Paris Hilton vs. Katy Perry: Which celebs are bitcoin buy signals?

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This week marks the anniversary of two serendipitous Bitcoin posts from celebrities on opposite ends of the cultural spectrum: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Paris Hilton.

Apex influencer Hilton came first, on April Fool’s Day in 2021. In a brief CNBC interview, Hilton was asked whether she was a bitcoin investor, considering her interest in NFTs.

“Yes! I’m very, very excited about that as well. It’s definitely the future,” she replied. It was near-peak bull market at the time, with the price of bitcoin breaking past $60,000 only two weeks earlier.

“Have you been in bitcoin for a while?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I guess it’s been a good trade,” joked the interviewer.

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One year later, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was pictured giving two thumbs-up at a rooftop bar along with Bitcoiners Alex Gladstein, Saifedean Ammous, and Dan Held.

Tyson expressed curiosity about bitcoin’s resilience, even as its price tumbled alongside global markets shaken by rate hikes, inflation, and geopolitical unrest. Gladstein tweeted:

“Neil asked great questions. One of his first ones was, ‘What if aliens come to earth with much more computing power — couldn’t they mine all the bitcoin?’” Which led to a great Saifedean explanation of the difficulty algorithm.”

What’s clear, looking back, is that these were signposts marking the beginning of the end of Bitcoin’s celebrity era.

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The roots of the celebrity era can be traced to the music industry in late 2013 — also peak bull market — when Snoop Lion (née Snoop Dogg) tweeted that he wanted to accept bitcoin for his next album, to be “delivered by drone.” The sale never materialized, but the tweet sparked attention from Coinbase and BitPay, both eager to make it happen.

About a week later, Spice Girl Mel B began accepting bitcoin for her single “For Once in My Life,” even offering a discount to fans who paid in BTC “due to the extremely low transaction costs of using bitcoins.”

Still, the intent for both Mel B and Snoop Dogg — two of the first celebrities to publicly show interest in Bitcoin — was to experiment with bitcoin as money.

Six months later, 50 Cent raked in 700 BTC (~$400,000) for his 2014 album Animal Ambition, when bitcoin was still trading under $700.

He then forgot about it, only to be reminded by TMZ almost four years later, when a reporter pointed out it would’ve been worth between $7 million and $8.5 million. 50 Cent later confirmed that the bitcoin was sold immediately upon receipt.

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Around the same period, Lily Allen revealed that she had been offered “hundreds of thousands of bitcoins” to livestream a concert about 5 years earlier — but had turned it down with a dismissive “as if.”

Some celebs clearly strayed too far from Bitcoin, resulting in awkward and costly entanglements — the most severe of which were ultimately triggered by events that occurred only one month after deGrasse Tyson’s thumbs-up picture from April 2022.

If that picture marked the beginning of the end for Bitcoin’s celebrity era, Trump’s recent alignment can be celebrated as the end of the end.

Bitcoin was suddenly no longer a financial quirk, but both bona fide money used by the US President to pay for burgers in bars, and a credible safe-haven asset managed by the Treasury and Commerce secretaries. Any individual celebrity adopting Bitcoin may never be as impressive.

So, what comes next, now that Bitcoin is in its post-celebrity era?

Think of it like music: the “post-” in genres like post-punk signals a turn back toward experimentation. No neater way to bring Bitcoin full circle in the culture than that.

— David Canellis