Author: Nianqing, ChainCatcher

 

Happy New Year! How will you spend the last moments of 2024?

If we need some NetEase Cloud moments tonight, it might go something like this:

In April, you encountered a rare rainstorm in the desert of Dubai;

In September, the A-share market rose above 3,300 points and you quickly cashed out to buy A-shares.

In November, an Ethereum Devcon attendee was robbed at knifepoint in Thailand;

In December, Bitcoin broke through 100,000 US dollars. The news you forwarded attracted likes from relatives and friends, who said that you must have made a fortune if you had entered the market earlier. You replied with tears in your eyes: I didn’t make much, just a small profit.

……

This year, your cognitive dimension has been greatly improved, and you have completed the transformation from a cryptocurrency leeks to a crypto consumer.

Here is a summary of my investment advice for 2024:

The flowers are the same every year, and I really want to make back my investment in the cryptocurrency circle.

At this special moment today, ChainCatcher has reviewed some events other than "financial consumption" for you:

(This article only represents the author's personal sense of humor. If you have more black humor, funny, or sarcastic news, please discuss with us on the X platform and @ChainCatcher_)

Vitalik becomes the adoptive father of the popular hippopotamus Moo Deng

In September this year, a two-month-old pygmy hippopotamus, Moo Deng (Bouncing Pig), at the Chonburi Zoo in Thailand, quickly became popular due to its funny interactions with the keeper, becoming a famous online meme and being made into various meme pictures. The hippopotamus fever has also swept the crypto circle, and multiple chains have also given birth to their own memecoins with the same name, including Ethereum and Solana.

Interestingly, after receiving the MOODENG airdrop from the deployer, Vitalik continued to sell tokens for several days, causing MOODENG to fall more than 70% from its high point. However, Vitalik went to the zoo to visit the little hippo Moo Deng in November, which caused the Meme token MOODENG on the Ethereum chain to reach a record high.

Just recently, Vitalik announced that he would become Moo Deng’s adoptive father. In the next two years, Vitalik will donate 10 million Thai baht to help the little hippo grow up healthily and happily, and “maybe I will donate more because I have reserved 88 ETH for Moo Deng and her friends.” As soon as the news came out, MOODENG 24h rose by nearly 70%.

But then again, Vitalik received a total of 61.7 billion MOODENG tokens, accounting for 14.68% of the total tokens, worth about several million US dollars.

Solana officially released Breakpoint ad film, satirizing the current state of crypto conferences

On August 1, Solana's official social media platform released a promotional advertisement with the theme "Breakpoint: not your average crypto conference". This video satirizes the current situation of crypto conferences with full skill and sharpness. For example, there are more speakers than listeners, attendees collect "a ton" of project peripherals, the audience cares more about airdrops and coin issuance rather than project innovation, and the guests always repeat similar views and force concepts, and the whole conversation is incomprehensible. This video was quickly translated into multiple languages, sparking discussions (or self-mockery) in the industry, and has now been viewed more than 1 million times. Interestingly, Solana Breakpoint really did what it said, and the Breakpoint Summit held in September gained a high popularity and reputation.

Review again: https://x.com/solana/status/1818718599579943075

On November 5, Solana officially released a video titled "Build for users. not VCs", which seemed to be a call back for the satirical advertisement in August. This latest video lists a series of Crypto jargons, such as talking about building infrastructure, improving scalability, bridging to the main network, re-staking, establishing partnerships with well-known protocols, and quickly obtaining financing, but never asking about consumers and users and specific use cases.

Click here to view: https://x.com/solana/status/1853567281630150859

The founders of Bankless and Synthetix had an offline real-life fight

Many crypto users are willing to fight online, but few dare to do so. On October 11, Kain Warwick, founder of Synthetix, and David Hoffman, founder of Bankless, had an offline real-life fight in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.

The match was co-organized by Permissionless and Karate Combat, a live-streaming fighting platform. Permissionless is a cryptocurrency-themed conference co-organized by Bankless and Blockworks, which offers free tickets to fighting events to ticket holders.

The reason for the fight between the two was that they had some disagreements on some core issues of DeFi and the crypto industry during an online discussion. The two had reached a $500,000 bet on the sponsorship scale of Synthetix's infinex. This fight in the cryptocurrency circle has attracted much attention. Polymarket opened a betting pool for the duel between the two as early as September 24.

This real-life fight lasted less than ten minutes, and the final result was that Bankless founder David beat up Synthetix founder Kain, who was a size larger than himself.

Related reading: (A real-life fight in the cryptocurrency circle, the founder of Bankless beat up the founder of Synthetix)

A spa in New York, USA, chose to mine Bitcoin to heat the bath due to high electricity bills

On the surface, the Bathhouse in Brooklyn, New York, is an ordinary public bath. But behind these warm baths, there are more than a dozen Bitcoin mining machines running 24 hours a day.

