The Birth of Meme Wealth: Analyzing the Success Paths of BTC and Bome

Introduction

Human beings pursue trends, and trends create value. This is the cycle of history.

The tulip bubble can be simplified as popularity plus limited supply. This is the most famous and earliest super meme phenomenon in human history. Entering the 21st century, the information age has experienced the infinite replication of Web 2.0, and now it is stepping into the limited information era of Web 3.0.

Information spreads at the speed of light on the Internet, and the carriers of popular value have shifted from physical items to non-reproducible digital data. The popularity of mobile payments has made transaction scenarios ubiquitous worldwide. This has been followed by the explosion of memes, forming a peculiar and colorful meme world.

In the realm of Meme coins, those who can lead internet trends can directly monetize popularity through tokens. So, how can popularity be created? This article will first present the theory of Meme popularity, and then use this theory to analyze the rise of BTC and Bome.

The Secrets of Crypto Popularity

The popular nature of information is essentially similar to the spread of disease. In communication studies, both information dissemination and virus transmission use the SIR model. Information dissemination includes two stages: information infection and information immunity.

Information infection is the process of converting ordinary people into followers of popular information. Information immunity is when followers of popular information break free from its influence and become outsiders.

The key to making information viral is that the infection rate exceeds the immunity rate. As long as the number of new infections within a unit of time is greater than the number of immune individuals, the followers of the viral information will increase, and the information will spread widely. Conversely, the virus will decline. So how can we increase the infection rate and reduce the immunity rate?

Clearly, the more new people (those who have not been exposed to the information) come into contact with the information, the higher the infection rate will be. The higher the quality of the information, the stronger the stickiness, making it easier to spread and harder to escape. Combining communication studies and social psychology, four key external factors for the success of a meme can be summarized:

Four Key Elements

Content:

Content is information, which is the main body of dissemination and determines the attributes of dissemination. It influences the suitable audience for dissemination and the preferred dissemination nodes. For example, $People naturally carries leftist colors and is more likely to resonate with leftist groups. Similarly, $Doge has a natural affinity with dog lovers, and this affinity can persist in the long term.

The stickiness of the content is also very important. Certain concepts have a time-sensitive nature, such as memes related to political figures or sports events. Once a real-world event concludes, the associated on-chain information may lose momentum, and the infection rate may fall below the immunity rate.

The affinity of content includes the ability for secondary dissemination. A good dissemination event should lower the barriers to sharing; the simpler and more direct it is, the easier it is for ordinary people to spread it, resulting in a wider dissemination range.

Environment:

The environment includes two aspects: time and space.

Time: Refers to the unique economic cycle in the cryptocurrency space. The outbreak of Memes requires a period of high industry attention and user willingness to engage in speculation. In the past, this usually occurred in the later stages of a bull market, when other projects had uninspiring stories, allowing purely cultural Memes to shine through. The recent Meme craze sparked by inscriptions represents a significant transformation. Industry attention is drawn by the Memes themselves, and cultural dissemination is no longer an alternative option when project content is lacking, but rather becomes the main means of attracting traffic.

Space: refers to a community. A community is a group of people with a common goal. A common goal means that these people have similar attributes. If the content being disseminated aligns with these attributes, it can achieve faster dissemination efficiency. Just like different diseases spread at different rates in different populations, malaria is more likely to be prevalent in areas with poor sanitary conditions.

KOL matrix

Research shows that different individuals have varying abilities to spread information. Some people are particularly good at expressing their opinions to others and can easily convince those around them. These individuals are known as super individuals, or KOLs. The more KOLs there are, the more they can form a KOL matrix, influencing a broader group. KOLs are closely related to communities, and those KOLs that can influence the target audience's KOCs are the truly valuable nodes. If they cannot reach the target audience, the value of KOLs is greatly diminished.

Wealth Effect

The characteristic of the crypto circle is that the wealth effect guides attention. The so-called "using rises to attract people" refers to using financial facts to assist information dissemination. Therefore, Memes reinforce each other in terms of coin price and cultural transmission. The higher the price of Meme coins rises, the wider the cultural dissemination, and the more steadfast the believers become; conversely, the lower the coin price falls, the more difficult cultural dissemination becomes, making it easier for believers to drift away. This also leads to Meme coins often exhibiting the characteristic of extreme volatility.

Operational Analysis of Memes

BTC

Although some do not consider BTC to be a meme coin, it does not matter. From a macro perspective, the spread of BTC consensus is fundamentally no different from the paths of other meme coins; only the content of the dissemination differs.

The core content of BTC is the fear of the collapse of centralized finance. Its genesis block contains a news summary stating "The UK Chancellor again bailouts the financial system." This news serves as an anchor, and each dissemination reinforces people's fear of centralized collapse through this example. Each financial storm further strengthens the consensus around BTC. The consensus of BTC is very strong, and believers often find it difficult to abandon their faith in BTC.

