People need to feel a sense of belonging in whatever field or realm they consider themselves in. Even those loners who enjoy the company of their own thoughts need those thoughts to enter of their own volition and stay their welcome. It’s so important that Pelletier notes belonging as “a basic human need – as basic as food and shelter.” In crypto in 2017, before then, and still now, the sense of belonging comes from the various sub-communities that people call themselves a part of.
Being part of a community in the crypto space was essential more than just for the human necessity of belonging. In all seriousness, if someone fulfilled their basic need of belonging mostly or solely with crypto communities, then they deserve a great deal of sympathy for the abuse that they endured on the daily. That applies both in the present and past tense. The fact is that whatever specific niche crypto community a person dwelled in mostly was and in some cases still is populated by some colorful individuals. These are people who will perform research into highly abstract technological ideals made possible through magical internet money. You cannot touch most of what cryptocurrency and blockchain deals with – it’s metaphysical but observable nonetheless.
These are people who throw their entire life savings and then some into an asset that consistently overperformed for weeks and months in 2017 then were shocked to find out that they had lost everything on their whim. On the other hand, they were also pioneers who, if they weren’t weeded out as ‘weak hands’ who dropped out of the game due to the ferocious volatility in the market, felt in some way a spiritual connection with the solutions some companies claimed to be developing. That’s what people still fail to understand about the greater crypto community. This isn’t entirely about making money, although that is certainly what many are in it for. It starts with the fact that there are real problems in society, economics, politics, and interpersonal relationships that can be solved.
The way our world operates now with interconnected devices begs for further interconnectivity. Cryptocurrency and blockchain provide that interconnectivity in such a baffling way to too many that it’s inaccessible. Nobody wants to know how sausage is made, they just want to eat it and enjoy it. The crypto communities in 2017 straddled the line between being rogues gallery round tables and perpetual high school economic debates. Nobody could possibly accurately predict how any coin would behave in 2017, and those who claimed to do as much played every suckered community for fools.
Now this chapter is a bit tricky since some of the communities that came into existence in 2017 are still in existence today; however, this portion of the book is supposed to focus on the Bitcoin Bubble of 2017. Therefore, the past tense will be used throughout the remainder of the chapter. Bear in mind, though, that some are still active under the same or different names. In fact, Crypto of Korea remains active under a different name, but that’s a story for a different chapter.
These communities came mainly in two different forms: online and offline (makes sense!). The way that these two different methods of human interaction manifest themselves in the crypto realm resemble in some ways any run-of-the-mill field of study or existence, but diverge in more distinct and esoteric ways that the layperson would take time to get used to. First, we will see how the online communities operated mainly in Korea with global reference points throughout. Then we will see how the offline communities operated in 2017 with their veritable rogues gallery of actors.
Online Communities
Aside from the PnD groups and the KakaoTalk or Telegram chatrooms that most Koreans frequented amidst the 2017 Bitcoin Bubble were online communities. These were a class apart from the typical chatrooms in that they served as archived forums of information for anyone to access by keyword or topic phrase at any time. Lucky for us they are still up and running today so that we can see all the fun crypto netizens were up to in Korea in 2017.
The online communities were in essence in many ways like the chatrooms and PnD groups. One or a number of topics would be proposed for discussion and either people responded or the focus of the group shifted to another topic posted by someone else. Although most websites were set up to put the topics with the largest volume of discussion at or around the top of the homepage while still giving members the option to look away, chats and PnD groups were mostly limited to a singular focus at any given time. The community’s attention online could be divided as it willed so that any single topic wasn’t automatically drowned out or otherwise discouraged by the wave of responses to another topic. A very notable aspect about online communities was that their traffic was generally much higher than the chatrooms since there was no platform restriction.
Through the differences and similarities, some benefits and drawbacks to the online communities can be sussed out. Those strengths and weaknesses played a big part in how people received their information about coin pumps in 2017 and through 2018. Since then things have changed slightly for the better only because the environment in the chatrooms has changed. For the sake of this chapter, members of chatrooms and PnD groups as online communities.
The main benefit to the online forums was that members were generally far more amicable with each other. Although toxicity existed in some small capacity, the degree found in online forums was largely mitigated by the sheer fact that it took more time for members to find and respond to a topic.
Now this may be somewhat difficult to grasp: In Crypto of Korea, a chatroom, Derrick received harsh criticism for the way he forced his coworker to FOMO into the crypto market. The pressure put on that young man led him to contemplate suicide. In person it wasn’t quite as common, but online people tend to get their muscle shirts on and pretend to be big people. Members of Korean chatrooms and online communities would be forthright in telling others they disagreed with to jump into the Han River.
