The True and Accurate History of the Boating Accident Meme
I love the boating accident meme. It makes me smile every time I hear a bitcoiner joke about losing it all in a boating accident. I daydream about the look on the face of some agent of the state when I inform them that I cannot comply with their directive to hand over all my bitcoin (a la E.O. 6102) because I lost it in a boating accident.
Having a boating accident is a way to refer to the inherent properties of bitcoin that make it difficult to seize: keys are easy to hide, the system itself is pseudonymous, and the only way to prove that someone no longer has access to their bitcoin is to send it to someone else or provably burn it. With normal bitcoin, you can only prove the presence of keys, not their absence.
Inevitably there are those smarmy school-teacher people who patronizingly remind us that a boating accident is not a legal defense. In high-pitched breathless voices they inform us that the IRS isn't going to accept our boating accident jokes when they come knocking and if we try it we will go to a jail with lots of communal showers.
Therefore, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you my research revealing that plausible deniability was actually an addition to the meme, and that having a boating accident used to refer to something far more important.
The history of boating accidents on BitcoinTalk
Bitcoiners have been using the boating accident meme for almost as long as Bitcoin has been around. I searched through the annals of BitcoinTalk and the earliest usage I could find was by the user Tomatocage in 2013. Responding to a 27 March 2013 OP titled "[POLL] How much money have you invested in Bitcoins?"1, Tomatocage posted
None. I lost all my BTC in a tragic boating accident.
After this rather lovely "Nice try, Fed!" sentiment, many other BitcoinTalk users began dropping the meme. By 2014, it was pretty common. For example, enjoy these rousing specimens
What if you lost them in a tragic boating accident? -2014-03-26, response to OP: IRS Releases Tax Rules on BTC
Tell them the price doesn't matter because you lost all your bitcoins in a tragic boating accident. -2013-12-07 response to OP: The worst part (bemoaning a price crash)
But where did Bitcoiners get the meme from? Many of those early BitcoinTalk posts also mention firearms. And the earliest mention (rather than usage) of boating accident on BitcoinTalk is a question about why so many posters on Zero Hedge use the meme.
The boating accident meme is NOT about guns
It is true: gun owners were talking about boating accidents long before Bitcoiners.
If you google the term "boating accident" you will probably end up on a much-cited 2020 article from a website called Pew Pew Tactical which claims the meme originated in the 2014 discovery of a pistol in the bottom of a lake in California.
Although the story doesn't contain any citations,2 it claims that an ATF agent and some friends spent a day on a lake near Los Angelos in 1992. Instead of leaving their badges and guns in their car, they put the items in a backpack and brought it with them on their boat.
Of course they had a boating accident.
The backpack sank, and when the agent had to account for the loss to his superiors, he said the items were lost in a boating accident. If it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander...
As confident as the article sounds, it's obviously not the origin of the meme. Enthusiasts on gun forums across the internet are unanimous that the saying long predates the 2014 discovery of the ATF agent's gun and badge. If you grew up in the US before 2000, you likely heard somebody's stepdad's shooting buddy say he lost all his guns in a boating accident.
Unfortunately, in coopting the meme for their own plausible deniability purposes, the firearm crowd twisted the meaning of having a boating accident away from its original, more venerable form.
The boating accident meme is a moral imperative
In December, 1913, Ernest Shackleton famously placed this ad in the Times of London as he was preparing for his expedition on the Endurance.
Here, Shackleton used the boating accident meme in its original meaning: reality requires the possibility of irrevocable/catastrophic failure. It's not venturing into the unknown if you can't get lost; it's not trying to conquer the elements if they can't conquer you; it's not a great adventure if you can't lose your life. Supposedly more than 5,000 people answered the ad.
Unfortunately, such an ad never existed. For the last 20 years there has been a reward consisting of a case of Madeira, $100 US dollars, and possibly a bottle of good whiskey for anyone who can produce a physical copy of the ad3 from any London newspaper. It seems most likely that the ad was created out of whole cloth by an author who wanted to increase book sales (in this case, a book about morals called Quit You Like Men).
