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Report · MB Parodies · 2013–2019

The parody is the point:
Mad Bitcoins as comedy as commentary

Thomas Hunt's Mad Bitcoins ran for 594 numbered episodes of nightly Bitcoin news, but tucked inside that run — and curated on YouTube as Bitcoin Movie Speeches and Parodies — sits a smaller, weirder corpus of 31 parody pieces: Patton, Network, Pulp Fiction, The Untouchables, Churchill, FDR, Animal House, Hulk Hogan, Idiocracy, Reservoir Dogs. The centerpiece is the 2017 MadTrilogy — three film parodies uploaded the same day at the peak of the Bitcoin scaling war. This is what they are, what they were aimed at, and why they read in 2026 like the field notes of a working journalist.

Sources: yt-dlp · @MadBitcoins channel · 31 parodies · MadTrilogy playlist (3) · MB 594 / WCN 1,568 / TBG 482 / TIB 234

§ 01 · Executive summary

What's in the file

The official Bitcoin Movie Speeches and Parodies playlist on the @MadBitcoins channel holds exactly 31 videos, spanning June 2013 → December 2019. Three of those are also grouped on the channel as a separate playlist titled The MadTrilogy — Bitcoin Scaling Parodies: the three videos all uploaded on April 18, 2017, in the run-up to the Bitcoin Cash hard fork that August.

The shape of the corpus

  • 31 parodies in the canonical playlist — all in the local mirror, durations from 46s to 10m, view counts ranging from 353 to 19,465.
  • The MadTrilogy — 3 entries, all uploaded 2017-04-18 — has its own playlist and appears (as #16, #20, #25) inside the main parodies list.
  • No separate "fork wars" or "altcoin wars" playlist exists. The Roger Ver / scaling-war material is concentrated in early- to mid-2017 inside the main parodies playlist, not segregated.
  • Source-material genre split: 21 films, 5 political speeches (Patton, Churchill, FDR, JFK, Pullman/Independence Day), 3 viral YouTube / commercial parodies, 1 wrestling promo, 1 reality-TV format. Films dominate.
  • Most-parodied film: Sidney Lumet's Network (1976) — Thomas adapted it twice, three years apart (2013's I'm Mad as Hell about Bitcoins! and 2017's MadTrilogy #1).
  • Peak production year: 2017 — 8 parodies, all clustered around the Bitcoin Cash fork debate (March–August).

Three most surprising finds

  1. The MadTrilogy is not a "Roger Ver trilogy." Roger Ver is never named in any of the three video titles or in the playlist title. The set is officially "Bitcoin Scaling Parodies." Inside the bitcoin community of 2017 the implication was unambiguous, but on tape the trilogy is broader than one person — it's an argument about centralizing actors, of whom Ver was only the loudest.
  2. The film sources of the MadTrilogy don't repeat. Three videos uploaded the same day, but they parody three different films: Network (1976), Miller's Crossing (1990), and Scrooged (1988). The "trilogy" is structural — three messages, three film registers — not three takes on the same source.
  3. "Big Trouble in Little Youtube" has nothing to do with Big Trouble in Little China. Despite the title, the script lifts the "Ya Got Trouble" patter from Meredith Willson's The Music Man (1962), almost line for line. The title is a feint.
§ 02 · The catalog

All 31 parodies, oldest first

Pulled by yt-dlp from youtube.com/@MadBitcoins/playlists on 2026-05-18. Dates, durations and view counts confirmed against the local mirror of the channel's info.json files. The Source column gives the work Thomas explicitly cites in each video's description.