BTC adopts fair mining, which is a mutually beneficial design. In the early stages of the project, anyone who contributed computing power could obtain BTC. Satoshi Nakamoto himself also airdropped to some users in the early days, which can also be seen as mutual benefit. The act of contributing computing power can be viewed as recognition of the BTC project, and through this action, those who obtain BTC are psychologically more likely to identify with the project. In terms of supply, BTC has implemented a limit of 21 million coins through programming, highlighting its scarcity. Satoshi Nakamoto's documents also depicted a vision where BTC would reach a price of $1000 once accepted worldwide. Although this prediction seems too conservative now, it was a highly attractive promise in an era when BTC had no price.

The early days of a Meme are as fragile as the initial spread of a new virus. Due to the very limited number of transmissible nodes, the likelihood of successful spread must be increased. The BTC white paper was published in 2008, which, although not during a bull market, coincided with a period of turmoil in centralized finance. There was widespread skepticism regarding the sustainability of centralized finance. This timing aligns closely with the narrative content of BTC, which is crucial for the early popularity of Memes.

The initial community chosen for BTC was also carefully selected. Satoshi Nakamoto first chose the cryptocurrency community. The philosophy of the cryptocurrency community is highly consistent with the design philosophy of BTC, sharing a sense of urgency and mission for decentralization. Developing them as seed users incurs minimal resistance.

In the initial KOL matrix of BTC, Satoshi Nakamoto chose prominent figures in the crypto community: Dai Wei, Hal Finney, Jon Matonis, Laszlo Hanyecz, etc. For example, Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned in an email to Dai Wei that BTC not only realized the concepts in Dai Wei's paper but also received recognition from Hal Finney. This provided credit endorsement for the product. Although these individuals may not be well-known outside the crypto circle, they have significant influence within the crypto community. Their involvement helped BTC quickly take root in the crypto community.

Bome

Before the release of Bome, regardless of whether the artist Dark Farm had the intention, he was fully prepared for the popularity of a Meme. In content, Bome is a book that records the history of Memes and has historical value in the current environment. As mentioned earlier, issuing coins through culture is no longer an alternative after having no projects to release this year, but rather leads the forefront of the entire industry. Whether it is Solana, Avalanche, or Ethereum, Memes are regarded as important means to attract new users. Investors are also gradually acknowledging Meme tokens as a type of asset. The Book of Meme, as a comprehensive work of meme culture, naturally receives attention. This concept also has a natural affinity for groups chasing Memes.

In terms of timing, Bome was initiated during an industry bull market with abundant funds. In terms of community, Dark Farm has previously delved into meme culture within the ETH ecosystem, and the creation of the Book of Meme project is not accidental; he has a certain influence in the meme community in the crypto space. His previous works maintained a floor price higher than the issuance price before the Book of Meme went viral, indicating that his achievements are recognized by the community and that he has a certain level of fame within it. This community is highly overlapping with those pursuing new projects.

From the dissemination of the posts released by Bome, it can be seen that many shares come from KOL support who are also artists. Although these artists are not large in scale, their users are real and cohesive. When the Meme develops to a certain stage, it can gain interaction from other traffic, such as Beeple's promotion. As a Meme artist on Twitter, DarkFarm is also very traffic-conscious and is good at leveraging super nodes to enhance the influence of its own projects.

The avatars of early promoters show: the initial promoters came from the SMOWL community. Having the community allowed Bome's Meme to directly bypass the most vulnerable stage. This is also part of the DarkFarm plan, where SMOWL interacted with these initial KOLs in the Bome declaration image. After Bome's success, the price of SMOWL's NFTs also rose to a floor price of 0.7, providing substantial returns to community members. The entire operation formed a perfect closed loop.

The three pillars of projects in the internet era are traffic, technology, and capital. In the world of Memes, technology and products do not exist. The success of Meme projects lies in the mutual matching of traffic and capital. Capital can drive up coin prices, but simply raising coin prices cannot effectively attract retail investors to chase.

This also indicates that for Memes, there can only be one representative Bome in an era. From the perspective of traffic economy, all other Memes are competitors of Bome. If Bome is diverted, it may collapse, making it even harder for other imitators to make progress. If Bome is not diverted, other projects can only make small moves.

Conclusion

Meme tokens are the most unique phenomenon of attention economy in the Web3 era. Attention is directly assigned financial value. The matching of capital and attention creates Meme tokens.

Creating attention is about dealing with people. In addition to the unique wealth effect, it is also necessary to emphasize the KOL matrix, the communication environment, and the fit of the information content. Having all aspects in place is not an easy task. Therefore, creating a viral Meme is not a simple task either. To evaluate the birth and virality of a Meme, one can start from these four factors.

Meme focuses on attention, and one can consider the attention feedback phenomenon when investing. For example, the Bome community has driven the value increase of the SMOWL community.