Poolside Chat — Barry Gibb

Published in

OMGPool

7 min readJul 6, 2020

For our third poolside chat session, pwolf flies all the way to California, to the indomitable Barry Gibb! He is certainly the Satoshi of the crypto meme community. He recently sacrificed 80k reddit karma for the love of his favorite coin. He was just not getting enough downvotes. Let’s dive deeper into the mind of this notorious meme-lord.

You recently “sacrificed” your Reddit account and made a new one. Tell us how you’d like to be known in this poolside chat?

Barry Gibbb the saint of gains.

When did you learn about crypto? Tell us about this life-changing experience.

I want this to sound so much more inspirational than it actually is. The year was 2013, Bitcoin was exploding up to $1,000 and I had some extra money laying around. A buddy of mine was like “yo dude this shit is going to $2,000 wanna buy n blaze?!” and I was like “fuck it.” Not even kidding really, except I don’t ‘blaze’ but I do buy. Especially when it comes to OMG. Then after bitcoin fell to around $120 I started researching, but slowly and over time. I always kept my mind open to it and never sold anything I bought at (literally) the top. Because I researched enough at the time to know I loved the underlying message behind decentralized UN-printable currency. It’s funny too when you have the perspective of time because I’ve already been through a serious bear market. So when people tell me “Crypto is Dead” I remember them saying that when Bitcoin was $120. Which made it easier to get back into crypto in November of 2016 which is when I started really researching the Ethereum space and I got in just before the craze started.

How did you celebrate OMG Network’s mainnet launch?

With the boys on Telegram mostly (extra shoutout to the OG’s). I texted my little brother about it who I got into crypto in 2017. He’s basically 100% OMG now like I’ve been since 2017. Definitely enjoyed some Don Julio blanco (neat). Gloated on biz but that’s only fun until they start calling you names :)

You seem to have a solid grasp of tokenomics. What makes you excited about OMG’s staking compared to other staking projects in the space?

Here it is! The pwolf staking pool plug (I love OMGpool btw no jokes!) I genuinely think ‘staking’ as a whole will be the next big thing in crypto. I remember the “crypto gold rush of 2017” when everyone was wrecking PC gamers (who just wanted to play Horizon Zero Dawn at max settings) through buying up all of the GPU graphics cards that ever existed. I built a miner myself, the fomo was real. So I think staking will be huge and OMG working with Bitfinex to onboard Tether will be a game changer since we’ll always be 66% cheaper than ETH. I think other exchanges will follow suit and the arbitrage market (which is GIGANTIC) will HATE saving money oops I meant love. Biz thinks hate though.

What do you think is the biggest risk for OMG to succeed?

Not sacrificing on the daily. But seriously, IF you are Low IQ: ZK Snarks / ZK Rollups because CONCEPTUALLY they’ve already succeeded and beaten Plasma. Regular IQ: actually I think the biggest risk is branding and people assuming Plasma = Dead because they skim ethtrader/ethfinance OMG posts and don’t actually know about the project. If we don’t bring volume to the network we’re just another NEO/Vechain/XRP/EOS, but something tells me that isn’t the case. (Get your surfboards ready plz)

Have you ever tried to explain the OMG Network to friends or family? How did they respond?

Yes. They bought. Lots. I single-handedly brought more people into the OMG family than anyone will ever know or understand. They’ve been surprisingly great about all of it even during the bear market (with minimal exceptions). I think if you actually look at what OMG is trying to accomplish and you care about the mission of crypto/bitcoin at all, you understand that OMG is one of the closest projects to actually accomplishing the original Satoshi vision of Bitcoin.

I like that last one. Besides Tether integration, what do you really want to see accomplished in the next 12 months?

Fast exits, staking, I legit think the dream of OMG (anyone with a phone is also holding a permission-less bank account) is possible since June 1 when Mainnet launched. Key word: possible, Tether will help there. An actually production ready ETH scaling solution is here which will ALWAYS save you 66% on all ETH transactions and yet it gets almost no love in the ETH community has only upside from here IMO frens.

What other staking pools (e.g. for ETH) are you familiar with? What have you learnt from them and is there anything you can recommend to OMGpool?

I can’t say I’ve participated in any, I just think the sooner we know about staking/slashing, how all of it is going to work, the better. And no matter what the reddit/buttcoin crypto haters will view staking as a ponzi scheme until far more information is available. If your network needs watchers to secure your network, the more your future watchers know about it, the better.

Can you remember your first OMG meme?

I helped design the OMG 1 Million TPS meme gif that was all over the place. My friend (who I got into crypto/OMG) did the heavy lifting cause I suck at After Effects and he’s amazing at it.

Oh right! This one:

I’ll never forget that one. Which one is your brightest creation?

A recent favorite biblical meme which involves Jun or an old man standing in front of an Ark with a bunch of tether being on-boarded is something I enjoyed making. I also love simplicity of the old “fat OMG PePe” with OMG on his hat and shirt always gave me joy…

… to the reader: he means of course this piece of art:

…But I guess my favorite one is the scene from “A Few Good Men” where I told the team why “YOU’RE GOD DAMN RIGHT I SHILLED OMG.” That was fun to make especially as people were feeling low. There’s so many though, mad props to the whole community. We have to be the memes we want to see in the world.

You’ve said in the past that memes drive the crypto community. You are one of our community’s top meme-lords. If you had an army of meme creators at your disposal, how would you wield this power?

I would create way more infographics/gif’s similar to the OMG 1 million TPS gif because I think nothing ever tops that kind of visual understanding of what a project is capable of / trying to accomplish. And frankly we just have way more firepower now with a launched Mainnet and tokenomics (when fee change) that actually incentivize holding the coin. No hate to XRP hodlers but that coin (and so so so many others) got by on “big partnerships” AND gif memes of TX per second and the fact that it was a few cents to buy vs BTC (which was a few thousand). So people with birdhouses-for-brains thought “this = cheaper than BTC an can moon to same price, DROOL”. Which is a great meme, maybe I’ll make that one.

You’re obliged to lock your tokens and can never touch them anymore, but you can pick now one specific date on which they will be sold for you. After today, you can never ever change that date anymore. Which date would you pick? Rock Year is not a valid answer.

Mark it boys. And I’m buying back in.

Can you tell us something the community doesn’t know yet?

Chainlink didn’t moon because of its tech no matter what the biggest/heaviest linkies tell you. Memes are what made Link crush it even during a bear market (which is why I brought it up). I wish everyone understood how important sentiment is and how we can help it by being positive about our favorite coin. If you don’t believe me look up Google Trends and use different crypto terms against Link. Sentiment/Search/Interest/Repetition > Actual product (at this time). We’re just lucky that the OMG team delivered an actual product. I never doubted them, Github doesn’t lie. Volume is next! Can’t wait!

You may now nominate another lord of the OMG kingdom. Who will it be?

First of all huge shout out to my dude Paul for nominating me. I think one of the people who gives meme-lords the most hope/ammo is tousthilagavathy or Thila as lots of us have come to call him. I can’t tell you the amount of times he’s broken things down in a way people with hamster wheel brains like myself can better understand. DROOL

Thank you Barry

Check out our previous poolside chats with Sir-Kao-Pad and Jager_Master!

OMGpool (omgpool.org) is building the first open-source, community-driven staking pool for the OMG Network.

Be sure to check out our staking rewards calculator on our website omgpool.org.

If you’d like to be the first to hear about the staking pool when it launches, sign up for email updates here or in the form below.