Cryptocurrency: The Interplay of Culture and Consensus

The value consensus of digital currency is deeply rooted in its unique culture. The dissemination of this value consensus is inseparable from the cultural genes unique to cryptocurrency. The value consensus is essentially a meme (Meme), and cryptocurrency cannot escape the influence of the meme phenomenon. Bitcoin is the earliest and largest representative of memes; it directly injected its core cultural concept into the system by engraving a piece of news in the genesis block, ultimately achieving self-guidance.

Revisiting the on-chain cultural traditions and returning to the decentralized spirit is a feasible path to return to Bitcoin's spontaneous bootstrap model. The emergence of Ordinals, Sats, and other inscriptions directly embeds inscription code information into the Bitcoin community, marking the spontaneous starting point of the Bitcoin Renaissance. The combination of crypto culture and technology, through the method of content on-chain, consciously binds crypto assets with culture, which is likely to become an important direction for the development of inscriptions 2.0.

Value Consensus is a Meme

Newcomers to the cryptocurrency space, especially friends coming from the blockchain circle, often feel confused by projects like EOS that have advanced technology and good user experience, yet have a terrible market value. This is because they have not clearly distinguished between the differences of technological Consensus and value Consensus.

Consensus can be divided into two types: technical route consensus and value orientation consensus. The value of Bitcoin has been gradually established from zero, ultimately achieving value self-sustainability. In this process, the community must not only reach a consensus on technology but also form a consensus on values. Having only technical consensus does not equate to a strong value consensus. Taking EOS as an example, its technical level is not considered outdated even today, and the on-chain experience and ecological applications were once not inferior to Ethereum. However, all the technological advantages and ecological barriers could not stop its foundation from frequently selling EOS for BTC and ETH. This operation has caused EOS to become seen as a tool for the team to harvest profits in the eyes of community members. Once an asset forms a negative impression in the minds of investors, reversing that requires huge capital investment. Without capital support and with the departure of the core team, even the best products cannot support EOS's valuation.

In contrast, the original meme coin Dogecoin had almost no remaining development team before Musk's endorsement. However, with Musk's call, most investors believed that with his social influence, Dogecoin would be seen, recognized, and held by more people. The diffusion of the token's consensus relies on Musk as the source of dissemination, giving it wings. This kind of community consensus pushed Dogecoin's price from $0.014 all the way up to $0.8.

These two cases illustrate that EOS has excellent technology and products but has failed to gain corresponding market value. Dogecoin is purely a meme, without an ecosystem or technology, yet it has achieved a high valuation. This shows that technological consensus does not equate to value consensus.

The process of forming a consensus on values is essentially the process of shaping memes. The technical consensus of Bitcoin ensures that each account can fully control its own permissions and that there is no double-spending issue. The technical consensus has been promoted by its technical white paper since the inception of Bitcoin. Bitcoin took a year and a half to evolve from being worthless to having a price, and from being mined to truly achieving payments. During this period, members of the Bitcoin community constantly reflected not only on whether Bitcoin as a chain is secure enough, but more importantly, whether Bitcoin has value and what that value is. This is the value consensus, which is always subjective. The foundation of the value consensus of Bitcoin is laid by "The Non-State Money" and the panic about the centralization of currency. The news article embedded in the genesis block is precisely the seed and the trigger of this panic. Without the reprint of this genesis block, this news article would have long been buried in the vast archives of The Times.

Satoshi Nakamoto deeply understands the ways of the attention economy. Looking back at the successful launch of Bitcoin, Satoshi has always sought endorsements from big names in the crypto community. For example, he showed David Chaum that Bitcoin had realized the concept of B-money proposed by Chaum and gained Chaum's offline support. This endorsement established a brand image for Bitcoin within the community, thereby attracting community attention. On January 12, 2009, Hal Finney received 10 Bitcoins sent by Satoshi during a test transaction, becoming the first recipient of a Bitcoin transfer. Subsequently, Satoshi often transferred mined Bitcoins to friends in the crypto community to gain the attention of community members through this behavior. This practice later evolved into one of the unique ways crypto projects attract attention: airdrops!

Tracing back to the first real transaction of Bitcoin, Laszlo Hanyecz purchased two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. In this transaction, Bitcoin first had a price. Both parties understood Bitcoin. The premise for both parties to reach a Consensus on Bitcoin's purchasing power is their recognition of Bitcoin's value narrative. The prerequisite for recognizing the value narrative is the ability to notice Bitcoin's value proposition. Satoshi Nakamoto etched this meaningful news headline into the genesis block, which makes every Bitcoin evangelist naturally elaborate on Bitcoin's value proposition when explaining the history of Bitcoin. This is the most direct and efficient way to capture value.

