The top ten funny news in the currency circle in 2024｜Annual review

Reprinted from chaincatcher

12/31/2024·4M

Author: Nian Qing, ChainCatcher

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

If you need some NetEase Cloud moments tonight, it might look like this:

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

In September, A-shares rose above 3,300 points, straighten your spine, and you quickly cashed out to buy A-shares;

In November, you covered the logo on your T-shirt with white tape for fear of being mugged during Ethereum Devcon in Thailand;

In December, Bitcoin exceeded 100,000 US dollars. The news you forwarded attracted praise from relatives and friends, saying that you must have made a lot of money if you entered the market early. You choked with tears and replied: You don’t make much, just make a small profit.

…

This year, your cognitive dimension has been greatly improved, and you have completed the transformation from a leek in the currency circle to a crypto consumer.

The investment sentiments summarized here for you in 2024 are:

The flowers are similar every year, and I really want to get my money back in the currency circle.

At this special moment today, ChainCatcher has taken stock of some events other than “financial consumption” that set off the festive atmosphere for you——

(This article only represents the author’s personal laughter. If you have more black humor, funny, and satirical news, please feel free to discuss it with us on the X platform and @ChainCatcher_)

****Vitalik becomes the adoptive father of internet celebrity hippo Moo

Deng****

In September this year, Moo Deng (Bouncing Pig), a two-month-old pygmy hippopotamus at the Chonburi Zoo in Thailand, quickly became popular due to its funny interactions with its keepers. It became a famous Internet meme and was made into various memes. Hippo fever has also swept the crypto community, and multiple chains have also given birth to memecoins of the same name, including Ethereum and Solana.

Interestingly, after Vitalik received the MOODENG airdrop from the deployer, he continued to sell tokens for many days, causing MOODENG to fall by more than 70% from its high point. However, Vitalik went to the zoo to visit the little hippopotamus Moo Deng in November, an action that caused the Meme token MOODENG on the Ethereum chain to hit a record high.

Just recently, Vitalik announced that he has become the adoptive father of Moo Deng. In the next two years, Vitalik will donate 10 million baht to help the little hippopotamus grow up healthily and happily, and "maybe will donate more, because I support Moo Deng and her." Friends have reserved 88 ETH." As soon as the news came out, MOODENG rose nearly 70% in 24h.

But having said that, Vitalik received a total of 61.7 billion MOODENG tokens in vain, accounting for 14.68% of the total token supply and worth approximately several million US dollars.

Solana officially releases Breakpoint

commercial, satirizing the current status of encryption industry conferences

On August 1, Solana’s official social platform released a promotional advertisement with the theme “Breakpoint: not your average crypto conference”. This video is full of satire on the current situation of the encryption summit, and it is full of skill and sharpness. For example, there were more speakers than the audience, participants collected items related to the “One Ton” project, the audience cared more about airdrops and coin issuance rather than project innovation, the guests always repeated similar views and concepts, and the entire conversation was incomprehensible, etc. The video was quickly translated into multiple languages, sparked discussion (or self-deprecation) within the industry, and has now been viewed more than 1 million times. Interestingly, Solana Breakpoint really does what it says, and the Breakpoint Summit held in September gained high popularity and reputation.

Let’s review it 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 commercial in August. This latest video lists a series of Crypto big-name slang, such as talking about building infrastructure, improving scalability, bridging to the main network, re-staking, establishing partnerships with well-known protocols, and getting financing quickly, but never Ask consumers and users about specific use cases.

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

The founder of Ba n kless and ****the

founder of Synthetix**** had an offline real-person fight

Crypto online netizens have many fights, but few dare to fight. On October 11, Synthetix founder Kain Warwick and Bankless founder David Hoffman held an offline real-life battle in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.

This competition was jointly organized by Permissionless and the fighting live broadcast platform Karate Combat. Permissionless is a cryptocurrency-themed conference jointly organized by Bankless and Blockworks. The conference will give free tickets to the fighting event to users who hold tickets.

