Having A Gas: This Week In Crypto Pop Culture, December 17-21

It’s Friday, December 21, everybody! It’s the start of the winter solstice, the year is winding down, and ETHNews is here to deliver the latest edition of Having A Gas, where we bring you a short roundup of some of this week’s lighter stories in crypto and blockchain news.

William Shatner Is at It Again

The cryptospace was shooketh in November when one Captain Kirk tweeted a thumbs-up emoji at Vitalik Buterin and then responded to some light criticism by referencing ERC standards.

Yesterday, Shatner got the crypto itch again, starting a minor Twitter feud with Ethereum team lead Péter Szilágyi. For reasons probably nobody will ever truly understand, Shatner took offense to Szilágyi’s reaction to Buterin giving three Ethereum 2.0 startups each 1,000 ETH, tweeting, “6 days ago you [Szilágyi] were shaming another account to fund an employee and now you are having a meltdown because Vitalik gave 1,000 eth … Kind of ironic, imho but what do I know?” Szilágyi clapped back with a simple tweet:

That seems like fair criticism, but it’s also fair of Shatner to point out Szilágyi’s perceived hypocrisy.

Overall, Shatner got the last word, calling Szilágyi “cryptoboy.” There’s nothing like infantilization to prove you’re not in over your head at all.

Value-Added Journalism

This week, the cover for Bloomberg Businessweek featured a, let’s say, corny take on the current state of bitcoin. Some individuals in a reddit thread applauded Bloomberg for giving its graphics department time off during the holidays, while others interpreted it as a signal to buy.

Some, however, took issue with the cover, questioning the aptitude of coin journalists in general and claiming Bloomberg was taking advantage of the current climate simply to write negative pieces.

I, for one, applaud this one-sided journalism. Where would a segment like Having A Gas be if I had to continually point out both sides of a story instead of focusing on one specific detail, all in the name of telling bad jokes? It’d be nowhere, I tell you! (Note to my editor: You can ignore this last paragraph.)

For Your Viewing Pleasure

You know Snapchat? That app we all still definitely use?

In case you missed it, “Kappa Delta Crypto,” a Snapchat original show (yep, that’s a thing), premiered this week, combining the world of crypto crime with college hijinks. The series follows Maddie Sullivan, who by day is your average sorority girl running for president of the Kappa Delta house. By night, she’s a professional hacker, stealing money from mega-corporations and being tracked by the FBI. In the meantime, the university she attends has all its financial aid money stolen and converted to bitcoin by a single thief. Now Maddie must team up with the FBI to find the culprit.

Seven of the show’s eight episodes have aired, and in between professors pointing fake guns at students and a member of Kappa Delta referring to a student using financial aid as “a poor,” you’ll learn rad crypto tricks, such as making your private wallet address text white so it doesn’t show up on the Word document you’ve safely saved it under (yep, that’s a thing).

The plot seems too unrealistic to me. Something about a student stealing money from a university, instead of the other way around, is hard to come to terms with.

That’s it for Having A Gas. Join us next week, and remember, [insert clever catchphrase here].

Nicholas Ruggieri studied English with an emphasis in creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno. When he’s not quoting Vines at anyone who’s willing to listen, you’ll find him listening to too many podcasts, reading too many books, and crocheting too many sweaters for his dogs, RT and Peterman.

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