However, on 29 December, 1913, Shackleton really did publish this letter in the Times:
As you can see, it also includes a reference to the likelihood of a boating accident. It turns out that the Edwardians (just like gun enthusiasts and Bitcoiners) rather fancied boating accidents -- but for different reasons.
The mother of all boating accidents
There is probably no more famous boating accident than the sinking of the Titanic. A brief survey of some of the headlines from that fateful event further demonstrates that generation's longing for raw, unshielded life.
As the twentieth century began, Western society was insecure -- technological advances, mass-migration to cities, and the ever-creeping expansion of the bureaucratic state4 weighed heavily on the young minds of that era. There was a common fear that the generations that came before them had been more vigorous, more vital, somehow more alive.
Already, more than a hundred years ago, people could feel the cult of safety building walls around them. The Titanic famously marked a new era in nautical engineering, safe even from sinking. So it's not surprising that there was a note of relief when her sinking reassured the world that boating accidents were indeed still possible.
Although it is likely that the meme was circulating in society before Titanic's infamous voyage, it was the sinking of that ship that brought having a boating accident out into the popular discourse. As we have seen, the rest is history.5
It's not bitcoin unless you can lose it in a boating accident
Bitcoiners like to say Not your keys, not your coins. Another way of putting this is Not your consequences, not your coins or maybe just It's not your bitcoin if you can't fuck it up. Boating accidents are a powerful way to sum up this proximity to reality.
My hope is that the next time you hear someone mention a boating accident, you will not avert your eyes in shame, cowering in fear lest a legal logical lap dog condescend upon us -- rather, I hope you will smile a little and remember the meme's true origin as the defiant boast of people who are willing to truly live. Let it be that in the world of Bitcoin, as in real life, it isn't really yours unless you can lose it in a boating accident.
Footnotes
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For those curious, the poll had eight choices ranging from $0 to $15000 - $50000. There were 247 votes and the most popular answer (38.5%) was $1001 - $9000. ↩
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The Pew Pew Tacitcal story may not have citations, but it does have a picture of what it claims is the gun, the badge, and some other items. It also is curiously full of details (the name of the lake, that they were driving a soft-top Jeep, that the agent was still working for the ATF in 2014, and that the ATF declined to say whether the agent received any disciplinary action) that it feels like it is based on some kind of reality -- perhaps a newspaper article? Or an ATF press release? I couldn't find it though. ↩
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The digital version that looks like it came from an old newspaper was actually created by a graphic designer named John Hyatt. This is his explanation for where he got the copy for the ads surrounding the spurious Shackleton ad: "The reference for my illustration was taken from the want ads of an early 20th century Los Angeles Times newspaper, replete with a display typeface of the day, broken and irregular typesetting and margin bars, and snippets surrounding the Shackleton ad—top, bottom and sides—from other typical "men wanted" ads. As for the "above" address (1408 Chapman Bldg.), that building, erected in 1912, still stands at Broadway and 8th in Los Angeles.the reference for my illustration was taken from the want ads of an early 20th century Los Angeles Times newspaper, replete with a display typeface of the day, broken and irregular typesetting and margin bars, and snippets surrounding the Shackleton ad—top, bottom and sides—from other typical "men wanted" ads. As for the "above" address (1408 Chapman Bldg.), that building, erected in 1912, still stands at Broadway and 8th in Los Angeles." Hyatt is quite the artist, and it looks like he made the ad as piece of a larger historical poster about Shackleton. You can find bits and pieces of his defunct website on the Wayback Machine. ↩
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If you need any further evidence that this was bureaucracy's coming of age, only remember that it was during this time that Kafka wrote both The Castle and The Trial -- perhaps some of the most terrifying descriptions of bureaucracy ever recorded. ↩
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To be honest, I may have found some evidence for the boating accident meme in a seventeenth century dutch print of Genesis 7 (the story of Noah). I don't have access to reliable translations, but the original Dutch of the verse ran: God sprak tot Noach: Ga nu een bootongeluk krijgen met uw gesinde In d'Ark which can be translated as "God said to Noah: go now with your sons and have a boating accident in the Ark." As fascinating as it would be to link the meme to the Noah story (how far does it go? As far as Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim? Who knows?), I decided that it was not likely to be relevant. ↩
This post might be more relevant and engaging in the ~culture territory.