You may or may not have noticed that memes and general shitposting are quite a large part of today’s crypto culture. If you were to hop on Reddit or take a quick stroll through Twitter, it wouldn’t be long before you start seeing posts along the lines of; “What each cryptocurrency would look like if they were toasters” or a photoshopped photo of doge sitting in a car with sunglasses and a gold chain around its neck with the captions mimicking that of a rap song (don’t worry, I’ll provide pictures of these below).



The question is; why do memes play a big part of the current crypto culture? I do have one particular theory which I’ll explore in the rest of this article.

Let’s start with the birth of the internet and how it came to be. The internet really started booming around the mid to late 90s, whereby the year 2000, the internet communicated over 51% of the global communication landscape. Those years are important as it helps to determine the average age of the majority of daily internet users of today.

If I use my one of my colleague’s age today, which is 35. He told me that he had his first laptop in 1988. Since he was born in 1982, it would have made him 6 at the time he had a laptop in the house to play with. So, at an early age, he managed to adopt the internet culture. By the time he was in his teens, he was building computers and spending several hours, a day surfing the web and digging through hyperlink after hyperlink.

At the same time, he or other kids around his age may have been out and about, carving their names or messages into trees and park benches or tagging graffiti in various places. At the end of the day, those activities share the same concept of what memes are and what they do. And that is to share an idea, a message to others people that will both understand and (in a way) appreciate your idea/message.

So as Dennis states in his Diary of Dennis; “Internet memes are the adjusted form of sharing a short message or idea.”

I believe a large number of the Crypto community are fairly young of age. I do not have the statistics or facts to be sure, but if a large percentage of the Crypto community is sub 40 years of age, then I think it’s easy to believe that a lot of them adopted the internet culture as they were growing up in their teens and early adulthood.

Memes are extremely easy to create and with how the internet and social media is today, even easier to share. Unlike carvings and graffiti, they can be sent to all corners of the world to anybody for them to see and enjoy.

And that’s that! Cryptocurrency was born on the internet. The developers and the first adopters were people who surround themselves in internet culture daily. And internet culture is what I believe Crypto culture closely relates to.

So, get out there, do your crypto thing and make memes!

Citations and cool links:

Diary of Dennis:

What are memes and why are they so popular: https://diaryofdennis.com/2015/01/19/what-are-internet-memes-and-why-did-they-become-so-popular/

History of the internet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

The importance of memes culture in millennial marketing:

https://medium.com/@KennySoto/the-importance-of-memes-meme-culture-in-millennial-marketing-62f2c350f152

This video on the Third Industrial Revolution is a very interesting one. It is long, so be ready to set aside some time for this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX3M8Ka9vUA

Check out the last Chuckles! https://embily.com/bi-weekly-chuckles-2/

Cover illustration artist Stone, stonetoss.com