In online forums, such abuse was easier to avoid as there were usually options to block members from commenting on your threads. There was no telling when your thread would pick up negative attention from the community and you were hit with an onslaught of negativity. With that, unpopular opinions on online communities were largely ignored or given a chuckle and passed on.
The sense of belonging that someone gets from being in a like-minded community provides the validation that their way of thinking is right and healthy. The online communities reinforce that perfectly. Why would someone who wants information about TRON go to a forum about the politics of blockchain? It just doesn’t work that way. People go to the forums and sub-forums that they are most interested in so that they find information that they are seeking or can easily access. Further evidence that the online communities tended to be nicer is that the topics could be distilled down to the coin and particular aspects of a project in different forums. People who were against TRON could go to the anti-TRON forums while those who have had too much to drink could go to the pro-TRON forums. The greater evolution of this form of online community can be seen on Discord today.
On the other hand, the slowness was also a handcuff on the movement of information. In each chatroom there would be a severe minority of technical authorities who the majority would turn to for sound advice. Those authorities, when available, could be conversed with and their advice picked apart to the tiniest detail so that all in the room could fully grasp their concepts in just a few moments, in real time. Whereas in a way the restricted speed of comments in an online community was a strength in mitigating toxicity, it was also a hindrance to the amount of raw information or ideas that could be shared at a time.
The next benefit that online communities had was a reply function. It may seem like a mundane thing to discuss but in 2017 and even through 2018, a ‘reply’ feature was absent from KakaoTalk, South Korea’s most-used messenger app. Strange as it may seem to many, the country with one of the most advanced infrastructures for communication has an ironically hard time designing an effective means of communication. That feature absence made conversing in the app relatively challenging compared to other apps, such as Telegram, which has always had the reply feature. It meant that discussion on that Kakao platform needed to be carefully focused or cross-talk would derail the entire group.
Reply features on running chats are not difficult to program. Online communities even on the most basic-looking websites managed to equip the reply feature. That feature allowed threads within the subforums to be hyper focused on a single comment. We take it for granted these days but back then it was very frustrating having to completely drop conversations when there was too much cross-chatter going on. KakaoTalk also lacked a tagging feature.
Within the context of the geography at stake – South Korea – the online communities provided a safe haven for users from the confusing and multitudinous English language communities. The lingua franca in crypto is still English, so having a strong grasp of the language was key to understanding global events. There was a lack of reliable reporting about global events in Korean, so the online communities provided a glimpse into what was happening around the world.
Korean people spend years learning English basics and tens of thousands of dollars learning to use the language in a reasonably strong capacity. For crypto traders, that proficiency often meant being able to decipher Justin Sun memes and to match the English coin tags to those in Korean. The online communities might have had 2 out of 10 members proficient enough in English to reasonably decipher news reports. Of those 2, maybe one of them would actually post the update with an actionable comment about what the article meant. That one post could be more helpful to the community as a whole than anything else that day since it could have been an announcement about an announcement (which led to pumps) or a report about legislative back stops being put down in some far off land that would have ramifications on trading on the peninsula.
A good example is shown in a post made on the popular online community Ddengle. In this post from November 25th, 2017, ‘leftsword’ posted a picture of the Stratis roadmap and their aspirations for the coming year. The infographic and official announcement from the company are entirely in English. Not simple English with basic crypto vocabulary – this was a detailed explanation of the company’s goals formatted to highlight by date what they wanted to do. That sort of formatting is difficult for non-native readers to understand, so your basic trader would likely see it, sweat a bit, and pass on to the comments. Lucky for those traders, leftsword summarized the entire announcement succinctly in a short paragraph that traders could read quickly and move on.
The full announcement comes in at about 300 words. The summary is about 50 words in Korean with an affirmation of his support for the project.
In a chatroom without a reply feature or a tagging function, it would probably have been frustrating to see an image with English posted about a project you were interested in. Even more so if your English proficiency was weak. Waiting for the poster to explain what it was or having to ask at all what it meant would be humiliating see: homicidal peer pressure and then to finally get the pay-off could come after another conversation distracted you. On the forum, the online community, you could see plainly exactly what you were looking for without any cross talk. It should be noted that that particular Stratis update had no comments on it, so it’s safe to assume that no one was interested in that particular update.
