If you were one of the thousands of Bitcoiners in attendance at Bitcoin 2021 in Miami, it was hard to miss the giant art mural onsite, featuring a mix of well-known and newly-inspired cartoonish characters adorned with Bitcoin iconography.
Over the course of four days, the mural was painted by American street artist Greg Mike[1] and his Atlanta-based team, which has been creating ambitious blends of classic American cartoons, Mike’s own imaginary characters and cultural symbolism around the world for years. Still, even for such experienced artists, the mega wall (which ran some 100 feet wide and 20 feet tall, by Mike’s estimation) at Bitcoin 2021 was a unique challenge — one that required two scissor lifts, a team of extra help and more than 200 cans of spray paint.
But following Mike’s experience completing a similar (though much smaller) mural project for the Bitcoin 2019 conference, it seems that deciding on the blend of imagery and Bitcoin references for the 2021 wall was less of a daunting challenge than the execution.
“[At Bitcoin 2019], I would pop into some of the speaker rooms and just hear some of them speak and that kind of sparked my interest just to dive deeper into the culture and community and learn more about it,” Mike told Bitcoin Magazine. “So, coming into this one, I definitely had some tricks up my sleeves in terms of the visuals to kind of get people excited about it and make pieces.”
The resulting wall featured a colorful, energetic smorgasbord of icons, pulled from Mike’s own psyche as well as the deep channels of Bitcoin’s internet culture. There