In 2019, two young people who like to take a bath after fitness established the first Bathhouse in Brooklyn, New York. It has three hot spring pools, two saunas, a steam room and two Turkish baths, but the constant temperature environment means a lot of energy consumption, and their monthly electricity bill is as high as 20,000 US dollars. In 2021, after seeing a video online of heating the pool with a Bitcoin miner, the two young people thought it was the most meaningful thing in the world and decided to practice it. At the end of 2021, they bought 12 Bitcoin miners to power the two heated pools of the Bathhouse Williamsburg branch, which can generate about 1,200 THz of computing power per second. This year, Bathhouse opened its branch in the Flatiron District of New York City, and all four hot spring pools and three Turkish baths will be heated by 14 bigger and better Bitcoin miners at a rate of 2,600 THz per second.

Although the income from Bitcoin mining does offset some of the costs, the two founders said that they only see mining as an engineering solution to effectively utilize energy and capital. Compared with the income from Bitcoin mining itself, this concept and marketing method have made them more famous.

Therefore, Bathhouse has never sold any Bitcoin and emphasized that there is no plan to sell in the future. They will deposit the Bitcoin earned from mining or paid by customers into the company's long-term savings.

Financial Times apologizes after Bitcoin breaks 100,000

On December 5, Bitcoin broke through the $100,000 mark for the first time. Then the Financial Times published an apology letter with a meme as the cover titled "Hodlers: an apology: A mea culpa to mark a BTC milestone". In this article, the Financial Times wrote: In this article: Old readers of FT Alphaville may have formed the impression that the authors were and are skeptical of cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin. This is correct...

Still, with Bitcoin trading over $100,000, a ton of commenters seem to think they owe an apology given our chronic cynicism, so here goes: If at any point in the last 14 years you chose not to buy this thing that keeps going up based on our "ratings," we apologize. It's great when your book is going up. If you misinterpreted our crypto cynicism as a declaration of support for tradfi, we apologize, because we hate that, too.

Many people in the cryptocurrency circle may have started to "repost" after seeing the title, but in fact, this is actually a self-deprecating or sarcastic "apology", a very typical British "dry humor".

Related reading: (Behind the sarcastic "apology" is a cry from journalists)

Airdrop involution escalates, Layerzero staged an "insulting" airdrop

The full-chain interoperability protocol LayerZero officially launched an airdrop in June this year, with an airdrop value of up to hundreds of millions of dollars. Prior to this, LayerZero had been through a witch cleansing campaign for more than a month. In LayerZero's view, the best users should receive airdrop rewards, and these best users should be the most "persistent" users.

LayerZero is called the "witch killer" because it introduced a new "bounty reporting mechanism". The review is even divided into three stages: self-exposure, official review, and bounty reporting. It can be said to be a "multi-angle, all-round" anti-witch. The large-scale cleansing campaign has attracted a large number of criticisms from the "Mao Mao Party" - "2.16 million witch addresses, the largest witch library in history was born, Mao Mao is an electronic beggar, holding a bowl to beg for food, zkSync passed by and left without even looking at it." But more people still self-deprecatingly "Twelve volumes of military books, every volume has my name on it", and many addresses were innocently caught in the crossfire. They interacted honestly and spent real money but got nothing. As a result, a new term was born in the Chinese community: insulting airdrops.

Related reading: (People who are “witch hunted” by LayerZero: We are “tools” to create false prosperity on the chain)

What’s more interesting is that during the process of claiming the airdrop, LayerZero also invented the airdrop “donation mechanism” (Proof-of-Donation), which means “paying money to get the airdrop”, that is, donating $0.10 for each ZRO token. This donation mechanism can actually be regarded as a kind of “airdrop tax”.

Related reading: (Pay money to get ZRO, this airdrop has a new Pay to Earn feature)

Musk finally got his wish and became the Minister of D.O.G.E.

Musk has become particularly active in politics in this year's US election year. As early as August, Musk mentioned his idea of ​​setting up a government department in an online conversation with Trump. In the talk show, Musk mentioned: "I think we need a government efficiency commission to look at where we spend money wisely and where we don't."

Finally, this government department was officially named the “Department of Government Efficiency”, and the abbreviation of the department is D.O.G.E. This is also a special contribution of the DOGE community!

On November 12, Trump officially announced that Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the Department of Government Efficiency. "D.O.G.E." officially became a reality, and Musk also completed his transformation from "Dog King" to "D.O.G.E. Minister."