Interestingly, for a time, Korean news was more valuable around the world than the global news was in Korea. This presented the inverse problem but on a much higher scale. It was also the catalyst for making Crypto of Korea what it was.
Bearing in mind the technical limitations of the platforms available to Koreans in their native language, online communities presented a net benefit over the chatrooms. Similar to how Reddit and Bitcointalk are, or at least were, the main forums that English speakers use to shares memes and updates about their favorite crypto and blockchain projects, CoinPan, Ddengle, and others in Korea were essential in helping proliferate the general public’s understanding of how crypto worked. Granted, in 2017 a lot of what there was to understand was gazua! and when will this coin go up? but it remains a good litmus test for the collective group over the course of time that that the online communities have been in existence.
Offline Communities
Offline communities could be described in a number of ways. There were those who met on a regular basis at one place, those who met sporadically at different places which often more resembled parties, and then those that were actually meetups sponsored by one or many crypto companies who had a pitch to make while you ate their pizza and drank their Coke. All of them were totally and hopelessly wrapped up in a frenzy that you could smell through the doors of whatever venue they happened to be meeting at.
People who fell into into the varying categories of offline communities membership could be described by the type of community they most identified with. Whereas the online communities were decidedly generic since each sub-forum within them could become so highly focused, the offline communities would attract drastically different types of people. That attraction is how they were defined.
First, there were the groups that met on a regular basis to discuss current events or to work on technical solutions to problems they saw within the network they were dealing with. Call them technical communities. Technical communities were tight-knit where people generally knew who everyone was. They also tended to focus on only one network or blockchain at a time, and that was usually either Bitcoin or Ethereum. The people who attended these groups tended to be the biggest nerds out of all the communities put together. They also happened to be the most productive, most supportive, least toxic, and most inclusive of all the groups. That inclusivity rested on the assumption that anyone who was willing to devote their free time to the development of this technology was welcome to come and, at the very least, discuss problems and solutions that maybe more talented members could work out further.
The typical people who called themselves members of the technical communities were always the most interesting among all the different communities probably because of their rarity. A single conference or standard shill meetup for a moderately well-known company could attract hundreds or even thousands of attendees. Those attendees had their quirks to be sure, which will be elaborated on, but all seemed to have an ulterior motive. Members of the technical communities were singularly driven and unashamed to point out the weaknesses in their favorite project. They were, on the other hand, eager to point out how nearly all other projects were inferior. Bitcoin maximalists have their place in the ecosystem of the greater crypto community both online and offline, too.
Being that South Korea is already quite small, that about half of the population of the entire country resides in Seoul, and that the blockchain players there could be found mostly on just one of two or three main roads within Seoul, anyone really interested in the crypto community would almost certainly know those who attended the technical community meetups. Their dedication to their rhetoric was admirable. Their ideology remained unsullied by marketing, shills, buzzwords, and any of the other pitfalls that were far too common in the online communities and chatrooms. Of all such types of groups in Seoul, there was always a single leader whom everyone respected as a main authority. That authority would keep discussions and suggestions on track so that if members became too heated on one side of a topic, he or she would round everyone back to the point at hand amicably.
One member closed her eyes at the beginning of any new stanza she uttered. The longer she kept her eyes closed, the more important she presumed her point was. She was most outspoken about how she thought people should approach cryptocurrency and its valuation. For sure it had nothing to do with trading. Another one was just a teenager with a big mouth. Excuse his dogmatic view since teenagers tend to latch onto the most dramatic opinions, but this kid got under a lot of people’s skin. After a bite with Adam Back, the group politely requested a photo with the man. The kid complained that the camera on the Samsung phone which was being used to take said photo was inferior to the newest iPhone’s camera. It was a totally unnecessary comment to make but one probably made entirely just to arbitrarily show off how much he knew about it.
The reason these technical communities were so important to the ecosystem was because of guys like Steuben. Steuben was one of those authority figure leaders of a technical Bitcoin community. He was definitely a Bitcoin maximalist, and that is said without an ounce of my tongue in my cheek. He had enough technical understanding to hobnob with the bigwigs of development in the blockchain space, the political savvy to know when and how to hold his tongue while still saying exactly what he meant to the right person, and the generally soft-spoken and kind demeanor of a guy you just want to grab a beer with. He suffered fools publicly. It was clear that those who wished to talk with him should say as little as possible around him unless directly addressed so as to hide their round lack of development or mathematical talents. There was never bluster, wild haircuts, spouting off, or any of those tropes then (and now) common among people with his social standing within the ecosystem and lower.
