Cultural Consensus of Encryption Assets: The Renaissance of BTC and the Rise of Social Inscriptions

The value consensus of cryptocurrency is rooted in its unique cultural foundation. The dissemination of this value consensus cannot be separated from the cultural attributes of cryptocurrency itself. Value consensus is essentially a Meme phenomenon, and cryptocurrency cannot escape the influence of Meme. Bitcoin is the earliest and most influential Meme, as it realized self-launching by directly inscribing core cultural ideas into the genesis block.

Revisiting on-chain culture and decentralized cultural traditions is a feasible path to return to Bitcoin's spontaneous bootstrap model. The emergence of inscriptions such as Ordinals and Sats directly embeds inscription code information into the Bitcoin community, becoming the spontaneous starting point of the Bitcoin Renaissance. The integration of encryption culture and technology, through the method of content on-chain, organically combines crypto assets with culture, and may very well become a new direction for the development of inscription 2.0.

The value consensus is Meme

Friends who are new to the encryption currency sphere, especially those coming from the blockchain field, often feel confused by projects like EOS, which are technically advanced and have a good user experience but have poor market performance. This is because the distinction between technological Consensus and value Consensus has not been clearly made.

Consensus is divided into technical route consensus and value orientation consensus.

The value of Bitcoin is also built gradually from zero, ultimately achieving self-initiated value. In this process, the community not only needs to reach a technical consensus but also needs to form a value consensus. Having only a technical consensus does not mean that a strong value consensus can be established. Taking EOS as an example, its valuation has troubled many technicians: with such good technology, why does the price remain low? Even today, EOS's technology is not considered outdated. The on-chain experience and ecological applications were once not worse than Ethereum. However, all the technical and ecological advantages could not withstand the foundation's actions of selling EOS for Bitcoin and Ethereum. This operation caused EOS to become a tool for the team to exploit the community members in their eyes. Once a certain asset forms a stereotype in the minds of investors, reversing the consensus requires substantial capital investment. Without capital support, coupled with the departure of the core team, no matter how good the product is, it cannot sustain EOS's valuation.

In contrast, the original Meme coin Dogecoin had very few developers left even before Musk's promotion. However, Musk's promotion made most investors believe that with Musk's social influence, Dogecoin would be seen, recognized, and ultimately held by more people. The diffusion of the token consensus relied on Musk as the传播源, like adding wings to a tiger. This kind of community consensus pushed Dogecoin's price from $0.014 all the way up to $0.8.

These two cases illustrate that although EOS has excellent technology and products, it cannot achieve good price performance. In contrast, Dogecoin is purely a meme, lacking ecological and technical support, yet it can obtain high valuation. This shows that technological consensus is not equivalent to value consensus.

The process of forming a value-oriented consensus is the process of Meme formation.

The technical consensus of Bitcoin ensures that each account can fully control its permissions, and there is no double-spending problem. The technical consensus has been communicated by its technical white paper since the birth of Bitcoin. Bitcoin has gone from being worthless to valuable, from having miners to truly achieving payments, taking a year and a half. During this period, members of the Bitcoin community constantly reflected not only on whether Bitcoin is secure enough as a chain, but more importantly, whether Bitcoin has value and what that value is. This is the process of forming value consensus. Value consensus is always subjective. The foundation of Bitcoin's value consensus is laid by "The Non-State Money" and the fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding currency centralization (FUD). The news that was written into the genesis block is precisely the seed and fuse of FUD. If it weren't for this reprint in the genesis block, this news would have long been buried in the vast archives of The Times.

Satoshi Nakamoto is a master of attention. Looking back at the successful launch of Bitcoin, Satoshi has been interacting with crypto bigwigs in the crypto community. For example, he showed David Chaum that Bitcoin had realized the B-cash concept proposed by Chaum, and gained Chaum's offline support. This endorsement helped establish Bitcoin's brand image in the community, thereby attracting community interest. On January 12, 2009, Hal Finney received 10 bitcoins sent by Satoshi during a Bitcoin transfer test, becoming the first recipient of a Bitcoin transfer. Since then, Satoshi has also frequently transferred mined bitcoins to friends in the crypto community, gaining the attention of community members in this way. This behavior later evolved into a unique method of building attention in crypto projects: airdrops!

Tracing back to the first real Bitcoin transaction, Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. In this transaction, Bitcoin first had a price. Both parties were aware of Bitcoin. The premise for both parties to reach a consensus on Bitcoin's purchasing power was their recognition of Bitcoin's value narrative. The prerequisite for recognizing the value narrative is the ability to notice Bitcoin's value narrative. Satoshi Nakamoto inscribed a deeply meaningful headline in the genesis block, which naturally allows every Bitcoin evangelist to spread Bitcoin's value narrative when explaining Bitcoin's history. This is the most direct and efficient way of value capture.

