In New York City, there are certain establishments — Phebe’s, Le Bain, the Brass Monkey — that you would never dare enter if you are above the age of, say 22. These meccas are called “intern bars,” and if you happened to stumble into one, you’d be overwhelmed by the scent of sweat, Natty Light and dry shampoo.
In these bars, the floor feels coated in grenadine, and your line of vision is a flood of untucked J.Crew oxfords and Goyard tote bags, not all of them real.
These drinkeries were considered chic in their heyday. But somewhere along the line they were co-opted by a cohort of rowdy individuals, often underaged and inebriated. A similar process seems to be affecting the meme-investment world.
Matt Damon’s ad for crypto.com is basically as bad as him showing up at an intern bar and asking “How do you do, fellow kids?” It’s the very definition of cringe, writes Lionel Laurent.
Slapping some laser eyes on your Twitter avatar, purchasing NFTs for Christmas gifts and name-dropping Cathie Wood at the dinner table won’t win you brownie points anymore.
But Lionel says this doesn’t exactly spell doom for the crypto craze. It just means parts of the cryptoverse have become cheugy, and not everyone is smart enough to separate the hype from the mockery.
In the hipper corner of the crypto, we now have a new financial instrument called a bividend, which is — you guessed it! — a dividend payable in Bitcoin.
As of this morning, the blockchain-y company BTCS was up 52% on news of its invention of the bividend, which Matt Levine praises as an effective attention-getting strategy, if nothing else.
People like bividends because they are new and shiny! People who like bividends probably do *not* think Murray Hill is cool! There’s like a 5% chance any of this makes sense to you, dear reader, and I think that is the point.
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