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"In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

— Andy Warhol (attributed)

Crypto cycles are getting shorter (and smaller)

There will never be another Danny DeVito.

The diminutive actor became famous by co-starring in the classic 1970s TV show, Taxi, and a few funny movies, like Twins, in the 80s and 90s.

But what sets DeVito apart is that, 40 years later, he's now the 80-year-old face of Jersey Mike's.

That's not because the New Jersey-based sandwich chain is targeting its advertising at people old enough to remember Taxi (there's not all that many of us left).

Instead, it's because DeVito belongs to the last cohort of stars that everyone recognized as being famous.

Michael Jackson, Madonna and Eddie Murphy are still household names because they became stars when we all watched the same handful of TV stations, went to the same movies, listened to the same radio stations and read the same magazines.

It was a golden age of media in which our attention was so narrowly concentrated that journalists could command $166,000 for writing one article for Vanity Fair.

Fame was concentrated, too, because those TV stations, movie studios and magazine publishers acted as gatekeepers that limited the number of people who could become stars.

But when someone did get past the gatekeepers, everyone knew who they were.

All that has changed, first with the rise of cable TV, and then the internet, social media and streaming services.

There are no gatekeepers to fame now — anyone can post a TikTok video, record a podcast or write a newsletter.

But the potential payoff in fame is smaller.

"This age we're living [is] dividing the mass market, which is basically dead now, into hundreds or thousands of micro-markets," according to Seth Goldin (himself micro-famous in marketing circles). "So you can't make a substantial impact on everyone anymore."

Or, as Byrne Hobart puts it, "once you have algorithmic feeds, someone can be famous to you and not famous to somebody else."

That wasn't the case in the 1980s when we could all still agree on who was and wasn't famous.

So, to get a spokesperson that all potential sandwich eaters might recognize as famous, Jersey Mike's had to reach back into that last cohort of universally acknowledged celebrities.

The celebrities of today are not as helpful in getting our attention because our attention is so fragmented.

There is still plenty of fame to be had, but it gets spread around more thinly — and is therefore more fleeting.

Something similar may be happening in crypto.

Lower your expectations

Dogecoin is the Danny DeVito of cryptocurrencies.

Like DeVito, the original dog coin was an unlikely star born of an earlier era when mainstream name recognition was more achievable.

Until recently, the supply of crypto tokens was limited by the technical skill required to create one.

When Dogecoin launched in 2013 there were only a few dozen tokens to choose from, making crypto a "low noise" environment in which it was much easier for a new entrant to attract attention.

It's much, much noisier now: Just as anyone can take a shot at virality by posting a video on TikTok, anyone can take a shot at crypto virality by launching a memecoin on a platform like pump.fun.

There are about 40,000 attempts a day now, almost none of them hit, and the ones that do don't hit it as big as they used to.

Dogecoin hit it so big because it achieved something like mass recognition before the wave of our attention dispersed into countless ripples.

It's unlikely to happen again.

As both memecoins and niche-celebrities proliferate, our attention becomes increasingly fragmented, and only the early, widely-seen entrants like Doge and DeVito endure.

As a result, today's celebrities are unlikely to be famous for multiple decades like DeVito has been — and today's memecoins are unlikely to maintain their value over multiple crypto cycles like Doge has done.

It's not just memecoins, though: Per CoinGecko, crypto investors have at least 760 smart contract blockchains to choose from.

That, I think, will make it much harder for the next Solana to break out.

Likewise, any newly created crypto asset will have to be orders of magnitude more attractive than Litecoin to have any chance of matching Litecoin's $6 billion valuation.

And none of these can compete with the original cryptocurrency: If Dogecoin is the Danny DeVito of crypto, bitcoin is probably the Frank Sinatra, Elvis and Beatles all in one.

That wasn't always obvious, though.

Lots of people once thought XRP would prove more valuable than bitcoin (in 2018, XRP's fully diluted value was only about 7% lower than bitcoin's) — and as recently as 2022, it was a widely held belief that ETH would inevitably take the top spot.

It's hard to imagine that now — and even harder to imagine that a token not yet created could ever garner enough attention to challenge bitcoin's supremacy.

Expecting a new crypto to become as big as even Dogecoin or Solana is like expecting a new entertainer to become as famous as Sinatra or Elvis.

For however long crypto prices remain a function of our attention, we should expect the winners to be smaller and the cycles to be shorter.

(Maybe as short as DeVito, even.)

— Byron Gilliam

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Burning Bitcoin: Michael Saylor's $1.5B Mistake

Bill Barhydt discusses Michael Saylor's notion about potentially burning the keys to his BTC before dying, crypto becoming a partisan issue with Trump's embrace, and why the future of banking is decentralized.

Listen to Supply Shock on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube.

NO SLEEP TILL BROOKLYN

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