bitcoin

It appears that memes are taking over the economy. If you've been keeping up with the GameStop saga and the rise of DOGE, by now you're probably well aware that bitcoin reached its all-time high of $48k early this morning. While bitcoin has been powering through its ascent for over a decade now and is certainly no meme stock, we can't deny that this forceful crypto rally may at least be loosely connected to the recent Reddit short squeeze meme schemes. Elon Musk has not-so-subtly been hyping both dogecoin and bitcoin for months—mysteriously putting 'bitcoin' into his Twitter bio, retweeting ridiculous pro-dogecoin memes, claiming that dogecoin is 'the people's crypto'—even Snoop Dogg (aka Snoop Doge) got in on the hype. But it all came to a head when Tesla announced its purchase of $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin on Monday. It didn't take long for the price of bitcoin to skyrocket to the moon. 

But how much further can bitcoin go? As more and more institutions adopt bitcoin as a legitimate form of currency, the plebs are wanting in, but many are wondering if they're too late. In retrospect, one could say there was never a bad time to buy bitcoin. Remember when one coin cost $9k a year ago? To be honest, I personally thought I was too late then. Now look at me. But obviously hindsight is clear as day, and the future of bitcoin is still foggy for those of us who need blockchain technology to be fully demystified before we can 'YOLO' our life-savings into cryptocurrency. If there's one thing we do know for sure, it's that the inherently viral nature of memes has shown to be a useful tool in pumping crypto. Just as r/WallStreetBets rallied to pump the GME short squeeze, subreddits like r/SatoshiStreetBets have been hyping altcoins like DOGE in order to raise the price floor. Some brush off dogecoin as a bubble or pyramid scheme that only functions as a pump and dump rather than a viable currency, but skeptics said the same thing about bitcoin in 2009, so who knows?

We can't say what the future holds for bitcoin, but we can offer what we know best—memes. We've got some amusing bitcoin memes and tweets both old and fresh for anyone who's either curious about crpyto for the first time or obsessive about checking those candlesticks every two minutes. 

What the hell is an NFT anyway? Non-Fungible Tokens are basically digital assets or collectors items, sort of like a rare Pokémon card that has gained value over time due to its scarcity, except NFTs only exist digitally on 'proof of work' blockchains, like Ethereum. When one buys an NFT, they aren't buying the image itself, but rather the token that points to the image or video and says 'this is the only one that exists.' Now people can even buy individual tweets as NFTs, but the way that works is a little more complicated, and frankly, we don't really get it. All we know is, Jack Dorsey is selling his first tweet ever for like, millions of dollars and 'Bad Luck Brian' sold an NFT of his school photo for 20 ETH (about $36,000 at the time). NFTs aren't only being used to sell digital art, the memes have unsurprisingly taken over and you can find everything from the 'Deal With It' sunglasses to 'Nyan Cat' selling for lots of money. All of this absurdity might seem like a harmless game to some—buying the metadata of original troll face for thousands of dollars in crypto? Sure, okay. But sadly minting NFTs on proof-of-work blockchain has disturbing environmental consequences. The average NFT that gets minted to the ETH network has the same carbon footprint as one European resident's electricity consumption for 1.5 months. So until we can figure out a more efficient way to sell digital assets, some suggest that participants in this madness will have to offset the environmental cost by doing things like reinvesting their gains into renewable energy.

We've collected some tweets that paint a picture of the current NFT frenzy—some from high-profile public figures who are participating and some reactions from people who are watching from the sidelines.

Elon Musk has really out-memed himself with his latest stunt. In a recent SEC filing, the CEO and CFO of Tesla have dubbed themselves Technoking of Tesla and Master of Coin, respectively. I mean, I suppose if you're one of the richest people in the world who can come back from the dead and whose tweets have the power to sway the meme-stock market, the world must look like some sort of game to you. Unsurprisingly, Twitter has some takes after waking up to the news of Musk's latest trolly moves, and we've collected some of the most amusing latest reactions. 

Everyone's got 20/20 hindsight, but many are blind when it comes to predicting outcomes and sharing takes that stand the test of time. It's not always fun to look into the past, especially when you're the one with the embarrassingly wrong analysis immortalized forever on subs like r/agedlikemilk. For us passive observers on the other hand, this stuff is mad entertaining.

We all know that hindsight is 20/20. That definitely applies to the year 2020, too. But today we're talking about a special kind of hindsight and regret. We've all seen that tweet from Hillary Clinton where she says "Happy birthday to this future President." Well, things didn't really go as planned. Today we're here to cover some of the regretful and poorly aged posts that you may not have seen plastered over the internet. You know, posts regarding the horrendous winter storm that struck America's heartland this week. Or, perhaps, posts that deal with some woefully ignorant Bitcoin owners who sold themselves short years ago.

Most of these regrettable situations and posts are pretty harmless. But they're a great reminder that you really need to try to think to the future before getting your hopes up - or your hopes lost. One thing's for sure, it always helps to laugh through the pain. 

We'd like to give these scammers the benefit of the doubt and assume that they don't know they're involved in a scam. Either that or someone who's down on their luck might resort to desperate measures to earn a bit of extra cash. Either way, this dude definitely picked the wrong person to mess with!

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the memes.

Don't let those Sunday blues get ya down!

Cryptocurrency seems to be on everyone's minds as the price of bitcoin has risen over 1600% since January of this year. As of right now, each bitcoin is worth over $17k. The dramatic increase is causing concern regarding the hypothetical popping of the cryptocurrency's bubble. While people fight over whether or not it's sustainable or smart to invest, we're more interested in the memes.