The price of coins cannot escape the Meme phenomenon

Most cryptocurrencies are essentially Meme coins. Looking back at other tokens in the cryptocurrency market, many mainstream tokens like UNI, ARB, and OP lack clear value capture support, with the rights and obligations of more assets being difficult to define, and it is even hard to find effective points of value capture. The valuation of cryptocurrencies cannot be explained by monetary theory or financial asset theory. Bitcoin is claimed to be a peer-to-peer cash payment system, but how many people are actually using Bitcoin for payments today? We can boldly say that Bitcoin is the biggest Meme. The changes in coin prices essentially reflect the Meme effect. It is precisely because of the Meme attributes that crypto assets possess a quality different from traditional finance: attention. Its volatility cycle is also significantly different from that of traditional finance.

Even the value of utility tokens contains elements of Meme. Ultimately, the pricing of financial assets depends on supply and demand. Supply and demand arise from changes in human decision-making, 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 Meme are not mutually exclusive. Meme can enhance the valuation of utility tokens, but it may also weaken the value of utility tokens.

Therefore, we can say that the change in coin prices is essentially the change in Memes.

In the short term, cryptocurrency prices may be manipulated by the market, but in the long run, the size of the community holding the tokens and their willingness to hold them depends on whether the output of values is successful. Just like with iPhones, even if the cost-performance ratio is low, users still buy them. Only long-term believers and long-term holders are the true support of a token's value. And these believers and holders are inspired by culture.

( The achievement of consensus requires cultural dissemination.

The technical consensus and value consensus of tokens are formed through different paths. Technical consensus helps to form the value consensus of tokens. However, whether it is technical consensus or value consensus, there are emotional components, and there is a tendency for people to make simplified judgments based on intuitive thinking. Therefore, unlike the cold code being replicated between different computers, consensus needs to be conveyed among people using warm content as a medium. This warm content that spreads among people is what we commonly define as social content.

All encryption projects have no disagreement in building brands and establishing value consensus through social media and social content. Almost all the projects I know have their own various social accounts and private domain communication spaces. From community operations to group administrators, the project parties will form their own community tier. Social accounts become the source of communication, and communities or a series of small encryption circles become the communication channels.

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

The cryptocurrency industry has always been the best at cultural communication. Looking only at the current wave of inscriptions, various small images and different slogans are all aimed at helping more people understand the Meme culture represented by four letters. Unfortunately, the area of communication still mainly relies on Web2 social media, and Memes do not inherently carry a strong value orientation like Bitcoin. Many inscriptions struggle to find their own positioning in the communication process. Successful inscriptions, on one hand, occupy a legitimate position in the inscription space, while on the other hand, they form a unique culture in their narrative, such as the Sats community's slogan, "1 sats=1 sats."

In summary, cultural content is the 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 need to consider the relationship between culture and coin prices during the cultural dissemination process. The meme inherent in Bitcoin set a good precedent for the crypto space, but unfortunately, many so-called "meme" tokens that followed often only pursued the dissemination costs of "memes" while neglecting the relationship between "memes" and token value. This is also why, after Bitcoin, there are only meme coin names without any narrative of memes.

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Content on Chain: Capturing Native Attention on the Chain

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

( To widely reach a consensus on value orientation, it is necessary to capture attention.

To reach a consensus on value, information needs to be disseminated first. In modern society, the cost of content creation is nearly zero, and compared to the overwhelming flood of content, attention has become a scarce resource since a century ago. From the pages of mainstream media to the display positions of KOLs, from Web2 to Web3, project operations do not overlook the importance of attention. Since the emergence of the first generation of print media, attention has become the main commodity traded by the media. Entering the Web2 era, platforms that control the flow of traffic regard traffic distribution as the source of their monopolistic profits.

In the traditional business world, advertising goods is meant to help consumers understand the products themselves, as well as to promote their attributes and value propositions. However, the most high-end advertisements often employ a value proposition output method. Multinational giants like Apple and Huawei, as long as they provide differentiated products, are often well-versed in this approach. This output of values is no different from the output of values in encryption assets.

In traditional fields, the methods used by cryptocurrencies to capture attention are also quite similar. There are event marketing cases where an NFT was auctioned for tens of millions of dollars at Sotheby's, event marketing involving parties on chartered cruise ships, and brand marketing with the naming rights to sports arenas.

Cryptocurrency also has on-chain information channels. For example, Bitcoin's inscription, although only four characters long, directly injects Meme information into the core of the Bitcoin community. Whether in favor of or against the inscription, its emergence forces members of the Bitcoin community to express their stance. This on-chain information is eternal and open. Compliant inscriptions can be etched onto the Bitcoin blockchain and read by others. The process of minting an inscription is equivalent to a certain address liking that piece of information, publicly indicating a stance. However, traditional inscriptions have too little on-chain information, and community members' expressions of attitude are too one-dimensional.

It is undeniable that Satoshi Nakamoto's choice of content is exquisite.