The technical communities usually had a regular place to meet. Most met regularly on the same day and time with very little variation from that schedule. They are anything if not reliable to their schedules. Their meeting places tended to be small, like small board rooms or classrooms. There needed to be a board in the room with chalk or markers depending on the type of board was in use. Usually there were tables and chairs, but the tables weren’t always needed. They played games related to counting down the days before the next Bitcoin halving or, in the case of one alternative blockchain project, a game about identifying the correct characterization of various photos.
Honestly these communities were a delight to attend meetings for since they were so laid back. Social interactions were kept safely within the confines of the set talking points. Small talk was unnecessary. They didn’t need to rely on their conversational skills to be well-liked or respected. They didn’t even need to look at the people they were talking to in order for their points to be heard. With that, they were small and lacked any influence over the traders at all; that is, they lacked little influence over the community as a whole since they almost never had any funding – it was a labor of love for them. They might have produced some literature based on findings in their groups that could be used in the future, but it was guaranteed to be obscure at best.
Conferences
Other offline communities included those who attended meetups and conferences. Small and medium sized meetups were the most common type of gathering for people who wanted to show their face rather than hide behind a screen name. The dynamic of those meetups was fascinating so that they warrant their own chapter. In that case, let’s take a look at the people who physically decided to show up to the conferences.
To preface this sub-section, there was a massive shift in how conferences were executed and who attended them between 2017 and 2019. The influx of untold sums of money caused that changes especially after the Bitcoin Bubble had already burst. You would think that people would have learned their lesson and stopped taking positions on the vaporware that ICO shillmen were selling. Well, they didn’t, and it just made those the ICO’s pick up steam through 2018 in large part because of the conferences.
That was their function, afterall, to help the opportunists gain more recognition, notoriety, renown, or rep. Depending on the kind of business model for the conference, the execution of that main function could vary. There are those that raise revenue through the admission fees they charge. Top-value conferences can be upwards of $1000 per ticket. On the other hand, less expensive entry fees usually mean that the operators have a different goal in mind: sales leads. Organizers and sponsors use the sales leads for branding and to push forward with business development strategies. That is, the recognition, notoriety, renown, or rep can come from the high price you charge for entry to get access to the bigwigs, or from the comforts that ultimately attract the hotshots you want to make deals with.
Before late 2017 had attracted about as many flies as you could fit into one global community, the crypto conferences were understated affairs held in inauspicious venues with about as much flash as a 1950’s sitcom. Plenty of pictures are out there corroborating the fact that cryptocurrency and blockchain just were not in vogue before 2017. You’ll see Roger Ver, the man who vehemently will not let you get away calling Bitcoin Cash ‘BCash’ sitting at a foldable table lined with paper brochures and covered in a plastic sheet to shill his favorite cryptocurrency as the only real one. You’ll see people sitting on stage, much as they do now, across lounge chairs to discuss a topic before the audience. The stage will likely be lit by fluorescent lights while audience members sat in foldable chairs.
Compare that to the conferences after the Bitcoin Bubble had made so many people rich. Those conferences, starting in 2018, were held at the most expensive hotels and venues with the most expensive catering and charged the highest premiums for booths and speaking opportunities. One thing that remained consistent and still would be the same today if it weren’t for the coronavirus cancelling everything was the fact that speakers needed to pay to be on stage. The big names like Vitalik and the main sponsors for the conferences didn’t pay, but they were the only ones off the hook. Every speaking engagement at these conferences was paid for not with the admission fee, but by the people who appeared on stage.
The reason for the pay-to-play is that the theme of any meetup or conference in blockchain is to shill your product. The more you pay, the more time and the better slot you get. There really wasn’t a best time to speak since most people weren’t at the conferences to hear the speakers. Listening to the speakers was mainly the job of journalists or those who had been told specifically to see a person speak. The main draw of the general participants at conferences is that they will meet industry leaders and be able to hear their favorite stars speak on topics that they may have a vested interest in. The reality is that no one with a general interest in blockchain technology would pay $400+ to attend a conference to hear their favorites speak for 10 minutes when they can review for free on live social media updates what each speaker said. Would it make sense for the technical group members to attend these conferences when they already had well-establish communication networks to get their information?