But it should be noted that although D.O.G.E and Musk's related Dogecoin $DOGE just have a few more separators, there is no direct conceptual connection between it and Dogecoin.

Justin Sun eats the "most expensive banana in history" worth $6.2 million

On November 21, Justin Sun bought Maurizio Cattelan’s iconic Comedian banana for $6.2 million, making it the “most expensive banana in history.”

On November 29, Justin Sun held a press conference at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong titled "Justin Sun Wins the World's Most Expensive Banana: Reshaping the Boundary of Art and Crypto Culture". At the press conference, Justin Sun ate the banana worth $6.2 million on the spot and said: Bananas, as a decentralized conceptual art, transcend national boundaries and borders. He also revealed in an interview that he made the decision to eat the banana after successfully bidding for it and become a part of its history.

It is reported that the banana was bought by Sotheby's staff from a fruit stand on Manhattan's Upper East Side that morning. The owner of the fruit stand is from Bangladesh and revealed that the banana was sold for 35 cents. This means that the auction price is 14.85 million times the actual value of the banana.

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan's conceptual art work (Comedian) aims to explore the value of art, the nature of consumerism and the absurdity of the art market through an ordinary banana, and is intended to satirize market speculation. Before the auction, the BAN Meme coin launched by Sotheby's vice president also successfully warmed up the auction event in the crypto circle, and the market value of BAN reached a maximum of US$378 million. It was this Meme coin that made Justin Sun pay attention to the banana auction.

Related reading: (After buying the most expensive banana and attracting global attention, we chatted with Justin Sun)

HBO documentary attempts to reveal Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity, but all involved have denied it

No one wants to be Satoshi Nakamoto, after all, this identity is too dangerous.

In October, HBO announced that it would reveal the true identity of Bitcoin’s anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, in its upcoming documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, directed by Emmy-nominee Cullen Hoback, director of Q: Into the Storm.

Several prominent figures closely associated with the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency industry, including Craig Wright (who calls himself Satoshi Nakamoto) and Hal Finney (an early Bitcoin developer), have publicly denied any connection to the HBO documentary.

Craig Wright, although he has publicly claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto since 2016, has failed to gain widespread acceptance of his claims in the past few years. He recently said on social media: "There is still no solid evidence for the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Anyone who claims to know the truth is just speculation." This statement once again sparked heated discussions on social platforms.

On the other hand, the family of the late Hal Finney also publicly stated that they were not involved in the production of the documentary and did not want Finney's name to be associated with any unverified theories or speculations. They emphasized that Hal Finney's contribution was more reflected in the development and promotion of Bitcoin technology rather than the debate about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.

TON Ecosystem Game Hamster Kombat Attracts Iranian Military Attention and Official Opposition

This year, the trend of TG Click to Earn Money game has spread all over the world. In the streets and alleys of Iran, in subway stations, taxis and buses, and even in any place, you can always see people happily clicking on their mobile phone screens. These Iranians who seem to be having fun are most likely users of Hamster Kombat.

Iranian government officials and hardliners have strongly opposed the blockchain game "Hamster Kombat," claiming it is a tool of Western soft power designed to distract the public from the upcoming presidential election, local media reported on June 24. Millions of Iranians are looking to Web3 games as a way to make money amid Iran's deteriorating economy and rising inflation. Hamster Kombat is a clicker game on Telegram where users earn points by performing repetitive tasks and receive potential airdrops.

Hossein Delirian, spokesman for Iran's National Cyberspace Center, said that using games to mine cryptocurrencies has become a hotbed for hacker crimes, and people who participate in these games should pay attention to protecting their information and accounts. The controversy has also attracted the attention of the religious community. Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi, a well-known Shiite scholar, described cryptocurrencies as "the source of many evils" and urged people to avoid playing games like Hamster Kombat that involve Bitcoin.

Special Notes

In fact, many funny and interesting events in the cryptocurrency circle this year happened in the Meme circle, such as:

(Girlfriend's Hair Collection Campaign: When Performance Art Meets Meme, a market value of tens of millions was reached in two days)

(When Meme Coin Meets Social Hotspot: LUIGI Performs the "Crypto Robin Hood" Plot)

(How did a kid who ran away from live streaming to issue coins become the new top streamer?)

(Meme Angle Award: I used a refrigerator to issue a meme coin...)

Memecoin, as a typical "attention economy", has developed the combination of the cryptocurrency circle and performance art to the extreme. People look for themes, angles, and narratives, and use absurd and even vulgar ways to tease people's nerves. But I personally don't think this has anything to do with encryption. They are just wearing the cloak of issuing coins. Therefore, in this article, these interesting moments are not specifically considered as "cryptocurrency circles", but I still think it is an important part of Crypto culture.