In anticipation of a solo exhibition by artist Nardo at Bitcoin Mena, in collaboration with AOTM Gallery, I sat down with him to explore the intersections of memes, mythologies, and digital culture. Nardo’s work navigates the intriguing space between the tangible form of traditional painting and the fleeting nature of meme culture—two seemingly contrasting mediums that are evolving in tandem with Bitcoin.

The title of your exhibition, Fresh Impact, and the centerpiece painting, Sandwich Artist, both reference Subway-related memes. Notably, Subway became the first fast-food chain to accept bitcoin in 2013—a moment documented by Andrew Torba, who famously used bitcoin to buy a $5 sub in Allentown, Pennsylvania (an ironic detail, given that Torba is now CEO of the social network Gab). This early mix of Bitcoin and meme culture sparked humorous reflections on “spending generational wealth” on footlongs and highlighted themes of currency value over time, as the dollar’s purchasing power wanes while bitcoin’s grows. How does this Subway meme resonate with you, and how does it shape your approach to painting in an increasingly digital age?

I think there is something to be said about quick consumption in contemporary culture—whether it’s fast food footlong subs or internet memes. The attention span of human senses has diminished to bursts of repeated dopamine, where selecting your type of bread, meats, and toppings becomes the most exciting part of your afternoon. Then comes the tireless effort of finishing 12 inches of processed food matter. You repeat this over and over because it’s convenient, and maybe next time, you’ll excite yourself by swapping cheddar for provolone.

However, Subway has developed a systematic experience that feels eternal. Memes and internet behavior function in a similar way. The ephemeral consumption of entertaining or humorous memes acts as the dopamine hit—we share them with friends, they spread at rapid speeds, and then they often die off, leading us to move on to the next. Yet, the success of memes also lies in their systems: cultural iconography, bold fonts superimposed onto captivating imagery, hyper-sharpened visuals, deep-fried aesthetics, or low effort applications. Memes rely on visual and cultural layers—bread, meat, and toppings.

I think, as it relates to Bitcoin, we should really confront its experiential nature in the exact moment of exchange. To have purchased a footlong for $5 worth of Bitcoin in 2013, only to view it today in 2024 as ~$4,300, is both absurd and somewhat painful—but the experience is eternal. The very act of using digital internet money in exchange for physical, consumable goods feels almost alchemical.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “memes” to describe units of cultural transmission, likening their spread to gene replication. Memes also resemble viruses in how they propagate through social networks, blurring the lines between genes and viruses as both can integrate into DNA and influence evolution. You and I have joked that memes—and memecoins—are akin to the fast food of digital culture, serving as cybernetic junk food or street drugs. Do you consider memes to be a low art form? Is the buildup of studio trash made famous by painter Francis Bacon or the outlandish waste and detritus of Dash Snow’s 2007 “hamster nest” installation somehow related? What are your thoughts on contemporary artists like Christine Wang, who replicates notable memes in her recent painting exhibition, “Cryptofire Degen,” at The Hole in New York? What happens when a digital meme becomes a physical painting? 

This all ties back to what I discussed earlier—I am interested in slowing down the process of consumption. To meticulously hand-paint a meme in oil and present it as such can be a little jarring. Similarly, considering trash as form or content, rather than something to be discarded, fascinates me.

After the user has consumed their lunch and doom-scrolled through countless memes on Twitter, what remains as the detritus of all that? The whole experience can feel like nullifying brain rot—a diminishing of structure and existence within passive chaos. Perhaps, though, that is the liminal mindset necessary to birth the most viral ideas.

My introduction to cybernetics came from Japanese animation series like Ghost in the Shell (1995-2014), which explore cyberpunk themes such as internet-connected minds, hackers, and cyber viruses, echoing Dawkins’ ideas about memes and cultural transmission. The series highlights concepts like “ghost-hacking” and “thought viruses,” which replicate across networks and influence societal behavior, aligning with Dawkins’ notion of self-replicating cultural units. Given your recent exploration of the “skibidi toilet” meme phenomenon, what insights have you gained about how this meme has propagated across social networks and shaped the collective consciousness of younger audiences?

The Ghost in the Shell connection isn’t far removed from the world as we know it now. Much like the premise of that “fiction,” our fleshy brains are nestled within a cybernetic façade of digital personas and communications. We practically live vicariously through a digitized shadow-self—a projection of what we think we could become. This aligns with why I often say, “You become what you meme.”

I am deeply intrigued by the phenomenon of American youth becoming obsessed with new memes that older generations are unable to compute, such as Skibidi Toilet. I think it is in this fracturing of sensibility that new languages are born, while old mythologies are repackaged in contemporary ways. Skibidi Toilet is the Iliad of the Internet.

