same substrate, the internet, to exist. And so they already are intertwined by that. However, at the same time, crypto networks are inherently Social networks, they are propped up by users, by people running the node, by people mining the chain, by people validating the chain, by using the chain, by holding the assets. Crypto networks are a very wide collection of different participants and stakeholders,

• 1:10:15David Hoffman?

  but at the end of the day, they're all, the more humans involved in a network, the better. And so when a meme is conveying information as to how you should join that crypto network, then that crypto network grows stronger, the better the memes are. And the stronger the crypto network is, the better the memes become. And this turns into a positive feedback loop in the same way that like religion is a positive feedback loop and they converge upon the large religions and capitalism and communism were mind viruses that that brought on new participants, especially throughout the 1900s. And and these memes are spread and spread and spread. It's now crypto, the the turn of crypto economic protocols to be the new meme for the new age

• 1:11:00David Hoffman?

  technology revolution. And that's why crypto and memes in the internet are these three things that are going to help bootstrap themselves into existence.

• 1:11:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. I think people forget that this crypto movement is as much a social technology as it is a software technology. And people talk about is crypto money or is it software? And my answer is it's both. But if you forget one of those two things, if you forget, for instance, the meme quality of it, the the social technology aspect of it, if you forget that crypto is a lot like writing or language or government or money, and you are only thinking about the the technology aspect of it, the transactions per second on the network, you know, the the details of the cryptography, then you miss the point, I think. This is very much a social technology and a social experiment and a societal change.

• 1:11:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that's why memes are so important and so essential to the decentralized propagation of crypto, even though all of this stuff sounds silly right now. The the base layer of the social tech we're creating is all based On memes and these memes will kind of propagate up. They will work their way into institutional acceptance. Wall Street will repeat these memes as they've started to do with Bitcoin as digital gold. It will become common knowledge, common sense that of course, you know, this is what crypto is. These memes are crypto and it will leak in its way into mainstream.

• 1:12:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is essentially how good memes propagate and what I anticipate will happen with crypto. So we've got to be working on this meme layer. We also have to evaluate the memes that we see in crypto as far as whether they're true or not. And we need to work on propagating the memes that are true. All right, David, so let's wrap this up. So to summarize memes, they are thoughts or behaviors that spread within culture. They could spread super fast because of the internet. They are, they, when embedded, can become the core social fabric of everything that we do as a society. They are at the core of crypto as well.

• 1:13:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you should use the good ones to level up, accept those, be careful of the wrong ones, evaluate each of them. One of the things that we want you to do is try to escape meme bubbles that you might be in that aren't accurate. Realize that some of these memes are used to program you to think or to respond in a certain way and check those assumptions at the door. So that, these are the actions today. Evaluate the memes, figure out if they're true or not, figure out what you can learn from them. We also want you to go to Bankless in the App Store. Give us five stars. David, why are those five stars important, man?

• 1:13:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, the five stars are super important because they impact Bankless's rankings when you search for generic crypto terms in the iTunes Store. Right now, there is this podcast, it's called ICO 101 and it has, I think, 43 five-star reviews, but it hasn't put out an episode since early 2019. I think the content that we are putting out here is much better. Better than whatever ICO 101 was doing and we deserve to show up higher than them. So if you could, please go to the iTunes store and give us that five star review so we can help share the Bankless meme. We would much appreciate it.

• 1:14:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what else they can do? They can go to Bankless on YouTube. David, you've been putting out some awesome videos in addition to getting the podcast there. They can also check out some of the videos you've been uploading. Want to talk about that?

• 1:14:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so all of my articles I have read for you. I have the article itself on the screen, but I'm reading it as well and we go through the article together. I pause them and I share my thoughts as we work through them. So if you like to have things spoon-fed to you like me and want me to read the articles right into your ear holes, you can go to YouTube and do that and also subscribe to the YouTube channel. Give us those thumbs up so we also show up higher on YouTube as well.

• 1:15:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you guys know what to do. Five stars, Bankless on iTunes, check out YouTube. YouTube's going to get better and better as we go. You can read, you can watch, you can now listen to Bankless. We're going to get it into every hole in your body. Let's talk about risks and disclaimers. ETH is risky. Crypto is risky. DeFi is risky, guys. If you're buying ETH, if you're buying into these memes, if you're buying Bitcoin, know that you are going out west. You're going into the frontier. There's Bandits, isn't for everyone. You can lose what you put in. Be careful out there, guys. We are very excited to be on the Bankless journey with you. This has been Bankless, episode five. Thanks a lot.

• 1:15:50David Hoffman?

  Thanks, everyone.

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