Happy Five Year Anniversary to WeUseCoins The Bitcoin Video That Started it All
On August 4th, 2010 a bounty for a “Bitcoin animated movie” was posted on Bitcointalk. Theymos, now a controversial and polarizing figure in Bitcoinland, and owner/moderator of Reddit’s r/Bitcoin was a “major sponsor” of the Bounty and interestingly had a condition that the video rise to the Digg* front page (See MIT Technology Review:Why Did Reddit Succeed Where Digg Failed? for context)
WeUseCoins uploaded the Video to Youtube on March 22, 2011 to much fanfare on Reddit (and r/technology) and Bitcointalk.
On April 7th, 2011 Kiba, the founder of the Bitcoin Weekly (the precursor to Bitcoin Magazine) announced that WeUseCoins won the 8,511.96 BTC bounty, then worth approximately $6,385 (using a weighted average Mt. Gox price of 75 cents); Now worth approximately $3.5 Million using a “HODL price” of $415:
WeUseCoins should be celebrated for bringing Bitcoin imagery and semiotics into the popular consciousness. Indeed, the video inspired the video clip from the January 2012 CBS episode of the Good Wife Bitcoin For Dummies:
Of note the August 4th, 2010 bounty was posted about three months after “Bitcoin Pizza Day” which was is the seminal 10,000 BTC exchange for Laszlo’s Papa John’s Pizza Pies.
WeUseCoins should be celebrated for bringing Bitcoin imagery and semiotics into the popular consciousness.
About a year after the video was posted it acquired 1 Million views on Youtube. The original video released under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license now has 6.6 Million views.
An updated version of the video posted on April, 24th, 2014
has 2.1 Million views.
The cost to produce the video was reported to be 2,000 BTC with the remainder of the BTC to be used to promote Bitcoin.
THANK YOU AND CONGRATULATIONS WEUSECOINS!
*Note there were different bounties associated with the Bitcoin Video Bounty. |The Bounty size increased to at least 13622.05 BTC “13622.05 BTC ($2520) and growing” unclear (to the author) if the related Reddit and/or Digg bounties were claimed