Beyond Ghost in the Shell’s exploration of cybernetics, the seminal anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion intersects with the Age of Aquarius concept through its themes of interconnectedness and collective consciousness. The series delves into the merging of individual identities, echoing how “hive mind” behaviors in contemporary internet culture reflect the rapid influence of shared information and memes. In your artwork Sandwich Artist, you highlight the tension between individual artistry and the pressures of representing a faceless brand. How have you observed this shift over time, and how can artists engage with collective ideas while preserving their individuality in today’s digital culture?

The Sandwich Artist piece utilizes a well-known meme template, yet through various digital alterations—specifically the literal scribbling out of pre-existing text—it takes on the feel of graffiti and eventually becomes my own. I like this piece for how it represents an individual manifesto of my work and reflects how I think about my artistry as a whole. Sure, consistent branding and aesthetics are great for sales if done right, but I’m more interested in how my work exists within a long enough historical timeline. The hive mind desires a brand to rally behind, yet history yearns for individual artistry.

We’ve discussed the term “subway” in relation to submarine sandwiches, but it also evokes the idea of underground transportation. Japan famously studied mycelial growth patterns to optimize its subway and train systems. Similar to fungi, memes propagate and connect individuals in a vast, decentralized network, evolving as they move from one “host” to another. This fungal comparision highlights how memes adapt and spread dynamically, mirroring natural systems of growth and communication. How do you think artists can consciously navigate this memetic landscape of propagation, host vessels, and network dynamics?

The lifespan of most internet memes moves so rapidly that it’s difficult to grasp them before they vanish into a shallow grave. Among the few that manage to take hold of the collective consciousness, I find it fascinating to analyze how they connect to humanity’s past on a metaphysical level. Trends and symbols have remained consistent throughout human history; they simply resurface in different forms as time passes.

Efficient memes rely on efficient systems for delivering information. As artists, we should remain conscious of history and metaphysical symbolism, as this awareness can help us uncover our own primordial self through the mirror of memes.

A lot of consensus-change proposals for bitcoin are on the table at the moment. All of them have good motivations, whether it’s scaling UTXO ownership or making self-custody more tractable. I won’t rehash them here, you’re probably already familiar. Some have been actively developed for years.

The past two such changes that have been made to bitcoin successfully, Segwit and Taproot, were massive engine-lift-style deployments fraught with drama. There have been smaller changes in bitcoin’s past, like the introduction of locktimes, but for some reason the last two have been kitchen sink affairs.

The reality not often talked about by many bitcoin engineers is that up until Taproot, bitcoin’s consensus development was more or less operating under a benevolent dictatorship model. Project leadership went from Satoshi to Gavin to… well, I’ll stop naming names.

Core developers will likely quibble with this characterization, but we all know deep down that to a first order approximation that it’s basically true. The “final say” and big ideas were implicitly signed off on by one guy, or maybe a small oligarchy of wizened autists.

In many ways there’s really nothing wrong with this – most (all?) major open source projects operate similarly with pretty clear leadership structures. Oftentimes they have benevolent dictators who just “make the call” in times of high-dimensional ambiguity. Everyone knows Guido and Linus and the based Christian sqlite guy.

Bitcoin is aesthetically loath to this but the reality, whether we like it or not, is that this is how it worked up until about 2021.

Given that, there are three factors that create the CONSENSUS CONUNDRUM facing bitcoin right now:

(1) The old benevolent dictators (or high-caste oligarchy) have abdicated their power, leaving a vacuum that shifts the project from “conventional mode of operation” to “novel, never-before-tried” mode: an attempt at some kind of supposedly meritocratic leaderlessness.

This change is coupled with the fact that

(2) the possible design space for improvements and things to care about in bitcoin is wide open at this point. Do you want vaults? Or more L2s? What about rollups? Or how about a generic computational tool like CAT? Or should we bundle the generic things with applications (CTV + VAULT) to make sure they really work?

The problem is that all of these are valid opinions. They all have merit, both in terms of what to focus on and how to get to the end goal. There really isn’t a clear “correct” design pattern.

(3) A final factor that makes this situation poisonous is that faithfully pursuing, fleshing out, building, “doing the work” of presenting a proposal IS REALLY REALLY TIME CONSUMPTIVE AND MIND MELTING.

Getting the demos, specs, implementation, and “marketing” material together is a long grind that takes years of experience with Core to even approach.

I was well paid to do this fulltime for years, and the process left me disgusted with the dysfunction and having very little desire to continue contributing. I think this is a common feeling.

A related myth is that businesses will do something analogous to aid the process. The idea that businesses will build on prospective forks is pretty laughable. Most bitcoin companies have a ton on their backlog, are fighting for survival, and have basically no one dedicated to R&D. The have a hard enough time integrating features that actually make it in.

