About The Artist
American Gothic is a now famous painting by Grant Wood, depicting a Midwestern farmer and his daughter posing in front of their farm house. The house features an out of context, gothic inspired top floor window – probably an ecclesiastical/religious reference – weighing heavy in the scene.
They’re both somewhat prim and puritanical looking. People of faith or possibly even of a more dogmatic or maximalist religious persuasion? In his hand the father, the literal guardian, is holding a pitch fork, symbolising a hard working man but also one not to be messed with.
Someone who will protect his property and everything he believes in (so don’t tell him how you rate his aesthetically challenged daughter).
They are both in colonial style dress and the scene itself is set up like a 19th century long exposure photograph. He may be wearing a suit jacket but he has his overalls on underneath. Jazzy stylez but also, telling… The painting is referencing and celebrating values and techniques of the past, while adopting a modern context (for the time in which it was created,1930).
It smacks of Americana. Initially you may receive it as a “comic valentine” – a caricature of “simple” America. But while I first see satire, I very soon after also see steel, virtue, determination and buckets loads of the American pioneering spirit that was once so ubiquitous there.
Sound values & hard work. Hard faith and sound money.
Gothic Hodl
American Gothic is in many ways the perfect avatar for American Hodl.
He too is perhaps first seen as a caricature. However it doesn’t take you long to spot the serious belief, the celebration of the traditional while adopting a better, more modern context for it.
The pursuit of virtuous purpose and the vocation and determination to protect it.
He is an evangelical but rather than screech bible verses at the world through a megaphone on a street corner he is doing it in 280 character chapters and by singing proverbial hymns about Satoshi’s work on Clubhouse. He range is Mariah Carey’esque – 5 octaves. From the deeply cosmic to dick memes.
Yes he is forthright, brash and braggadocios. Yes he is a bit of a gobshite at times, as they might say in the North West of England, but everything is delivered with a knowing and mischievous look. Whether he is shitposting or getting deep with fellow cosmic travellers Erik Cason, RB and Vallis, he is always uncompromisingly himself. It’s this consistency that endears you to the guy and what gives him integrity.
He cares more about saying what he wants and his freedom to say it, than he cares about his follower count. Most Bitcoiners would give their right bollock to have as many Bitcoin as there are American Hodl headstones in the Twitter graveyard.
"I actively court my own account disillusions. I actively do things that I know will get me banned from Twitter just so that I can get banned from Twitter again. I don’t want to be a person with 100k followers. I just want to be a dude who shows up at Bitcoin conferences, has a few drinks with his buddies and holds Bitcoin for the long term."
I find that refreshing as hell. There are WAY to many so-called plebs, let alone Bitcoiners, that clearly care way too much about their follower count!
Meme Collection
#01
#03
Mascot for the Misfits
After his platform philandering – his proverbial fornicating with the noobs and attention seekers of Club House – American Hodl is back!
No simping but it’s good to have him back too.
After he missed out on the Spaces chat we had with President Bukele he FOMO’ed back into Twitter faster than you can say “volcano mining”.
I can’t deny that Bitcoin Twitter is a more entertaining place to be for his particular brand of jovial spice. His poignant takes, silly antics, his tiffs with Deeter and the occasional super honest reflection on his childhood are great fodder.
I’ll probably have Deeter Bob snapping at my ankles – barking shrilly about circle jerking – but surely even he prefers his Twitter experience to include Hodl. For the rest of us their episodic instalments of Handbags At Dawn are worth the price of entry alone. Brilliantly it took about 3 seconds of being back on Twitter before he was involved in a battle with the little chiwawa, resulting in a permanent ban from the Spaces.
"I was removed from Spaces after an argument with Deeter Bob, permanently banned. We just got into it in a heated way. I don’t care, it was fun!"
We’ve all had a friend like Hodl at some point in our lives or if you haven’t, maybe you were that friend. The older brother energy. Someone who is always there to give you a dead arm, to call you ghey or to tell you that your beloved new Jag is a car for pussies and housewives
Ultimately though there is warmth about it all and even an arm around the shoulder should there be a noob in need. It was beautiful to see how he took Greg under his wing when Greg first left the shitcoins and started to make terrible Bitcoin memes. Greg spoke to @mtcbtc as part of his Block 07 feature about the influence Hodl had on him in these early days…
"American HODL had a big impact on my memes and my engagement with the community. Because of what he posts and some of my conversations with him really helped me get my head around the thesis of Bitcoin and why it’s important not to shitcoin in the first place"
Anyway, fuck you Greg – you had your feature, bro…
Whether he is comfortable with it or not he has become a bit of a mascot for the ungovernable misfits. The spirit animal of those that fell between the cracks.
