Towards a Potent Ycash
Learnings from Walt Disney and Don Draper
In the first week of this year, I had the opportunity to revisit Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Although I am vaguely familiar with the cult-like devotion that many so-called “Disney Adults” have to Disney’s original theme park, I was still struck by the number of adult visitors I saw proudly adorning all manner of Disneyland-related accoutrements—head-to-toe Disneyland sweatsuits, fabric necklaces overladen with collectible enameled Disneyland pins, and (of course) the iconic Mickey-Mouse-inspired mouse-ear hats.
Was I surrounded by pawns brainwashed by decades of Disney marketing to spend all their hard-earned money on overpriced Disneyland souvenirs and food? After all, much of the modern Disneyland experience has been unabashedly optimized to extract maximum value from visitors. (I’m sure there’s some spreadsheet laying around Disney’s corporate offices demonstrating that the profit-maximizing price of a churro in Fantasyland is $5.75.)
Yet, I still find myself drawn to the place, and any initial derision I had while observing all the unbridled consumerism surrounding me was quickly replaced by admiration for the Disney corporation’s stewardship of Disneyland. Disneyland is a time capsule. Even though it’s expanded and changed over the years, much the core experience is essentially how it was when I visited it as a child over 40 years ago. The horse-drawn carriages on Main Street. The Casey Jr. Circus Train. The singing animatronic characters in It’s a Small World.
While re-experiencing Disneyland, I thought of Don Draper’s fictional pitch to Kodak in Mad Men. (I suggest watching the pitch in full. For context, Don works for a marketing firm and is trying pitch Kodak on a marketing campaign for its new slide projector.) At the outset of the pitch, Don recounts the following anecdote:
Technology is a glittering lure, but there’s the rare occasion where the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash—if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in-house at a fur company with this old pro copy writer, [a] greek named Teddy. And Teddy told me that the most important idea in advertising is New. Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent.
At its core, Disneyland is all about nostalgia. Although attractions have been removed and added over the years, there are still 14 attractions that date all the way back to Disneyland’s opening in 1955. Indeed, even at its opening Disneyland was already all about nostalgia, as the design of Main Street is said to be inspired by Walt Disney’s own memories of small town America circa 1900. Walt Disney’s extraordinary brief, 68-word opening day dedication speech explicitly emphasized nostalgia, proclaiming that Disneyland was a place where “age relives fond memories of the past.”
With every family visit, the DNA of Disneyland is passed on to a new generation of children who will in turn pass that DNA onto their own children someday. The corporate stewards of Disneyland have succeeded thus far in making Disneyland timeless. Which brings me to a recent X post from oldtale12345, a Ycash devotee based in China:
Some #ycash Chinese fans have taught their children to use the ywallet wallet, hoarding yec will become a belief, and the belief will be passed down from generation to generation. Belief is unrelated to reward, is unreasonable, and is eternal.
oldtale12345’s post beautifully demonstrate Ycash holders are developing their own sentimental bond with Ycash—their own Ycash nostalgia.
I believe that nostalgia is at the core of Bitcoin’s potency. I remember—with some fondness and a tremendous amount of regret—my earliest interactions with Bitcoin. Buying a few Bitcoin in 2011 on Mt. Gox when Bitcoin was $11. Syncing my first Bitcoin full node in 2013. Buying my first Bitcoin ASIC mining machine in 2014. (I mined a whole bitcoin in the first 24 hours, only to have the difficulty change suddenly and reduce my daily earnings drastically.) The fondness comes from the excitement I distinctly remember that came with mining, sending, and holding bitcoin. The regret stems from my failure to hold on to my bitcoin and choosing instead to focus on Zcash. My deep regret (and anger) surrounding Zcash led me to propose the Ycash fork.
Similarly, to make Ycash potent, we need potent Ycash nostalgia. How do we foster that? How do we continue to nourish the sentimental bond with Ycash that oldtale12345’s post described? As Don Draper noted, nostalgia is delicate. I don’t have all the answers, but I have a few thoughts.
First, no matter what, we must stay true to our founding ideal of mining on commodity hardware. One of the core aspects of Ycash that distinguishes it from Bitcoin and Ethereum is that anyone in the world with electricity, an internet connection, and a commodity GPU can mine a bit of Ycash for themselves without asking anyone’s permission. That is the magic of Proof of Work mining on commodity hardware. Commodity mining is to Ycash as Main Street is to Disneyland—it is a core part of our identity that we must remain committed to. Thus, if a Ycash mining ASIC arises in the future, we must resist the temptation that Zcash succumbed to when facing the same scenario in 2018 and we must have the resolve to collectively migrate to a new ASIC-resistant mining algorithm.
Second, we need to understand that nostalgia does not require stagnation. With careful stewardship, Disney has made changes to Disneyland that have enhanced the nostalgia surrounding Disneyland instead of destroying it. Similarly, with careful stewardship, we can evolve Ycash to fulfill Bitcoin’s founding ideals in a way that even Bitcoin can’t because the Bitcoin powers-that-be have chosen the path of religious devotion to backward compatibility. We must collectively find a way to navigate a middle ground between Bitcoin’s debilitating obsession with never changing the consensus rules and Zcash’s haphazard litany of consensus rule changes. When in doubt, I believe that we should err more towards Bitcoins’s approach. Changes to the consensus rules should be the exception, not the norm, but we should be confident in making them if they will help Ycash fulfill Bitcoin’s original goal of being peer-to-peer electronic cash.
Finally, we must remain committed to the long game. I love Ycash in part because I truly believe that, like Bitcoin, Ycash will still have value 1,000 years from now. Timelessness is the essential ingredient in the recipe for potent nostalgia. In the long run, a true long-term Ycash believer (like oldtale12345) is worth a thousand short-term traders merely looking for the next altcoin to flip. Personally, I don’t have any sentimental bond with the the memecoins in my wallet, but I have a deep sentimental bond with the Ycash that I’m holding. To use Don Draper’s terminology: While memecoins are merely a “shiny lure”, we have a rare opportunity—due to Ycash being scarce and fairly distributed via commodity mining—to foster a deeper, sentimental bond between Ycash and its holders. In the long run, we will win.
I envision a day will come where we will talk with great nostalgia about buying a whole Ycash coin for only 10 cents. We’ll regale younger generations with stories of how we solo mined a Ycash block with nothing but a single GPU. Those younger generations will marvel that we personally witnessed the birth of Ycash.
Speaking of the birth of Ycash, while writing this article I learned that Disneyland coincidentally shares the same birthday as Ycash! Disneyland’s official opening day was July 18, 1955 (A special preview was held the day before, but back then July 18th was considered the opening day.) Ycash was born EXACTLY 64 years later on July 18, 2019 (when the Ycash/Zcash chainfork occurred). Mere coincidence or fate? Either way, it’s a fact that seems destined to weave itself into the fabric of a potent Ycash nostalgia.