The reason for the fight between the two people stemmed from some differences between the two people on some core issues in the DeFi and encryption industries during an online discussion. The two people had reached a bet worth US$500,000 on the sponsorship scale of Synthetix’s infinex. protocol. This battle in the currency circle has attracted much attention, and Polymarket opened a betting pool on the duel between the two as early as September 24.

The real-life fight lasted less than ten minutes, and the final result was that Bankless founder David beat up Synthetix founder Kain, who was even bigger than himself.

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, looks like an ordinary public bathhouse. But behind these warm baths are more than a dozen Bitcoin mining machines operating 24 hours a day.

In 2019, two young people who like to take a bath after working out 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 With a lot of energy consumption, their monthly electricity bill is as high as 20,000 US dollars. In 2021, after these two young people saw a video of using a Bitcoin mining machine to heat a pool on the Internet, they felt that this was the most meaningful thing in the world and decided to put it into practice. At the end of 2021, they purchased 12 Bitcoin mining machines to power the two heated pools at the Bathhouse Williamsburg branch. These mining machines can generate about 1,200 THz computing power per second. This year, when the Bathhouse opens in New York City's Flatiron District, all four hot spring pools and three hammams 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 will indeed offset some of the costs, the two founders said that they only view mining as an engineering solution for the efficient use of energy and capital. Compared with the benefits brought by Bitcoin mining itself, this concept and marketing method have made them more famous.

Therefore, Bathhouse has never sold any Bitcoin and emphasized that it has no plans 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 tops 100,000

On December 5, Bitcoin exceeded the $100,000 mark for the first time. Subsequently, the Financial Times published an apology letter with the meme as the cover titled "Hodlers: an apology: A mea culpa to mark a BTC milestone." In this article, the Financial Times writes: Regular readers of FT Alphaville may have formed the impression that the authors were, and still are, skeptical of cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin. manner. that's right……

Still, with the price of Bitcoin surpassing $100,000, a large number of commenters seem to think they should apologize given our chronic cynicism, so here goes: If at any point in the past 14 years you chose based on our "ratings" We apologize for not buying this thing that keeps going up. It's good when your books go up. We apologize if you misinterpreted our crypto-cynicism as a declaration of support for tradfi, because we hate that too.

Many people in the currency circle may have started "retweeting" after seeing the title, but in fact, this article is actually a self-deprecating or weird "apology", a very typical British "dry humor".

Airdrops escalated, Layerzero staged ****an "insulting"

airdrop****

The full-chain interoperability protocol LayerZero officially issued airdrops in June this year, with the value of the airdrops reaching hundreds of millions of dollars. Prior to this, LayerZero went through a witch purge that lasted 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.

The reason why LayerZero is called the "Witch Killer" is because it introduces a new "bounty reporting mechanism". The review is even divided into three stages: self-exposure, official review, and bounty reporting. It can be described as "multi-angle, comprehensive" Azimuth’s anti-witch. The large-scale cleansing movement led to a large number of crusade from the Lumao Party - "With 2.16 million witch addresses, the largest witch library in history was born. Lumao is an electronic beggar, begging for food with a bowl, zkSync passes by, and leaves without even looking at it." . But most of them still laugh at themselves: "Twelve volumes of military books, each volume has the name of the father." Many addresses innocently lied at gunpoint, interacted honestly, spent real money but got nothing, and a new Chinese community was born. Noun: insulting airdrop.

What’s even more interesting is that in the process of applying for the airdrop, LayerZero also invented the airdrop “Proof-of-Donation” mechanism. In plain English, it means “paying money to receive the airdrop”, that is, donating 0.10 for each ZRO token. Dollar. This donation mechanism can actually be considered an “airdrop tax.”

Musk got his wish and finally became DOGE

Minister

Musk has become particularly active in politics during this U.S. election year. As early as August, Musk mentioned the idea of setting up a government department in an online conversation with Trump. In the conversation show, Musk mentioned: "I think we need a government efficiency committee. To look at where we are spending money wisely and where we are not.”

Finally, this government department was officially named the "Department of Government Efficiency", and the abbreviation of the department is DOGE. This must be the special contribution of the DOGE community!

