author:

@armonio_liang, AC capital

Key words:

Popularity, Meme, BTC, Bome

Preface

Humans chase fads and fads create value. This is the history of mankind that keeps repeating itself.

Tulip bubble = fad + limited supply

This is the most famous and the earliest super meme of mankind. Entering the 21st century, the information age has gone through the web2.0 of unlimited replication and stepped into the web3.0 of limited information.

Information can be spread on the Internet at the speed of light, and the entity that carries the popular value, from the offline bags, watches, luxury cars, a leap into a string of unrepeatable data on the line. Payment scenarios are accompanied by mobile terminals in all corners of the world. bong! Meme explosion, resulting in a meme world of light and strange.

In the world of Meme coin, popularity will be created, especially the Internet popularity, it will be able to realize the popularity directly through tokens.

So, how to create fads? In this article, we first present the theory of Meme's fads and then use the theory to deconstruct the genesis of BTC and Bome.

The secret of crypto-popularity

The epidemic of information is essentially no different from the epidemic of disease. In communication science, the model of information propagation and viral propagation are both using the SIR model, interested students can see, here is not to do the details of the expansion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology.

The process of information dissemination is divided into two parts: information infection and information immunization.

Information infection: we transform ordinary people into believers of the epidemic information.

Information immunization: the believers of a popular message get rid of the influence of the popular message and become outsiders.

The core of making a message popular is to make the rate of infection exceed the rate of immunization. As long as the number of infected people exceeds the number of immunized people per unit of time, the number of believers in the pandemic message is increasing, and the message is growing in popularity. Conversely, the epidemic is dying. So how do you increase the rate of infection and decrease the rate of immunization?

There is no doubt that the more new people the message can reach (who have not been exposed to the message), then the rate of infection increases. The higher the quality of the message, the stickier it is, the easier it spreads and the harder it is to get rid of. Here I summarize four important exogenous factors for Meme's success by combining communication science, social psychology:

Four elements of meme epidemic

Content:

Content is information. It is the main body of communication and determines the properties of communication. The people who should be inclined to spread the message and the nodes that should be prioritized are all determined by the message itself. For example, $People is naturally left-wing, and left-wing people will naturally have feelings about it. It's a natural advantage to use such a concept to impress left-wingers. Another example is $Doge, which has an affinity for dog lovers. And that affinity is there for the long haul.

Stickiness of content. Certain concepts are time-sensitive, such as the meme of a politician that broke out recently, or the meme of a sporting event. once the political election has passed and the event has been held, the real-world fad is over, and the fad of on-chain messaging, which was fueled by the fad of real messaging, loses its fuel, and the state of infected>immune may gradually shift to infected<immune.

Affinity for content includes the ability to spread it twice. A good dissemination event must lower the threshold of dissemination, the simpler and more direct it is for the average person to spread, then the wider it will spread.

Environment:

The environment contains two parts: time and space.

Time: the cryptosphere cycle: Time addresses the economic cycle unique to the cryptosphere.Meme's outbreak has to be when the industry has attention and users are willing to participate in the gamble, which used to be in the middle and late stages of the bull market, and after all the projects' stories were lackluster, the purely cultural communication of Meme shone through. The current Meme craze started by Minerva is an important change of pace. The industry's attention was drawn to the meme itself, and cultural communication was no longer an alternative to the project's content that couldn't be told, but became a way to attract traffic. Of course, the big background of BTC's inscription Meme is that 1, the BTC ETF is about to be passed, and BTC is becoming a mainstream asset, gaining attention from the mainstream world.2, BTC halving is imminent, and a bull market is expected after BTC halving, which triggers attention.

Space: community: Space refers to the community. A community is defined as a group of people with a common purpose. Having a common purpose means that the group of people share common attributes. If the content of the communication fits the attributes, it can get faster communication efficiency. As different diseases spread at different rates among different groups of people. Malaria is more prevalent in places with poor sanitation, such as Africa, than elsewhere.

