The legendary heterography itself: I AM HODLING
Everybody knows what happened after GameKyuubi made his famous I AM HODLING post -- go read Rizzo's or Coindesk's if you want to know what they say the story is.
Better yet, read Gamekyuubi's original post. Here's a screenshot of it. It may be the best piece of writing on the internet. It's worth the few minutes it takes to read it. So read it.
I still get chills when I read it. But, as with any great piece of writing, it's important to interrogate more than the text. We must ask
What about the psychology of the individual?
Let us begin then with what was going through GameKyuubi's mind when he "type d that tyitle" the first time.
From the text, you may surmise that the bitcoin price was experiencing some amount of volatility. Since reaching an all time high of $1132 in late November, the price of bitcoin had collapsed by more than half to $519. Nevertheless, GameKyuubi wasn't selling and his reasons are made very clear in his post (I'm a bad trader), but I'm curious about the specific phrase he wanted to use: why did GameKyuubi attempt to write "I AM HOLDING" instead of "I'M NOT SELLING" or "I AM DONE DAY TRADING" (as he says a few hours later after waking up from being passed out on the floor) or perhaps even the slightly retro "HANG IN THERE"?
First, it is important to realize that by today's standards, GameKyuubi was a total generate shitcoiner. He liked Datacoin, he liked Stablecoin, and he liked Doge. But then again, pretty much everybody was a shitcoiner back then. GameKyuubi was happy to call out scams, and had no trouble seeing Ripple for what it is. All of this in the 10 days leading up to the famous I AM HODLING post.
The point is, GameKyuubi clearly didn't mind trading. So what prompted the shift to the hold-mindset we see him develop while his GF is out at a lesbian bar?
For the longest time
Two days before GameKyuubi made his famous post, he posted this link to a YouTube video:
It's a music video and you should listen to the whole thing before reading further.
Zhou Tonged and Zhou Tong
Hard to go wrong with Billy Joel, and the musical duo that is known as Zhou Tonged certainly knew what they were doing.
Zhou Tonged was formed in early 2012, taking their name from the infamous founder of Bitcoinica who was known to auto-liquidate margin traders.
In an interesting aside, exactly two months after the musical duo Zhou Tonged came into existence, the real Zhou Tong made a post on BitcoinTalk announcing "I am leaving Bitcoin" -- although, in the post he also says he has a 1000 BTC Casascius coin that he will keep "as a lifetime investment" about which he is "pretty confident that it'll be the best investment ever in my life."
Back to the music group, Zhou Tonged -- in a video AMA from 2014 with the Austin Bitcoin Meetup, Zhou Tonged says that he's a music major who comes from a family of musicians and his unnamed partner in the group does all the video editing and tech. Zhou Tonged says they have been in Bitcoin since "$1 or $2" and as seems to have been the custom at that time, trading was the norm. Their name comes from first hand experience.
You can see the duo perform together in this video of their first (and only?) live performance (at the Bitcoin in the Beltway conference). I really dig these guys. They have enough production value to be enjoyable and yet clearly are just two guys doing this dorky thing. As with Bitcoin-themed movie posters, the niche for Bitcoin-themed music was never going to be large...
We used to be a cryptocurrency. A proper cryptocurrency.
The heading just about covers this section. Skip it if you aren't going to listen to these songs.
Goddamn, I love Bitcoiners.
Zhou Tonged released 12 songs between March of 2012 and April 2016. If you want to listen to the others, go to their YouTube channel. You won't regret it.
GameKyuubi wasn't the only one holding
Returning to GameKyuubi's state of mind on 18 December 2013. Two days earlier, we know he was listening to Zhou Tonged's Billy Joel cover, Holding (For the longest time). Let us then examine the lyrics of this wonderful song in a little more detail:
Hooooooo-oooooold
For the longest time
Hooooo-oooold
For the longest time
If you said that bitcoin was my life
I'd would tell you
Sho nuff!
Sho ya rite!
What else can I do???
