First! Largest! Bestest! Ever! …In The US

In the last few days, there’ve been more than a few ‘Muricans spouting off about BitPay’s latest round of VC funding. Headlines featuring Virgin’s Richard Branson,i PayPal’s Peter Thiel, and Yahoo’s Jerry Yang did little more than confirm the narrow-minded self-importance of everyone fucktarded enough to regurgitate this shit. CoinDesk, the official outlet for people who can’t find the new morning paper, wrote:

Atlanta-based bitcoin merchant processor BitPay has officially raised $30m in Series A funding in the largest-ever financing round for a bitcoin company.ii

Ever!

Proclamations of being the First! Largest! Bestest! have been coming out of the United States of Egypt for at least a century now, and up until quite recently, without doing any research whatsoever, such claims had more than a fair chance of being accurate. The US had a hell of a century, to be sure. As such, there are now several generations of US citizens who’ve never known anything other than their own dominance and superiority, giving them the confidence to use words without doing research.

But this is 2014 now and the US ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog with its hind legs broken. As such, Americans have unknowingly entered the Era of Asterisks, where all of their claims must be qualified with “…in the US” for the first time in their lives. It’s going to be an adjustment, sure, but so was Detroit.iii And guess what? The strong adapt and the Apollonian dead weight doesn’t. Just as it should be.

We can’t really blame underpaid, undereducated “journalists”iv for forgetting asterisks and vomiting all over the screen like they did with the BitPay thing. If Glenn Greenwald needs Edward Snowden to coach him through PGP/GPG, these kids have no hope. Still, we might expect more from folks who have a few million to their credit, even if it is in fiat. For example, from a Twitter conversation yesterday:

Ben Davenport:v ‏Congratulations to @BitPay on closing $30M Series A from @IndexVentures, largest funding event in Bitcoin to date.
Pete D: You too, Ben? Where did you get the idea that @BitPay was the “biggest?” It’s called MPEx. Cripes. @Mircea_Popescu
Mircea Popescu: Well maybe they mean “largest among our largely irrelevant pool of inbreeding” or something.
Ben Davenport: Legitimately curious. I don’t remember seeing that MPEx had raised anything in that neighborhood.
Mircea Popescu: @bendavenport @bitcoinpete Probably because you’ve not put in your 6 months of #bitcoin-assets lurkingvi like #bitcoin aspirants should.
Ben Davenport: Guilty as charged. No need to be coy about details though. MPEx is on AngelList, so you must admit Ohio mattersvii
Mircea Popescu: It closed 5% for 38k BTC ~ a year ago. It may take another 5 to 10% in a year or two, but again Ohio won’t matter. Cause BTC.
Ben Davenport: But at the time that was a $4M raise. Still a ridiculously good pre-money, but can’t really compare to a $30M raise.
Mircea Popescu: Yes, but you see, BTC still doesn’t care about Ohio. Your 30mn is 20k BTC and no more. MPEx mkt cap is… 1mn BTC, not less.viii
Ben Davenport: You’re conflating mkt cap (which is suspect here due to illiquid market) with investment size.
Mircea Popescu: @bendavenport MPEx is actually trading on a liquid market. Bitpay is… you know. Not. And the discussion was “largest”, nothing else. That aside, you’re trying to impose an irrelevant unit of account (usd). Bitcoin stuff is Bitcoin stuff, and 20k BTC < 30k BTC
Ben Davenport: Largest *raise*, not largest company. $GOOG valued at 418M BTC. So what?
Mircea Popescu: “Largest raise by someone I know”, aka “best all-white jazz band”. Just a little #racist dontchathink.

Boom.

Because Bitcoin matters and the US doesn’t. Welcome to the Era of Asterisks.

Welcome to Bitcoin’s century.

