19 Dec 2013 / If you’ve driven on Santa Clara’s Lawrence Expressway sometime in the past six months, you may have seen the Bitcoin honey badger. He’s on a billboard between the El Camino Real (the road that once served as the major traffic artery from San Francisco to San Jose) and Highway 101 (the modern-day equivalent).
Roger Ver pays for the billboard, forking over about $1,500 a month. It’s located about half a mile from Ver’s company, Memorydealers, a computer-parts reseller that in 2011 became the first company to accept bitcoins — a digital currency that exists only on the internet — in exchange for real-world products. With the billboard, Ver is encouraging others to follow his lead.
The billboard housed a variety of other Bitcoin ads before the honey badger, but it’s the honey badger that really caught on. It has become a beacon for those who believe that digital currency is destined to take over the financial world.
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. “Honey badger don’t care” is the family-friendly version of the video’s catch phrase. 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….. Read more