On November 12, Trump officially announced that Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy would lead the Department of Government Efficiency. "DOGE" officially became a reality, and Musk also completed The transformation from "Dog King" to "Doge Minister".

However, it should be noted that although DOGE and Musk-related Dogecoin $DOGE only have a few more separators, there is no direct conceptual connection between itself and Dogecoin.

Justin Sun ate the "most expensive banana in history" ****worth

$6.2 million****

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

On November 29, Justin Sun held a press conference at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong with the theme of "Sun Justin Wins the World's Most Expensive Banana: Reshaping the Boundaries of Art and Encrypted Culture." At the press conference, Sun Yuchen ate a banana worth $6.2 million from the auction on the spot and said: Bananas, as decentralized conceptual art, transcend national boundaries and boundaries. He also revealed in the interview that he made the decision after successfully taking the photo to eat the banana and become a part of its history.

According to reports, Sotheby’s staff bought the banana from a fruit stand on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that morning. The owner of the fruit stall, who is from Bangladesh, revealed that the banana was sold for 35 cents. This means that the auction price was 14.85 million times the actual value of the bananas.

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. Intended to satirize market speculation. Before the auction, the BAN Meme coin launched by the vice president of Sotheby's also successfully warmed up the auction event in the crypto circle. The market value of BAN reached a maximum of 378 million US dollars. It was this Meme coin that made Justin Sun pay attention to the banana auction.

HBO documentary intends to reveal ****the true identity

of Satoshi Nakamoto**** , but relevant parties have denied it

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

In October, HBO announced that the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, would be revealed in the upcoming documentary "Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery." The film is directed by Emmy Award nominee Cullen Hoback, director of "Q: Into the Storm."

Several prominent figures closely associated with Bitcoin and the 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, despite publicly claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto since 2016, has struggled to achieve universal acceptance of his claims over the past few years. He said on social media recently: "There is still no conclusive evidence for the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Anyone who claims to know the truth is just speculation." This statement once again triggered 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 speculation. They emphasized that Hal Finney’s contribution was more reflected in the development and promotion of Bitcoin technology rather than the debate on the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.

TON ecological mini-game Hamster Kombat ****has attracted

attention from the Iranian military and official opposition****

This year, the popularity of TG click-to-make money games has spread all over the world. On the streets of Iran, in subway stations, taxis and buses, or even in any place, you can always see people happily clicking on their mobile screens. Nine out of ten of these Iranians who seem to be having fun are users of Hamster Kombat.

According to local media reports on June 24, Iranian government officials and hard-liners strongly opposed the blockchain game “Hamster Kombat”, claiming that it was a tool of Western soft power designed to distract the public from the upcoming presidential election. In the context of Iran's deteriorating economy and increasing inflation, millions of Iranians see Web3 games as a way to make money. Hamster Kombat is a clicker game on Telegram where users perform repetitive tasks to earn points and receive potential airdrops.

Hossein Delirian, spokesman for Iran’s National Cyberspace Center, said that the use of games for cryptocurrency mining has become a hotbed for hacker crimes, and people participating in these games should pay attention to protecting their information and accounts. The controversy has also drawn attention from religious circles, with prominent Shia scholar Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi describing cryptocurrencies as "the source of many evils" and urging people to avoid playing games involving Bitcoin like Hamster Kombat.

Special instructions

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

" Girlfriend's Hair Collection Battle: When Performance Art Meets Meme, You Can Get a Market Value of Ten Millions in Two Days "

" When Meme Coin Meets Social Hotspots: LUIGI Stages the "Encrypted Version of Robin Hood" "

" How did a kid who ran away with live-streaming coins become a new top streamer?" 》

" Meme Angle Award: About the fact that I used a refrigerator to send a meme coin... "

As a typical "attention economy", Memecoin has developed the combination of currency circles and performance art to the extreme. People find themes, angles, and narratives, and use absurd and even vulgar ways to stir up people's nerves. But I personally don’t think this has any direct relationship with encryption. They just put on the cloak of issuing coins. So, I don’t specifically consider these interesting moments as “coin circles” in this article, but I still think they are an important part of Crypto culture.