I'm so inspired by you
And I'm just holding
for the longest time
Once I knew my stocks and bonds were gone
I knew Satoshi Nakamato was the one
To come and save me
Encrypted money baby
And I'm just holding
For the longest time
Hooooo-oooold
For the longest time
Hooooo-oooold
For the longest time
Don't panic!!
The price will rise and fall
Ultimately we're breaking through the wall
The sky's the limit
And I'm in it to win it
So I'm just holding
For the longest time
They say this couldn't last very long
But I saw the light
And knew you were wrong
Maybe I've been hoping too hard
But you see the price
And it's just gonna grow more
March 11th Orphan blocks were slow
Doubters panicked and let their bitcoins go
I took my chances
Scooping all the loan advances
Now I'm just holding for the longest time
Hooooo-oooold
For the longest time
Hooooo-oooold
For the longest time
Although GameKyuubi may have had a more literary bent, I think you can see many of the elements of the I AM HODLING post here: the price will rise and fall, doubters panicked and let their bitcoins go, and of course the refrain I'm just holding for the longest time.
Given that GameKyuubi posted a link to this song days before he made the I AM HODLING post, it's pretty clear that Zhou Tonged was doo-wopping through his mind as he wrote. While it may have been GameKyuubi who fat fingered "HODLING," Zhou Tonged helped to build the holding ethos that made GameKyuubi reach for the word in the first place.
Another interesting point here is that GameKyuubi introduced himself on BitcoinTalk in April 2013 just a few weeks after Zhou Tonged released their first track on 18 March, and their first tweet on 12 March.
So the next question is
What happened on 11 March 2013?
To answer this question we need to look to BIP 50:
A block that had a larger number of total transaction inputs than previously seen was mined and broadcasted. Bitcoin 0.8 nodes were able to handle this, but some pre-0.8 Bitcoin nodes rejected it, causing an unexpected fork of the blockchain. The pre-0.8-incompatible chain (from here on, the 0.8 chain) at that point had around 60% of the mining hash power ensuring the split did not automatically resolve (as would have occurred if the pre-0.8 chain outpaced the 0.8 chain in total work, forcing 0.8 nodes to reorganise to the pre-0.8 chain).In order to restore a canonical chain as soon as possible, BTCGuild and Slush downgraded their Bitcoin 0.8 nodes to 0.7 so their pools would also reject the larger block. This placed majority hashpower on the chain without the larger block, thus eventually causing the 0.8 nodes to reorganise to the pre-0.8 chain.
There was some chaos involving a 24-block reorganization, and the weak hands panicked. In the song, Zhou Tonged says "I took my chances" and scooped "all the loan advances." So we see that hodl is more than just "don't sell", it's disdain for the people who just follow the market.
What Billy Joel has to say about it
There is an interesting story that gets told about Billy Joel writing the lyrics to "For the Longest Time":
As Bahler recalls, Billy Joel came into the studio with “a spiral-bound college notebook.” Bahler sees Joel turn to a blank page in the notebook, jot down the title “For the Longest Time,” and start writing lyrics. After the Piano Man finished filling up the page with the new song’s lyrics, he turned the page and wrote them all again. Only this time, Bahler noticed it was with the exception of the title. Joel simply rewrote the lyrics from start to finish, with only a word or two being different from the version on the preceding page. According to Bahler, this repetitive process of evolution continued for “like 10 or 20 times” before Joel closed the notebook. The scene prompted Bahler to blurt out, “What the hell?” “What?!” responded Joel. “Well, Billy,” said Bahler, “I’m a writer, and most writers—I don’t know anybody who writes like that. If we get an idea, we cross out a line and replace it.” “Oh no, no, no, man. I don’t do that,” Joel said. “That would send my subconscious a message that I had made a mistake. And this is a process,” he added, holding up the notebook. -The Pursuit of Excellence, Ryan Hawk
Hodling is like this: it's a process. It keeps you grounded. It keeps you humble. It keeps you from thinking you can outsmart everyone else or that you've got some kind of infinite money glitch -- but it also keeps you from doubting yourself.