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If you’ve been online at any time in the past month, you’ve probably seen at least one meme about the Stanley cup. Not the hockey championship trophy, of course, but the colored water bottles with straws (which may or may not have lead in them) that have somehow both gripped and polarized the world.
In the vein of my previous Barbie vs. Ken vs. Allan crypto stereotype analysis, I thought I’d take a swing at hypothesizing which water bottle each part of the crypto industry prefers. These opinions are based on exhaustive research (such as googling “trendy water bottles 2024”) and my own personal recollections from attending crypto conferences, parties and meet-ups where people drank water.
To start off with the water bottle that started it all — the Stanley cup — it’s pretty clear that this is far from the water bottle of choice for the crypto industry.
The Stanley cup has become such a fashion choice that young women are buying them in every single color in order to coordinate with their outfits. However, as I’ve written before about crypto’s lack of fashion sense, and more importantly for this analysis, crypto as a whole has a general lack of women, there’s just no way that crypto enthusiasts are fans of the Stanley. Case in point — no one is buying this incredibly ugly $100+ Bitcoin Stanley cup.
With both of those points in mind, it’s clear then that the only people in crypto who would use Stanley cups would be crypto PR agents and marketers. Often coming from non-crypto industries, I would imagine that working in PR is the only field in crypto where one would even come into contact with the idea that having a Stanley cup is the coolest way to drink water right now.
Read more from our opinion section: If you’re in crypto, you’re an Allan
Moving on to one of the most classic water bottles, the Nalgene. This is a water bottle for the environmentally conscious, the eco-friendly, and therefore a clear choice for the type of crypto bros who work at, say, Gitcoin, and give presentations at conferences totally barefoot. If you’ve been in crypto since before bitcoin’s first price rise, and you’ve stuck around because you truly think that crypto provides an alternative, better financial system, you probably have a Nalgene (maybe with a Satoshi sticker or two on the side).
A few other water bottle hypotheses — if you’re a developer, you drink from a single-use plastic water bottle (or even, god forbid, just a cup with tap water). You are doing the hard stuff, actually building protocols, and you can’t be bothered with caring about a trendy bottle. If you’re one of those crypto people that actually attends the 6:00 am, crypto-themed morning runs or yoga sessions at conferences, you drink from a Swell. Crypto journalists prefer the leakproof Hydro Flask to keep around their laptops as they work, and if you own a lot of NFTs and love to talk about them, you’re definitely a Gatorade squeeze bottle type of guy. (If you drink Ape Water, I have no words to describe what category you’d fit in.)
But by far the most popular water bottle for those in crypto is the company-logoed, no-name metal water bottle that you get from conference booths. Why bother buying a water bottle if you’re handed one for free at an event? In the same way that the majority of people who work in crypto (in my experience) gravitate toward wearing company logo t-shirts and merch on a daily basis, no matter the occasion, so too do they prefer to drink out of company logo bottles.
I’d like to underline that none of these water bottle stereotypes are a value judgment, nor are they necessarily your reality — but if you happen to be a backend blockchain engineer who owns more than five Stanley cups, please hit me up to explain how I could have been so wrong about you.
I don’t care much about tech, I don’t care a whole lot about finance, either. I care about writing stories and watching weird things unfold. And that’s why I’ve ended up in crypto.
But because I’m missing that passion for what crypto and blockchain are all about — finance, tech, privacy, yadda yadda — I’m going to write instead about what I am actually interested in. Everything about crypto that has very little to do with crypto.
That’s what this column will be about. All the tangential stories that come out of the blockchain and crypto space, what I think about them, and how I navigate it all as a skeptical former Russian literature major.
It’s precisely my perch as an outsider that lets me do what I do: Opine on all sides of any crypto issue, no strings attached, no skin in the game.
If you want to talk crypto with me, let’s go off topic.