Analysis News TheBitTimes.com

1. Subcultures: From the Fringe to the Spotlight Expression is a universal human trait. A great meme can transcend cultural boundaries and make anyone smile. When collective identity, emotion, and intention converge, they form distinct values, language, and aesthetics. That’s how subcultures emerge — like the dramatic QQ “Zang Ai” clan, the dance style “Shehui Yao” during the mobile video era, or the fringe-dwelling “Sanhe Gods” of post-industrial China. They may seem obscure or outdated today, but they each embodied a striking and extreme expression of their time. No subculture is inherently superior. A hippie on a spiritual retreat isn’t more refined than someone reading pulp fiction. Enjoying Star Wars or believing in reincarnation doesn’t make someone more sophisticated than a fan of 90s Hong Kong gangster films. In fact, the more niche the aesthetic, the less it resonates universally. We’ve lived through the agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions — and now we’re cra...

Blockstream’s marketing and communications director Fernando Nikolić has created a new website to track some of Bitcoin’s most popular memes and lore. At launch, Know Your Bitcoin Meme displays a gallery of a few thousand viral images and attributes them to X (formerly Twitter) users.  “Culture drives change, and memes change culture,” said Nikolić in a statement to Protos. “ Bitcoin ’s history is written in memes and will continue to do so. So I felt compelled to create this ‘Great Library of Alexandria’ on the web as a nod to the culture and give everyone access to contribute to it.” Unfortunately, attributions are not vetted by human researchers, so they don’t indicate ownership or creation. Nikolić programmatically relies on image searches to attribute memes to creators. He admitted that he has only spent a few hours on the website as a hobby and hasn’t hired an editor to manually search variants or investigate the true origins of each meme. Kn...