protos.com
Blockstream’s marketing and communications director Fernando Nikolić has created a new website to track some of Bitcoin’s most popular memes and lore. At launch, Know Your Bitcoin Meme displays a gallery of a few thousand viral images and attributes them to X (formerly Twitter) users.
“Culture drives change, and memes change culture,” said Nikolić in a statement to Protos. “Bitcoin’s history is written in memes and will continue to do so. So I felt compelled to create this ‘Great Library of Alexandria’ on the web as a nod to the culture and give everyone access to contribute to it.”
Unfortunately, attributions are not vetted by human researchers, so they don’t indicate ownership or creation. Nikolić programmatically relies on image searches to attribute memes to creators. He admitted that he has only spent a few hours on the website as a hobby and hasn’t hired an editor to manually search variants or investigate the true origins of each meme.
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Documenting Bitcoin memes
Other Bitcoiners have attempted to create libraries of memes and lore. Currently, the de facto encyclopedia of Bitcoin memes is Urban Dictionary, the general-purpose wiki of slang terms and viral images, founded in 1999.
Know Your Bitcoin Meme is itself a derivative of Know Your Meme, a 17-year old web startup that hosted some of New York City’s first parties for bloggers and documented the early years of social media platforms Friendster, MySpace, Xanga, and The Facebook.
In a way, it launched to compete with general-purpose meme libraries like Urban Dictionary or Wikipedia. Know Your Bitcoin Meme simply plays on the name of that popular brand but is otherwise unaffiliated.