Many of the ones who do have the budget for R&D are shitcoin factories that don’t care about bitcoin-specific upgrades.

I’ve worked for some of the rare companies that care about bitcoin and do have the money for this kind of R&D, and even then the resources are not sufficient to build a serious product demo on top of 1 of N speculative softforks that may never happen.

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This kind of situation is why human systems evolve leadership hierarchies. In general, to progress in a situation like this someone needs to be in a position to say “alright, after due consideration we’re doing X.”

Of course what makes this seem intractable is that the Bitcoin mythology dictates (rightly) that clear leadership hierarchies are how you wind up, in the limit, with the Fed.

Sure, bitcoin can just never change again in any meaningful way (“ossify”). But at this point that almost certainly resigns it to yet another financial product that can only be accessed with the benefit of a large institution.

If you grant that bitcoin should probably keep tightening its rules for more and better functionality, but that we should go “slow and steady,” I think there are issues with that too.

Because another factor that isn’t talked about is that as bitcoin rises in price, and as nation-states start buying in size, the rules will be harder to change. So inaction — not deciding — is actually a very consequential decision.

I do not know how this resolves.

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There’s another uncomfortable subject I want to touch on: where the power actually lies.

The current mechanism for changing bitcoin hinges on what Core developers will merge. This of course isn’t official policy, but it’s the unintended reality.

Other less technically savvy actors (like miners and exchanges) have to pick some indicator to pay attention to that tells them what changes are safe and when they are coming. They have little ability or interest to size these things up for themselves, or do the development necessary to figure them out.

My Core colleagues will bristle at this characterization. They’ll say “we’re just janitors! we just merge what has consensus!” And they’re not being disingenuous in saying that. But they’re also not acknowledging that historically, that is how consensus changes have operated.

This is something that everyone knows semi-consciously but doesn’t really want to own.

Core devs saying “yes” and clicking merge has been a necessary precursor every time. And right now none of the Core devs are paying attention to the soft fork conversations – sort of understandable, there’s a bunch to do in bitcoin.

But let’s be honest here, a lot of the work happening in Core has been sort of secondary to bitcoin’s realization.

Mempool work is interesting, but the whole model is more or less upside down anyway because it’s based on altruism. For-profit darkpools and accelerators seem inevitable to me, although that could be argued. Much of the mempool work is rooted in support for Lightning, which is pretty obviously not going to solve the scaling problem.

Sure, encrypted P2P connections are great, but what’s even the point if we can’t get on-chain ownership to a level beyond essentially requiring the use of an exchange, ecash mint, sidechain, or some other trusted third party?

My main complaint is that Core has developed an ivory tower mindset that more or less sneers at people piatching long-run consensus stuff instead of trying to actually engage with the hard problems.

And that could have bitcoin fall short of its potential.

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I don’t know what the solution to any of this is. I do know that self-custody is totally nervewracking and basically out of the question for casual users, and I do know that bitcoin in its current form will not scale to twice-monthly volume for even 10% of the US, let alone most of the world.

The people who don’t acknowledge this, and who want to spend critical time and energy wallowing in the mire of proposing the perfect remix of CTV, are making a fateful choice.

Most of the longstanding, fully specified fork proposals active today are totally fine, and conceptually they’d be great additions to bitcoin.

Hell, probably a higher block size is safe given features like compactblocks and assumeutxo and eventually utreexo. But that’s another post for another day.

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I’ve gone back and forth about writing a post like this, because I don’t have any concrete prescriptions or recommendations. I guess I can only hope that bringing up these uncomfortable observations is some distant precursor to making progress on scaling self-custody.

All of these opinions have probably been expressed by @JeremyRubin years ago in his blog. I’m just tired of biting my tongue.

Thanks to @rot13maxi and @MsHodl for feedback on drafts of this.

This is a guest post by James O’Beirne. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

It is the prospect of the sovereign individual that seems to most trouble the nation-state today. This odd threat perception has been the outgrowth of a political genealogy that, in the generations since the American Revolution, has increasingly come to equate the state with society while constellating the individual as the enemy of both. This equation would have been profoundly disconcerting to the founders of the American republic, who called forth a new national project precisely to preclude the abuses of an entrenched and predatory overclass—an aristocracy—that deemed itself the rightful custodian, in perpetuity, of the fate and best interests of a people. The political question animating America’s founders was, therefore: How can a people self-govern without creating a hereditary class of governors? How can sufficient tension, if not conflict, remain between state and society that the rule of law is preserved without becoming a prison?