___ ___ ___

  1. Mr. Make $100K by Starting With $1M.
  2. For the record, Bitcoin corporations 1) don’t measure shit in fiat, and 2) don’t need bank accounts anymore than Jesus needed a pitchfork. This is important. Bitcoin is the unit of account and the bank account. It can be no other way. “Bitcoin companies” haven’t caught up to this yet…
  3. Detroit isn’t some American anomaly, it’s the canary in the coal mine.
  4. Here’s looking at you, Pete Rizzo and Seth Fiegerman.
  5. From Mr. Davenport’s AngelList profile: “I have been focused intensely on Bitcoin and startups in the cryptocurrency space since mid 2011, and have been a seed investor in BitPay, Coinsetter, itBit and Yoyocard.” We know that BitPay does merchant processing, Coinsetter drops coins on the exchange floor, itBit provides a “deeply liquid marketplace” of a paltry 1,000 BTC/day, but Yoyocard? Apparently, “Yoyocard’s mission is to make the financial system more accessible.” Derp.
  6. IRC Yeshiva anyone?
  7. If you once tweeted about the United Nations, must the United Nations admit that you matter? Mmm… not quite.
  8. By this calculation, which presumable accounts for the illiquidity of the fiat-btc market, BitPay’s market cap of $160M is 106,667 BTC, which is a shit-ton for a company that doesn’t publish its financials, but still less than 11% of the big bad MPEx.

15 thoughts on “First! Largest! Bestest! Ever! …In The US

  1. […] word on whether they’re the best or the largest…in the US. […]

  2. […] TwentyFiveFarthingedNumbskull’s article starts with “may” and, as you’ll soon see, ends with “most definitely will because the US matters.” As we’ve previously explored, the US ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog with broken hind legs. […]

  3. […] was the first, biggest, bestest, neh? Seeing as how PGP was already 7 years old at this point, it was likely no […]

  4. […] certainly predates Lenin and Marx – and undoubtedly even the “first” socialists, the Mazdakites of 5th century Persia – and yet it has never worked to […]

  5. […] So while there are an apparently infinite number of “communities,” your self-proclaimed identity or deference to any of them in no way illuminates you with reflected glory of the accomplishments of people actually doing shit. If you think talking about communities matters, you have a serious and probably terminal case of first, largest, bestest thinking. […]

  6. […] Arizonai and contested by the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks, was apparently the first, biggest, best ever. Shocker, I […]

  7. […] But some confucianism for the peasants never hurt. pete_dushenski: This OS is definitely in the first! biggest! best! vein. We all have to believe in something, some moreso than others. trinque: Yep. There was a […]

  8. […] land of the free and the home of the brave.” “Yada yada blah blah we’re the firstest bestest largest everest because reasons that don’t involve us being a plasticised two-bit knock-off of The Great […]

  9. […] people”ii is no great surprise. It’s also very much in line with the American “firstest, biggest, bestest EVAR” […]

  10. […] tienen su consenso, su mayoría económica, sus jerarcas bitcoineros, su Satoshi dijo, y su […]

  11. […] to be a realistic objective this millennium, never mind this century. What I do foresee is the USSA cribbing every single last page from the USSR playbook,iii which brings us to, before long, 2086. […]

  12. […] look at the messages and moralities embedded into these two songs to see just how much the “biggest bestest blahblah” has degenerated. […]

  13. […] suppose you thought that this could never happen to the Firstest Biggest Bestest Empire of America – it’d simply be too “unfair” for an emerging power on the global stage to […]

  14. […] to read. But at the same time, as he demonstrated hereabove, he’s too far inside the “USAUSAUSA” dogmatic doggie bag to see that while we might be fellow astronauts, I’m about as […]

  15. […] You think it’s all bubblegum, blowjobs, and backrubs up there eh ? Nuh-uh. Not a chance. Four-hundred steps just to put on a space suit when you can’t handle 10 steps to make a paper wallet or create and register a PGP key ? Seriously. Space is obscenely, impossibly, literally nauseatingly demanding even for the most well-educated, physically fit, and mentally disciplined pilots-cum-PhDs-cum-astronauts,ii nevermind the usual raft of johnny-come-latelys. […]

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