The KOL Matrix

Science has shown that different individuals have different abilities to spread an epidemic. Some people are particularly good at exporting their views to others and are especially easy to convince those around them. This kind of person is a super individual, KOL. the more KOLs we have, the more we can form a KOL matrix and influence more groups of people. kol is closely connected with the community, and the KOC that has influence on the community is a really valuable node. If it can't radiate the target group, the value of KOL is drastically reduced.

Wealth effect Cryptosphere is characterized by the wealth effect leading the attention. The so-called rise to convince people is to use financial facts to assist the dissemination of information. Therefore, Meme has a self-reinforcing coin price and culture spread. the higher the price of Meme, the wider the culture spreads, and the firmer the believers are. the lower the price of Meme, the more unfavorable the culture spreads, and the more the believers stray. This is also why Meme coins tend to exhibit properties that skyrocket and plummet.

Operational Analysis of Meme

In this section, we will review the project and explain the above theories with two case studies

BTC

Many people do not recognize BTC as a meme coin. But it doesn't matter.The definition of Meme is derived from Darwin's theory of evolution, which refers to the fact that, like living things, the diffusion of information involves replication, mutation, and being selected. At a macro level, BTC's consensus diffusion is no different from the path of other meme coins. The only difference is that the content of the spread is somewhat different.

The content of BTC is the fear of centralized financial collapse. In its genesis block, it added the news summary "UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Bails Out Financial System Again." to the news summary. This news serves as an anchor and becomes an anecdote. With each transmission, the fear of centralized collapse is reinforced by this anecdote. With each financial meltdown, the BTC consensus is reinforced once more.The consensus stickiness of BTC is very strong. People who believe in BTC tend to have a hard time giving up their BTC beliefs. The stickiness of this belief is obvious to all in the industry.

The use of fair mining in the consensus is a reciprocal design, and at the beginning of the project, as long as you put in arithmetic power, you can get BTC. satoshi nakamoto himself also airdropped to some users in the early days, which can also be regarded as reciprocal. The act of investing arithmetic power itself can be seen as a kind of recognition of the BTC project. Through the behavior, the person who binds to get BTC psychologically recognized. In terms of supply, BTC writes scarcity in its face by programmatically achieving a limit of 21 million pieces. Satoshi Nakamoto's document also depicts BTC to $1000 under the acceptance of BTC by the world. Although too conservative when put into today. But in the era when BTC had no price, it was such a tantalizing promise.

The initial stage of the Meme is very fragile, just like the initial stage of the spread of a new virus.At the initial stage of the spread of the Meme, because the nodes that can be spread are very limited, it is necessary to increase the likelihood of the success of the spread of the Meme.The release of the white paper of the BTC node in 2008, although it is not a bull market, but at that time it is the time that the centralized finance is in a precarious situation. Everyone was doubting the sustainability of centralized finance. The timing and the narrative of the whitepaper are highly compatible. This was very necessary at the beginning of the Meme's popularity.

The communities chosen for BTC in the early days were also carefully selected. Satoshi Nakamoto first chose the crypto community. The concept of crypto communities is highly compatible with the design concept of BTC, and they all have a sense of urgency and mission towards decentralization. Developing them as seed users has the least resistance.

BTC's initial communication KOL matrix, Satoshi Nakamoto chose the big bulls in the crypto community: Dai Wei, Fal Finney, Jon Matonis, Laszo Hanec and others. Here is just one example. In the email Satoshi Nakamoto sent to Dai Wei, he stated that the idea and design of BTC not only realized Dai Wei's idea in his thesis, but also that Fal Finney had already endorsed such a product. This has gained the product credit endorsement. These are people, who may not be known by many outside the crypto community, but have a strong influence in crypto circles. Their inclusion helps BTC take root quickly in the crypto community.