The founders devised an ingenious solution to this problem based on a revolutionary premise: That the rights of the individual, not those of the state, are fundamental for a free society.[1] In other words, people have rights; governments do not have rights. Governments have powers, but only those powers that are explicitly delegated to them by the people they represent. Put more precisely, the people have the totality of enumerated and unenumerated rights, while the state has only those powers explicitly enumerated. Any actions taken by agents of the state outside of their enumerated powers are a usurpation of the people’s rights. The people must safeguard these explicit limits and can take the enumerated powers of the state back at any time.

In other words, the American founders reversed the dominant political assumptions in their cultural world: It was not the people who had to prove that they were deserving of rights, that they were innocent before the law, or that they had cleared themselves of inherited obligations to the state. Rather, it was the state that bore the burden of proof: That it was worthy of trust; that it had the power to take a particular action; that any person or entity was guilty under the law; or that its war powers should be exercised with the people’s blood and treasure. Concretely, this meant that during the era of the US Constitutional Convention, when the debate between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists raged, a formative consensus emerged that the American state would have no power of its own, no money of its own, and no army of its own. The American Constitution stipulated that all of these things would be effectively on loan from the people, in whom true sovereignty resided.

But things have changed profoundly since the Constitution was ratified. Not only did America establish a standing army quickly thereafter; that army has been engaged in almost unceasing warfare—over a hundred conflicts both foreign and domestic, declared and undeclared—since that time. While most Americans today would likely be familiar with the large-scale conflicts in which their nation has participated—the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and two world wars, for example—they probably would be surprised by the majority of the wars in which the United States has been involved. During the nineteenth century, those wars were fought mostly against American Indian tribes as part of the push to colonize the West, while during the twentieth century they were waged predominantly against socialist and communist movements around the world. Twenty-first-century conflicts, in turn, have been prosecuted under the banner of the war on terror and, more recently, the containment of adversary nations. Although the Constitution grants Congress the sole power to declare war, in practice, Congress has only declared war in a few major conflicts: The War of 1812, wars against Mexico and Spain, and wars against particular belligerents in the First and Second World Wars. The rest have been waged through some form of unilateral executive action, whether by presidential decree or by the determination of military officers.

Just as the US government now seems to have its own army, it seems to have its own money. In 1913, Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment, giving it the right to levy permanent income taxes on the American people; estate taxes, gift taxes, capital gains taxes, and corporate taxes followed soon thereafter, while other permanent forms of taxation have been introduced in the decades since. This money has since come to be widely referred to as “government revenue” rather than “the people’s money.” But the federal government does not confine its spending to the people’s money; rather, it borrows extensively, supporting a ballooning administrative state whose agencies are so numerous and ill-defined that there is no authoritative reference for exactly how many there are. The Federal Register, the Online Federal Register, the US Government Manual, the Sourcebook of United States Executive Agencies, the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, FOIA.gov, and USA.gov all list widely differing numbers and definitions of agencies.[2],[3] These agencies function as both rulemaking and rule-enforcing bodies, collapsing all three branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial) into one in their own operations. This eliminates the checks and balances that the authors of the Constitution put in place to constrain the power of the state, subjecting the American people to a growing thicket of laws that they have had no part in making and have no electoral capacity to alter or repeal. As a result, an illusion is created that the government has its own power.

But while military conflict, taxation, and bureaucratic rule are all visible manifestations of the power of the state, they are underpinned by a platform that seems so normal and ubiquitous today that it largely goes unnoticed: A financial system in which central banks issue and manage the supply and price of unredeemable fiat currencies. These currencies serve as the base money that commercial banks, in turn, use as reserve assets to make loans. Commercial banks and central banks around the world form a network of financial intermediaries who share with each other information about every transaction that passes through their networks—which is also shared with the military, intelligence, and policing agencies of governments and intergovernmental organizations worldwide. Government’s gaze into the economic activity of every person and organization anywhere in the world is effectively unconstrained by any privacy laws or constitutional provisions regarding search and seizure of assets. This alliance between banking power and policing power took hold during the early twentieth century in what can be called the Banker Revolution—a revolution so successful that few are even aware it happened.

The Satoshi Papers, a project by The Texas Bitcoin Foundation and edited by Natalie Smolenski, will be available for pre-order on November 19th in paper back and limited Library edition.

[1] Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence read “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent [emphasis added], that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.” See Thomas Jefferson, “Image 1 of Thomas Jefferson, June 1776, Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.001_0545_0548/?sp=1.

[2] Clyde Wayne Crews, “How Many Federal Agencies Exist?” Forbes, July 5, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynecrews/2017/07/05/how-many-federal-agencies-exist-we-cant-drain-the-swamp-until-we-know/?sh=535830391aa2.

[3] Molly Fischer, “What Is a Federal Agency?” Federal Agency Directory, Louisiana State University Libraries, March 28, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20130518150541/http://www.lib.lsu.edu/gov/fedagencydef.pdf.