The Subculture of Cryptocurrency

Despite being in a winter and all the fraudsters, the crypto community has evolved its own culture. Let’s explore.

Photo by Traxer on Unsplash

Would you pay $300 Million for a pizza? In 2010, Florida resident Laszlo Hanyecz used 10,000 Bitcoins to buy a pizza. In today’s Bitcoin value, that equates to almost $300 Million. But he says he has no regrets. Another man accidentally threw away his hard drive, now worth nearly $400 Million. He’s been petitioning the local council to search the landfill for years.

While we hear much about cryptocurrency scammers and fraudsters, and there are these criminals, the majority of those in the crypto community aren’t criminally minded. Over the years they’ve come to evolve a defining subculture, with norms, a style of language, traditions and customs. All the elements that define a subculture. Let’s explore this very intriguing and interesting world.

Let’s start with how we see subcultures from a cultural anthropology lens. They will hold a shared identity that distinguishes them from a larger society. They evolve their own set of distinctive norms and values, often having a specialised language and may develop forms of resistance to dominant cultural norms. There’s other elements to defining them, but you see all these in the crypto culture.