“Stacking Sats” vs. “ETH is Money” - The Memes That Shaped 2019

The Breakdown

Blockworks

Investing, Business

4.8 • 806 Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2019

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From “digital gold” to “stacking sats” to “ETH is money,” 2019 was a year of narrative battlegrounds and meme warfare. And when every narrative is competing for scarce resources and attention, things are sure to get contentious. This special episode breaks down Ryan Selkis’ recent list of top ten crypto narratives and adds a few more worthy of note. Does “The Revolution Need Rules?” Is “Dissident Tech” the newest important area of focus.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin,
0:11.0	crypto and beyond, with your host, NLW. The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk.
0:20.0	Welcome back to a special edition of The Breakdown.
0:24.7	So today is Wednesday, December 18th, and throughout this week we've been looking at
0:29.1	crypto narratives in the context of contemporary news and trying to understand how the stories
0:35.1	closing out the year validate or change and suggest something different
0:40.2	about the narratives that have defined this year. Well, today we're doing something a little bit
0:44.0	different and we're going to actually look at narratives on their own terms. And this was
0:48.2	inspired by a post by Ryan Selkis, CEO of Masari, who wrote a huge tome, basically with predictions for 2020
0:57.7	as well as reflections on 2019, and from that extracted something he called the year's
1:02.6	top 10 crypto narratives and published it on CoinDesk as part of their 2019 year in review.
1:07.6	So Ryan kind of goes through 10 different narratives or memes that he thinks
1:13.8	defined this past year. I'm going to go through each of them, give you my take on what I think
1:19.1	about them, where I think their place in the market narrative is. And then I'm going to share one more,
1:23.9	one that I think is important to me and actually preview a piece that I have coming out for Coindesk. One thing that you'll notice as we dive into this is that there's a slight
1:31.3	difference, and I think, to me, between a narrative and a meme. A meme is a really powerful way
1:36.6	to simplify complex phenomena into something grokable quickly. And a lot of these ideas that Ryan puts forth, I think, are powerful memes. To me,
1:47.2	a narrative is an orientation in the world. It's a way that we understand and make sense of what's
1:52.0	happening around us. And it's the way that we compete to get other people to see the world in the same way
1:57.2	that we do. So when there's a Bitcoin narrative that Bitcoin is for day-to-day
2:01.9	transactions versus a Bitcoin narrative that it is a way to opt out of an unjust Fiat money
2:07.6	system, those narratives run into each other because they're competing for some scarce amount of
	...

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