Bome

Bome was well-prepared for the popularity of a Meme before it launched, whether artist Dark Farm intended it or not. Content-wise, Bome was making a Book of Meme, documenting the history of the Meme. This is historically valuable in this current environment. As I said earlier, through the culture of issuing coins, in this year, the first to get rid of the role of becoming an alternative after there is no project to issue. Rather, it is leading the forefront of the entire industry. Whether it is Solana, Avalanche or Ethereum, all use Meme as an important means of pulling in new people. Investors are also gradually facing up to the Meme token as an asset.The Book of Meme is a collection of the culture of doing meme, naturally valued. This concept, for the crowd of rushing Meme also has a natural affinity.

In terms of timing, the launch was in the midst of a bull market in the industry and was well-funded. In terms of community, Dark Farm had previously plowed into the Meme culture on the ETH ecosystem, and the Book of Meme project was not an occasional whim, and he had a certain influence in the meme community in the cryptocurrency circle. His previous masterpiece in the Book of Meme before the fire, its floor price is still higher than the issue price can show that his construction is recognized by the community, in the community has a certain degree of popularity. This community is highly overlapping with the Punchdog community.

Then we look at the repost proliferation behavior of Bome's releases, many of which are supported by KOLs who are also artists. These artists are not big, but they win because the users are real and cohesive. When Meme grows to a certain stage, it can get interaction from other traffic, e.g. Beeple's promotion. As a Meme artist on Twitter, DarkFarm also has a great sense of flow, and is adept at leveraging super nodes to enhance the impact of their project.

The avatars of the early communicators show this: the original promoters came from the SMOWL community. Having a community allowed Bome's Meme to cross directly over the most vulnerable stage. It was also in DarkFarm's plan to have SMOWL appear in his Bome diatribe images interchanging with these initial KOLs. Following the success of Bome, SMOWL's NFT price also jumped to a floor price of 0.7, giving these community members a handsome return. The whole act of manipulation formed a perfect closed loop.

I once said that there are three pillars of a project in the Internet era: traffic, technology, and capital. In the process of traffic accumulation, traffic nodes with the same scale also interact to push the traffic to a higher level. Beeple's interaction, for example, was both unexpected and reasonable. Both the founder's background in crypto art and Bome's own cultural attributes and traffic played a non-negligible role. In the world of Meme, technology and products do not exist.The success of the Meme project is the mutual dynamic matching of traffic and capital. Capital can push up the price of the coin, but simply by pushing up the price of the coin can not effectively attract retail investors to chase. And just traffic without wealth creation effect, traffic is also difficult to sustain growth.

This also shows that for Meme, there can only be one era of Bome. from the point of view of traffic economy, all other Meme are Bome's competitors. If Bome is diverted, Bome collapses the pole, and other dragons two dragons three, Handan will be more difficult to get up. If Bome is not shunted, The second or third places meme tokens are nothing more than small fry.

Summarize:

Meme tokens are the most characteristic phenomenon of the attention economy in the Web3 era. Attention is given a direct financial value. The matching of capital and attention creates Meme tokens.

Creating attention is dealing with people. In addition to the characteristic wealth effect, it emphasizes the KOL matrix, the communication environment, and the fit of the information content. The coming together of all the factors is not a simple matter. Therefore, creating a Meme out of the loop is no easy task either. Examining the birth and out of the circle of a Meme, in addition to looking at the trading volume, looking at the liquidity, and looking at the background of the founder, you can also consider these four factors.

Meme plays with attention, when investing, you can consider the phenomenon of attention feedback. For example, the Bome community pulls the value of the SMOWL community.

Meme plays with attention, when investing, you can consider the phenomenon of attention feedback. For example, the Bome community pulls the value of the SMOWL community.

Reference:

The tipping point: how little things can make difference

The Attention Mechanism: The Epic Scramble to Gel inside Our Head

Communication Theory: Origins, Methods and Applications

Influence: the psychology of persuasion

Satoshi Nakamoto Documentation: https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/

Satoshi Nakamoto's Early Emails Revealed: Where Bitcoin Came From And What He Was Worried About

AC Capital: Why is BTC the largest Alpha in this round?

Wikipedia: SIR model