THE HONEY BADGER

Many of the internet’s favourite memes were spawned from other memes. This remix culture can make a seemingly simple joke resonate deeply due to the layers of humour baked into it. The honey badger meme can be traced back to 2011 when National Geographic footage was overdubbed on YouTube with such catchphrases as “Honey badger don’t care” as the protagonist overcame venomous snakes and swarms of bees without flinching.

A lot of people could relate to honey badger, which became symbolic of defiance in the face of danger and a profound indifference to external threats. The meme was still going strong in 2013 as Bitcoin was gatecrashing the mainstream and it was not surprising that its community should see parallels between their monetary system and nature’s most defiant mammal. 

Many of Bitcoin’s early adopters were composed of cypherpunks, libertarians, and anarcho-capitalists who were drawn to Bitcoin not merely as a novel technology, but as a revolutionary political and economic tool. They had long dreamed of the separation of money and state and now they saw a way. One of these figures was Roger Ver, who was a big fan of Bitcoin but not so big on centralised government. He saw Bitcoin as a technology that would make coercive taxation more difficult and government-driven inflation impossible, expressing a hope that it would ultimately “bring an end to the nation state.”

As an early Bitcoin buyer and investor in several of the first Bitcoin companies, Roger had built up a sizable BTC war chest and gained the moniker “Bitcoin Jesus” on account of his passionate evangelism. Starting in 2011, Roger paid for a series of large billboards to be constructed broadcasting the gospel of Bitcoin to passing motorists on California’s Highway 101.

He experimented with various slogans and designs, professing that his favorite, from 2016, was the one modelled like a highway sign reading “BITCOIN = FUTURE, DOLLAR > EXIT ONLY.” Roger Ver’s most famous sign, however, appeared in the spring of 2013.

Bitcoin Don’t Care

The design of Roger Ver’s most memorable billboard came courtesy of another libertarian-leaning Bitcoiner, Erik Voorhees, who debuted it on t-shirts sold at the Bitcoin Conference in San Jose in May 2013. Roger Ver took the design and blew it up to create a huge billboard. In blue and white, it depicted the now iconic honey badger accompanied by a defiant slogan: “Bitcoin – The honey badger of money.”

As something of an inside joke, it’s debatable how many passersby got the reference. But they certainly got the broad message: Bitcoin was built differently. Whatever it was, it wasn’t regular money. It’s unlikely that the billboard onboarded new crypto users in their droves. But it resonated with the existing Bitcoin community, reinforcing their outsider status and adding to the growing lore that the cryptocurrency was steeped in.

In the Reddit comment thread celebrating Roger’s billboard stunt, one user posted a parody script of the original “Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger” video complete with such lines as “Bitcoin don't care. It just confirms what it wants. Whenever it's mining it just -- Eew, and it mines, transactions... Watch it reward! Look at that mining." 

Plenty more honey badger-based memes were to be riffed on by the Bitcoin community as they mocked futile efforts by financial regulators to ban or restrict Bitcoin. Their efforts were futile. Bitcoin simply didn’t care.