This article originally appeared in Bitcoin Magazine's "Censorship Resistant Issue[1]." To get a copy, visit our store[2].
The internet loves to trade. Doesn’t matter what. Doesn’t matter why. Doesn’t matter how. Over the last decade, exchange has become a medium through which community is created online. Depop, WallStreetBets, Buying/Selling groups, NFT discords; these are novel online spaces where the line between market and social group is as thin as the member count is large. Through the growth of these exchanges, economies emerge, and with these new economies come new systems of value. Sometimes there is little antagonism between these systems and the larger economies within which they exist. The value of shoes for example, while subject to considerations of hype, narrative and rarity, is still interpreted in relation to money. Sometimes however, the animosity is palpable. Sometimes it’s the point. And sometimes it gets big enough that the world, whether it wants to or not, is forced to contend with it.
If Bitcoin is one of those latter economies, Pepe, the cartoon frog meme, is as well. Over the course of the past fifteen years, both have experienced massive growth and market-threatening bubbles, idealistic evangelists and profit-maximizing speculators, malicious actors and dedicated communities. What connects them, aside from the assorted projects in which the Pepe economy sometimes finds a home, is the resonance their stories share and the means by which they mean something. Pepe and Bitcoin both represent systems of value forged in stark opposition to the one surrounding them, and both protect that value through a mutually reinforcing consensus of its worth. But while the economic origins of Bitcoin need little explanation, the development of Pepe from meme to commodity and back again requires a bit more to picture.
