🪧 First Bitcoin Billboard

In June 2013 Roger Ver started sponsoring a billboard along Lawrence Expressway in Silicon Valley featuring a honey badger and the slogan “Bitcoin: The Honey Badger of Money.” The campaign became the first widely recognized Bitcoin billboard, helping cement the honey badger as Bitcoin’s unofficial mascot — resilient, unstoppable, and indifferent to external pressure. WIRED described the cultural connection this way: “It plays off an existing meme. The honey badger became the internet’s ultimate snake-eating, beehive-busting badass after a January 2011 video on the animal went viral. … With his billboard, Ver is applying that same attitude to Bitcoin — an open-source system controlled by no one that lets you store and transmit money without the big banks and credit card companies.” — Robert McMillan, WIRED The billboard location had displayed other Bitcoin-related messages before and after but it was the honey badger version that captured attention and spread the meme across Bitcoin culture.