Context
Summer, 2011
Chapter 1
Everyone was a miner
In mid-2011 you could still mine Bitcoin at home on a graphics card. The forum was full of rig photos, power bills and arguments about overclocking, and Z1Xwitch’s first strips joke about exactly that: solo mining, ATI cards, fans loud enough to fly.
Episode 004 is titled “Nonstop Mining Disorder”. Episode 008 is “ATI warehouse”. To readers then, these were in-jokes about their own setups.
Chapter 2
Mt.Gox, the only door
Most of the trading went through one exchange, Mt.Gox. Its name stood for “Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange”, a leftover from its trading-card past, and episode 010 has fun with that.
On June 19, 2011 the exchange suffered a breach and its price briefly crashed. Episode 013, “Fist time MtGox broke” (his spelling), was posted that same day. Two years later his final archived strip was about Mt.Gox again, this time the Dwolla seizure.
Chapter 3
The world notices
In June 2011 Bitcoin reached the mainstream press, mostly through stories about Silk Road. Episode 016 is titled simply “Silk Road”. Episode 009 imagines an early TV appearance.
The comic was part of that coverage too: the artist reported that one of his strips illustrated the New York Observer’s piece on who was behind the bubble.
Chapter 4
Memes before memecoins
The humour came from rage comics, forum in-jokes and a cast of parody accounts. When a user called “buttcoin” asked for a strip, he drew episode 024, “Buttcoin.org”, on July 9.
These were not tokens and not marketing. They were a community laughing at itself, years before anyone attached a ticker to a joke.