Coin price fluctuations cannot escape the meme effect

Most cryptocurrencies are essentially meme coins. Looking back at other tokens in the crypto space, many mainstream tokens like UNI, ARB, and OP lack a clear value capture mechanism, even the major token (. The rights and obligations of more assets are difficult to define, and it's hard to find effective value capture. The valuation logic in the crypto space is hard to explain using traditional currency theory or financial asset theory. Bitcoin claims to be a peer-to-peer cash payment system, but how many people actually use Bitcoin for payments today? We might boldly say that Bitcoin is the biggest meme. The essence of coin price is the meme effect. It is precisely because of this meme attribute that crypto assets possess a characteristic different from traditional finance: attention. Its volatility cycle is also vastly different from traditional finance.

Even utility tokens contain elements of memes in their value. The pricing of financial assets ultimately depends on supply and demand. Supply and demand stem from changes in human decisions, which are influenced by emotions affected by information. Behavioral finance has long been a consensus in the investment community. The traditional financial value represented by tokens and memes are not contradictory. Memes can enhance the valuation of utility tokens but may also weaken the value of utility tokens.

Therefore, we can say that the essence of coin prices is the embodiment of memes.

In the short term, coin prices may be manipulated by various patterns, but in the long run, the community size holding the tokens and their willingness to hold coins depends on whether the value output is successful. Just like the Apple iPhone, even if the cost-performance ratio is not high, users still buy it. Only long-term believers and holders of coins are the true support of the token's value. And these believers and holders are inspired by culture.

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The formation of consensus requires cultural dissemination

The technical consensus and value consensus of the token are formed through different paths. Technical consensus helps to establish the value consensus of the token. Both technical consensus and value consensus have emotional components, and there is a tendency for people to rely on intuitive thinking. Therefore, unlike copying cold code between different computers, consensus spreads between people through content that has warmth. This warm content that spreads among people is what we usually define as social content.

All cryptocurrency project teams have no disagreement on building brands and establishing value Consensus through social media and social content. Almost all the projects I know have various social accounts and private communication spaces. From community operation to group moderators, project teams will form their own community hierarchy. Social accounts become the source of dissemination, and communities or a series of small crypto circles become the channels for communication.

The technical white paper of Bitcoin is calm and objective, while the news engraved in the genesis block is full of warmth. This news reflects the value orientation that Satoshi Nakamoto wants to convey to Bitcoin followers. The genesis block has been deployed around the world with the full nodes, and as long as Bitcoin exists, this excerpt advocating Bitcoin's value orientation will not cease its spread. Every time this excerpt is read, people are reminded again that the end of centralized central banks is approaching. If we regard Bitcoin as a religion, then "UK Chancellor's bailout" is the apocalyptic prophecy of this religion. And Bitcoin is the Maitreya, the Messiah, the Ark of Noah in the end times.

The crypto world has always understood cultural dissemination the best. Looking only at the current wave of inscriptions, various small images and slogans are all aimed at letting more people understand the meme culture represented by four letters. Unfortunately, the dissemination area is still primarily dominated by Web2 social media, and memes themselves do not carry a strong value orientation like Bitcoin. Many inscriptions cannot find their positioning during dissemination. Successful inscriptions, on one hand, occupy the orthodox position of inscriptions, and on the other hand, form a unique culture in their narrative, such as the Sats community's "1 sats=1 sats".

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In summary, cultural content is a carrier of value orientation. This understanding aligns with meme theory. A meme is an information unit in cultural dissemination. Here, culture broadly refers to thoughts, concepts, customs, artistic forms, etc. To support token prices, designers must consider the relationship between culture and coin prices during the cultural dissemination process. The memes contained in Bitcoin set a good precedent for the crypto circle, but unfortunately, many so-called "meme" tokens that followed often focus solely on the cost of meme dissemination, neglecting the relationship between memes and token value. This is also why after Bitcoin, there are only meme coin names but no longer any meme narratives.

Content On-chain: Capturing On-chain Native Attention

Capturing on-chain native attention through content on the blockchain is currently a very rare content on-chain strategy. Other sectors have not formed a sustainable economic cycle and mostly remain in the experimental stage.

To widely reach a value-oriented Consensus, it is first necessary to ensure information accessibility. In modern society, the cost of content creation is almost zero, and compared to the overwhelming influx of content, attention has become a scarce resource since a century ago. From the placement in mainstream media to the positions of KOLs, and from Web2 to Web3, project operations cannot ignore the importance of attention. Since the emergence of the first generation of print media, attention has become the primary trading commodity of media. Entering the Web2 era, platforms that control traffic hubs regard traffic distribution as the source of monopolistic profits.

In the traditional business world, advertising for products aims to inform consumers about the products themselves, as well as to promote their attributes and value propositions. However, the highest-end advertising often adopts the method of value proposition output. Multinational giants like Apple and Huawei, as long as they offer differentiated brand products, often excel in this area. This value proposition output is no different from that of digital encrypted assets.

In traditional fields, the methods of capturing attention in the coin circle are quite similar. There are event marketing campaigns involving an NFT auctioned for tens of millions of dollars at Sotheby's, promotional events with parties chartering cruise ships, and brand marketing securing naming rights for sports arenas.

There are also information channels on the chain in the coin circle. For example, the inscription of Bitcoin, which consists of only 4 short characters, directly injects Meme information into the core of the Bitcoin community. Whether in support of or against the inscription, the inscription