Before Bitcoin had ETFs, before it had institutional adoption, before it had a $2 trillion market cap... It had memes.

Memes are the pure and synthesised culture of Bitcoin. They are the reason how ideas spread without permission, how newcomers get initiated, and how the community laughs at itself while the world calls it a scam. As the cypherpunks understood: code is law, but $memes$ are the messengers.

This is the story of the first Bitcoin meme and the following memorable ones that shaped the most valuable movement in human history.

The WizardThe Wizard

The first and most memorable everyone should know about is the Bitcoin Wizard, drew in MS Paint on February 18, 2013 by reddit user named @mavensbot. The drawing is crude: a blue-robed figure with a starry hat, a staff, floating in black void. Above it, four words: "BITCOIN MAGIC INTERNET MONEY." ^[1]

He posted it in response to r/Bitcoin moderator @theymos, who had asked the community for ad submissions. Within an hour of the thread opening, this absurd doodle was live. It broke every rule of advertising: no polish, no branding, no professional typography. It was disarming. It was charming. It was perfect.

The ad ran on Reddit for months. Conversion rates leapt from 0.018% to 2.753%. On November 6, 2013, when the ad went live, Bitcoin was at $287. Twenty-two days later, it hit $1,132. ^[2] South Park's "Black Friday" episode that same month featured a character strikingly similar to the wizard.

The Bitcoin Wizard was not the first image ever shared about Bitcoin: but it was the first meme that spread beyond the bubble. It captured the feeling of that moment: the weirdness, the excitement, the raw belief in internet money that came from nowhere and answered to no one.

The original artist, @mavensbot, later wrote: "It wasn't about speculation, VC-funded projects, or institutional adoption. It was about the idea that this thing: this decentralised, uncensorable, digital gold: was going to change everything."

A decade later, the wizard was inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain as an Ordinal. ^[3] The magic internet money found its permanent home in the very protocol it helped popularize.

I AM HODLINGI AM HODLING

Ten months after the wizard, in December 2013, Bitcoin was crashing. The People's Bank of China had banned financial institutions from handling Bitcoin. ^[4] The price plunged from $1,150 to around $550 in days. Panic filled the forums.

On December 18, 2013, at 10:03 AM UTC, a BitcoinTalk user named GameKyuubi: a guitarist and coder from Japan who had been on the forum since 2011 ^[5]: opened a bottle of whiskey and started typing.

The title: "I AM HODLING."

He knew the typo was wrong the moment he typed it. He left it anyway.

The post was a rambling, drunken confession of trading incompetence that somehow contained more wisdom than a thousand analyst reports:

"I'm a bad trader and I KNOW I'M A BAD TRADER. [...] In a zero-sum game such as this, people who HODL are the ones who profit. [...] BTC VALUE DOES NOT GO DOWN LONG TERM. It ONLY goes up long term."

Bitcoin was ~$550 when he wrote that. By 2026, it would return over 22,800% from that price.

The typo wasn't corrected: the community preserved it. Soon, backronyms appeared: "Hold On for Dear Life." The word became a verb, a noun, an identity. "Hodlers" were not traders. They were believers. ^[6]

In 2024, asset manager VanEck launched a Bitcoin Trust ETF with the ticker symbol HODL. ^[7] A drunken typo from a Japanese guitarist had become Wall Street's official shorthand for Bitcoin conviction.

This is the most remarkable thing about HODL: it took a moment of despair and turned it into enduring faith. Every bear market since, someone has reposted "I AM HODLING." It is the anchor of Bitcoin's emotional resilience. GameKyuubi didn't just coin a term: he encoded a strategy for survival.

If you want to know more, @Scoresby wrote about it late last year #1353063 here in SN, and @HODLR commemorated the 11th anniversary #814030 nearly two years ago.

When Lambo?When Lambo?

December 2013 was a busy month for Bitcoin memes. While GameKyuubi was HODLing, another anonymous figure was making history on 4chan's /g/ board.

A user going by "Jay" posted a photograph of a brand-new Lamborghini Gallardo. The caption was deliberately flat: "bought this today with bitcoin. it gets here next week, what should i expect? thx."

He had paid 216.84 BTC: about $210,000 at the time: to Lamborghini Newport Beach, ^[8] making it the first luxury car dealership to accept Bitcoin. The dealership confirmed it. ^[9]

The post was immediately immortalized. The question "Wen Lambo?" became shorthand for crypto wealth. It was half-joke, half-aspiration. Every bull run since, it resurfaces. When Peter Saddington bought a Lamborghini Huracán with 45 BTC in 2017 (coins he had acquired for $115 in 2011), the meme went mainstream. CNBC, Forbes, and Netflix all ran the story.

"Wen Lambo?" is Bitcoin's relationship with money laid bare: the dream of escape, the desire for proof that this digital abstraction can actually change your life. It's gauche, it's funny, it's honest. It asks the question everyone is thinking but few will admit: when does this become real?

Number Go UpNumber Go Up

By 2017, Bitcoin had survived Mt. Gox, the Silk Road takedown, and multiple 80% crashes. A new generation arrived, and with them, a new mantra.

The phrase "number go up": deliberately lowercased, ungrammatical: first appeared on SomethingAwful forums in October 2017. ^[10] A user named Blade Runner used it to mock the simplistic mindset of crypto speculators. The Bitcoin community adopted it immediately: but they flipped the meaning.

"Number go up" became not an insult but a confession. Yes, the number going up is the point. Not because of greed, but because price appreciation is the mechanism by which the network secures itself. A higher price means more hash rate, more security, more adoption. NGU became the ultimate expression of Bitcoin's first-principles logic: fix the money, fix the world, and watch the number go up as a side effect.