Memes for Prosperity
In a sense he has almost become a meme himself and so perhaps it’s unsurprising that he also gave us one of the biggest memes of the last bear cycle. One that still permeates our culture today. Like most good memes it packs a punch. It intends to provoke and inspire in equal measure. It may have felt a little crass at first. Perhaps it felt insensitive to those who could only aspire but it made them aspire! It was an impossible reach for some but reach they did…
6.15 – For Eternal Riches and Big Titty Bitches
In recent times it has of course been stripped back to its essence – 6.15
It’s becoming one of those mythological Bitcoin numbers that we all rely on in our Bitcoin lives from time to time. We recently had to price something up for 21ism and the answer was of course 6.15% of profit.
"There have always been stacking goals in the Bitcoin community. When I first came in it was 21 coins. Only a million people could ever be richer than you so that was a great goal to aspire to. Over time that became out of reach so someone had to create a new one. It became 6.15 and then I attached the lure that large breasted women would be attracted to you. "
Many of the class of 2020 still won’t know where it came from or how it came about or who its biological father is. The acronym BTBs might as well be a secret, 3 letter government agency, as far as they’re concerned. They will however know that owning 6.15 Bitcoin is the ultimate aspiration – even if that is way further out of reach than it was at the time of it’s birth.
"It’s great when a meme outlives you and people have no idea you created it. That’s the point of memes. Don’t watermark your memes, they’re not yours! Rogan reads out “Stacking Sats” at the beginning of every episode and many won’t even know who Matt Odell is."
Like Hodl, I’m a contrarian fucker. I’m a stubborn so and so. I like to think I’m impervious to peer pressure but between all the cashapp screenshots of Hodl’s incessant stacking and this meme, I was put on notice. Notice that there were people willing to out-stack me and that if I didn’t get my shit together, if I didn’t start to mine and burn some serious fiat, there would be plenty of plebs buying up the sats that I had intended for me!
I’ve heard it said many times before but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have the same amount of corn today had it not been for this meme and for Hodl tirelessly banging on the 6.15 drum.
Normally I would have been the contrarian having a slight nod in the corner of the club, resisting to get involved, and now I was finding myself dancing wildly to the beat of this heady mix of aspiration, greed and competitive accumulation. Those days were a stacking madness!
Hodl has chummed the waters and now everyone were going ham. Everyone was sharing their cashapp screenshots – it was a good natured feeding frenzy!
"It’s like having gym buddies. It’s a reminder to go hard in the gym. It’s a reminder to stack sats for future prosperity. Making it a competition helped a lot of people go hard in the bear market."
It’s not for show either. We know the story of how he already years ago was driving around on a shitty Chinese-made scooter in order to stack more sats. This was despite being relatively fiat wealthy already. This last year he stacked so hard he was forced to sell his big Chevy.
If he induced FOMO in you, in us, he wasn’t impervious to the FOMO himself.
"I ended up with no runway and having to do things like sell my car in order to have enough money to live. "
Pioneering Purpose
Part of his stacking fervour is because he sees it as the best way to combat the threats we see around us today. The diseases of despair, intersectionality, critical race theory, collectivism, corporate imperialism are all due to the money being broken. There will be a ‘Great Reset’ but it won’t be the one they think they’re getting!
" I want to suffocate the beast by starving it of air so why would I sell back into fiat. Why would I not take as much of my wealth out of circulation as possible? The best thing to do is to stack sats and build a happy family."
As soon as he had the opportunity to retire he did it. Why continue to chase fiat goals.
But won’t you be bored? Aren’t you ambitious anymore?
I got all the same questions when I decided to pack in my fiat job myself.
What they don’t understand is that it’s ultimate ambition that’s the reason for quitting the hamster wheel. Like Hodl, I’m determined to be happy, to build a healthy and based family and to fighting the NWO. Purpose is one of the most virtuous things to pursue because not only does it lower consumption through focusing, and thus humbling yourself to what really matters in life, but it’s also the best thing for the world at large. What could be better than to fill it with as many people fuelled by purpose and virtue as at all possible.
As Plato once wrote – “Both wealth and concord decline as possessions become pursued and honoured. And virtue perishes with them as well.“
It is time to reclaim truth, agency and fundamental freedoms. Freedom of speech has always been fundamental to the American diaspora. The freedom to speak your mind was always something that was prized. Now people are fearful and afraid to speak out, particularly in the public square, school, work and community environments.
Never before has it been as important to have the courage and conviction to not only seek truth but to speak about it when you find it and to demand that others do the same.
These days it seems like a bifurcation of society is happening and that we are going to have to break new ground in our search for prosperity.
American Hodl is here for it. Steely stare and with pitchfork in hand.
One of the many physical manifestations amongst us of the New American Pioneering Spirit.
Badders
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Check out my podcast chat with @TheAmericanHodl (linked above) where we talked about:
His views on what is happening in the world right now. How being based is a lonely experience. What made him susceptible to the truth of Bitcoin and how you sometimes have to kill your heroes as he found himself having to do with Trace Mayer.
I loved chatting to HODL. If you enjoyed it too, show him your appreciation on Twitter here.
Ciao for now!