The types of people who typically attended conferences both before and after 2017, but mostly after since that’s when attendance would be in the tens of thousands, were salespeople. More specifically, international non-Korean salespeople. CEO’s and other C-level executives could be included in the salespeople category since they all had a highly vested interest in getting their company funded. Often, they too huddled around their booths and waited for more leads to walk right up to them. Especially by 2019, conferences became a wasteland of shills shilling to other shills. Imagine a room of primped and permed, jet-lagged, hungover suits discussing the benefits of their company over the competition and why someone should use their services over another – only competitors would be giving their pitch to each other. Conferences very quickly became places that the general public would not attend because of the price tag and lack of a payoff. Deals were made in the VIP lounges. Interviews were done all over even outside of the conference itself. Money exchanged hands in the hotel suites. And the drinking happened at the after parties when shills would do their ‘networking’. There the reckless required handlers. Despite its academic outer crust, there was nothing accessible for the lay person at the conferences.
The people who attended were totally unaware of their place. The catering served their western flavors since they were just carpetbaggers passing through to take what they could. People you saw on the floor were never the ones you wanted to talk to since the truly valuable individuals were either on stage or hiding in their VIP lounges; they were always inaccessible despite the promise of their presence. One was hard-pressed to find people who claimed to be in Korea because they were genuinely interested in tapping the Korean market for the long-term. Although the conferences were taking place in Korea, they were merely international parties; “-like a destination party,” as one attendee commented in 2018. Most telling was the fact that by estimation, only about 15-20% of the attendees were Korean.
Imagine that: feigning interest in a market that you were currently passing through, but which also represented the single most important region in your field. The next chapter should really be about all the ICOs that failed to ever put together a business plan to show profit.
Korean Conferences
The Korean investors and developers attended their own conferences. The same contributing factors that led to the Kimchi Premium are what led Koreans to organize their own conferences. Everything was in Korean and the attendees were about 85% Korean which is uninviting to non-Korean speakers. The lobbies of booths were eager to hand out even entire whitepapers to cater to the older, more moneyed crowd than the international conferences. During Korea Blockchain Week 2018, one of the largest conferences that took place wasn’t even listed on the docket of events for the series because they didn’t care about international folks tracking in their foreign dirt.
The differences between the international conferences and the Korean revealed the vastly divergent aims of Korean blockchain investors from international folks. Korean conferences were a very far cry from the flashy, showy, gaudy, self-absorbed conferences that international folks were bringing through Korea. Korean conferences were understated and jam-packed with attendees who clamored for every word the speakers gave since they were apparent authorities on matters such as the differences between IPO and ICO. Older Korean folks wouldn’t know those differences, and they certainly wouldn’t know how or care to get involved with the international conferences.
A rift between the international market and Korean market became all-too apparent as the companies who had traveled thousands of miles to be in Korea lacked awareness of their surroundings and the Koreans sat just around the corner both aware of the ongoing traveling shows yet uninterested. Korea Blockchain Week took place then at the Grand Intercontinental Seoul Hotel. Blockchain Innovation Forum for Koreans took place at the Grand Intercontinental Seoul Hotel on the same days. BIF took place on a higher level of the hotel.
Korean conferences and non-Korean conferences were aiming to achieve similar yet not identical goals. They wanted to help people make their deals and gain leads. Everyone there was there to turn a profit in one way or another. It seemed that the Korean folks cared about who you were whereas the international folks cared what you could potentially bring to the table. Both sets were opportunists in their way. Can’t blame them.
If you want the ‘in a nutshell’ version of how international conferences and Korean conferences as totally different offline communities varied, take the account of perennial TheNews.Asia contributor Erik Mendelson. He commented from BIF, “I don’t know how well this forum was advertised. The website wasn’t really put together that well… Beyond Blocks is doing parties; it’s a party crowd that’s more entrepreneurial. If you want to get real business done, you would have to be at something like BIF, but there’s definitely a language barrier here.”
People need to belong to a community. No one debates the fact – too many episodes of the classic Twilight Zone illustrate the point that loneliness and isolation lead to ubiquitous dark places in people’s minds. The further we creep into those dark depths, whether by design or accident, the harder it is to be pulled out.
Those into cryptocurrency and blockchain found a natural home online where they could multitask to their heart’s content. The type of people who became famous avatars would be unrecognizable from their online selves in person. This is confirmed.
Cryptocurrency produced three distinct types of people: those who never flew their true colors far from their devices, those who bothered to share their views in only the right company, and those whose company told them what the right view was to share. Each of these distinct general profiles found a community to belong to.