The phrase distilled Bitcoin's investment thesis into three words. No whitepaper necessary. No lectures on Austrian economics. Just: number go up.

The $5 WrenchThe $5 Wrench

In 2009, Randall Munroe published xkcd comic #538, "Security." ^[11] It depicted two panels: a crypto nerd's imagination involving a million-dollar cluster to crack 4096-bit RSA, and what would actually happen: "Drug him and hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us the password."

The comic was originally about general encryption, but Bitcoin adopted it as its own. ^[12] The premise was simple: no matter how sophisticated your cryptography, someone can beat you with a $5 wrench until you hand over your private keys.

It was darkly humorous, but the point was deadly serious. Bitcoin made you your own bank: but that meant you were also your own security guard. The meme spread because it captured a truth that most people don't think about: the weakest link in any security system is the fleshy, breakable human holding the keys.

The $5 Wrench Attack became Bitcoin's security philosophy distilled into a joke. Hardware wallets, multi-sig, passphrase-protected seeds: all of it is, in some sense, a defense against the man with the $5 wrench.

Laser EyesLaser Eyes

In February 2021, as Bitcoin approached its previous all-time high, a new meme emerged. Someone edited red laser beams onto their Twitter profile picture, along with the hashtag #LaserRayUntil100K. ^[13]

The idea: keep the laser eyes until Bitcoin hits $100,000. Five years later, we are still on it! Are you?

It spread like wildfire. Michael Saylor, executive chairman of MicroStrategy, added laser eyes. Senator Cynthia Lummis added laser eyes. The President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, added laser eyes. Even Tom Brady did it. ^[14]

The laser eyes campaign lasted nearly four years. It survived crashes, FUD, and every form of market torture. Then, in December 2024, Bitcoin crossed $100,000 for the first time. ^[15] The lasers had achieved their objective.

What made laser eyes different from previous memes was its scale. This was not a forum post or a Reddit thread. It was a global synchronized signal, adopted by heads of state and Fortune 500 executives. It showed that Bitcoin's meme culture had grown from niche internet humor to a coordination mechanism powerful enough to involve the president of a nation.

Laser eyes was the moment the meme became a flag.

What Memes DoWhat Memes Do

Bitcoin memes are not decorations. They are the reproductive system of the idea.

The wizard converted the curious into the initiated. HODL turned panic into patience. When Lambo turned speculation into aspiration. Number Go Up turned price worship into philosophy. The $5 Wrench turned paranoia into preparedness. Laser Eyes turned conviction into visibility.

Each meme solved a problem. The first problem was attention: how do you get people to look at this strange internet money? The wizard solved that. The second was retention: how do you keep people from selling at the worst possible moment? HODL solved that. The third was narrative: how do you make people believe the price will keep rising? Number Go Up solved that. The fourth was security: how do you warn without scaring? The $5 Wrench solved that. The fifth was coordination: how do you signal en masse? Laser Eyes solved that.

Memes are the reason Bitcoin survived its adolescence. The technology was remarkable, but technology alone does not create movements. Movements need inside jokes. They need shared references. They need rituals that bind strangers across continents into a single tribe.

Every time someone types HODL in a chat, they are repeating the mantra of a drunken Japanese guitarist who accidentally wrote the scripture of long-term thinking. Every time they ask "wen lambo?" they are quoting an anonymous 4chan post from 2013. Every time they send the wizard, they are invoking the spirit of an MS Paint doodle that helped drive Bitcoin from $287 to $1,132.

The price goes up and down. The memes are forever.

_{This article is part of the Bitcoin History Month} #1492293 _{initiative on Stacker News.}

FootnotesFootnotes

1. mavensbot, "magic internet money," r/Bitcoin, Feb 18, 2013. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/111ykea/magic_internet_money/ ↩

2. History of Bitcoin, "Magic Internet Money." https://www.historyofbitcoin.io/timeline/magic-internet-money ↩

3. Bitcoin Wizard, "The Original 2013 Meme." https://bitcoinwizard.com/ ↩

4. People's Bank of China, "Notice on Preventing Bitcoin Risks," Dec 5, 2013. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2013/12/05/china-bans-bitcoin/ ↩

5. GameKyuubi, "I AM HODLING," BitcoinTalk, Dec 18, 2013. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=375643.0 ↩

6. HODL 2013, "The Full Original Post." https://hodl2013.com/i-am-hodling.html ↩

7. VanEck, "VanEck Bitcoin Trust (HODL)," 2024. https://www.vaneck.com/us/en/investments/bitcoin-trust-hodl/ ↩

8. The Drive, "The $48 Million Toyota Prius and Four Other Cars Bought in Bitcoin," Feb 2021. https://www.thedrive.com/news/the-48-million-toyota-prius-and-four-other-cars-bought-in-bitcoin-worth-millions-today ↩

9. CarBuzz, "$210k Gallardo Bought with 216 Bitcoins," Dec 12, 2013. https://carbuzz.com/news/210k-gallardo-bought-with-216-bitcoins ↩

10. SomethingAwful Forums, "Number Go Up" meme origin (archived). See also: CoinDesk, "The History of Number Go Up," 2021. ↩

11. xkcd #538, "Security," Randall Munroe, 2009. https://xkcd.com/538/ ↩

12. explain xkcd, "538: Security." https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/538:_Security ↩

13. @CHAIRFORCE_BTC, "#LaserRayUntil100K" original tweet, Feb 16, 2021. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/laser-eyes-bitcoin-trend-laserrayuntil100k ↩

14. Know Your Meme, "Laser Eyes Bitcoin Trend / #LaserRayUntil100K." https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/laser-eyes-bitcoin-trend-laserrayuntil100k ↩

15. Bitcoin Annotated, "Laser Eyes." https://bitcoinannotated.com/entries/laser-eyes/ ↩