# Date Title Source material Form Topic / target Views
012013-06-02Fireside Chat on Bitcoin EvangelismFDR — First Fireside Chat (1933)speechRecruiting Bitcoin evangelists in the post-Cyprus moment420
022013-06-22Speech to the Third Bitcoin ArmyPatton (1970) — Scott opening monologuefilmRallying Bitcoiners as a "Third Army" against fiat1,005
032013-06-29Cryptocurrencies Unite! — Inaugural AddressJFK — Inaugural Address (1961)speechCalling truce in the Bitcoin-vs-Litecoin coin war726
042013-07-03Big Trouble in Little YoutubeMeredith Willson, "Ya Got Trouble" — The Music Man (1962)songYouTube's lack of a Bitcoin tip system353
052013-07-06I'm Mad as Hell about Bitcoins!Network (1976) — Howard BealefilmPrice crash, miners going under, the early bear market1,497
062013-07-13Bitcoin Dogs — Tipping SceneReservoir Dogs (1992) — diner tipping scenefilmWhether Bitcoiners tip merchants and waiters500
072013-07-20The First Rule about Bitcoin…Fight Club (1999) — rules of Fight ClubfilmReversing Fight Club's rule — do talk about Bitcoin530
082013-07-27Bitcoin is a Game of BitsAny Given Sunday (1999) — Pacino "inches" speech (title nods to Game of Thrones)filmBitcoin recovery as an inch-by-inch grind403
092013-11-24Rebel Bitcoiners plan to break Bitcoin $1000Star Wars (1977) — Death Star briefingfilmBitcoin climbing toward $1,000 for the first time2,175
102013-12-05How to get Bitcoin — The Chicago WayThe Untouchables (1987) — Mamet, "He pulls a knife, you pull a gun"filmHow to argue Bitcoin at parties: tulips, Ponzi, dot-com bubble835
112013-12-07Bitcoin Independence DayIndependence Day (1996) — Bill Pullman, with FDR "infamy" linefilmDecember 2013 crash; Bitcoiners "uniting in common interests"1,219
122014-03-18Leave MadPotcoins Alone!Chris Crocker, "Leave Britney Alone!" (2007)viralResponse to backlash on Thomas's altcoin coverage1,162
132014-04-10Bitcoin is not over! (Indian Food Night)Animal House (1978) — Bluto's "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?"filmPost-Mt. Gox morale; Sacramento meetup recruitment1,482
142014-09-18The Bit LebowskiThe Big Lebowski (1998)filmThe chill Bitcoiner archetype as an answer to the maxi996
152014-09-19Bitcoin is Good — Talk Like a Pirate DayWall Street (1987) — Gordon Gekko, "Greed is good"filmBitcoin Rebel merch and pirate-day promo952
162014-09-23MadBitcoins on Shark TankShark Tank — ABC reality format (Season 5, ep. 20)TV formatPitching Bitcoin to mainstream TV "Sharks"19,465
172014-10-27Pulp Fiction BitcoinPulp Fiction (1994) — Captain Koons gold-watch monologuefilmA father-to-son lineage for the protocol669
182015-01-29Mad Bitcoins in a Few Good TipsA Few Good Men (1992) — "You can't handle the truth!"filmBitcoin's reliance on VC-funded infrastructure749
192016-11-29"We shall fight for Bitcoin"Churchill, "We shall fight on the beaches" (June 4, 1940)speechPre-fork-war defiance, hours, beaches, hills1,080
202017-01-13A Sudden Loss of Bitcoin Leverage(news short, MB-style)formatChina's exchanges quietly tightening trading-policy399
212017-03-02BITCOIN BITCOIN BITCOIN"RAGE RAGE RAGE" by Redkiller66 (YouTube)viralPure on-camera Bitcoin-name yelling829
222017-03-18The Bitcoin fork is tearing me apart — Rebel without a chainRebel Without a Cause (1955) — "you're tearing me apart" scenefilmThe Unlimited bug; Roger Ver / Core split feels personal837
232017-04-18You have meddled with the primal forces of Bitcoin MadTrilogy #1Network (1976) — Arthur Jensen's "primal forces" monologuefilmBig-block actors as those "meddling with primal forces"617
242017-04-18If you can't trust a fixed bitcoin, what can you trust? MadTrilogy #2Miller's Crossing (1990) — Coen brothers, Leo / Tom dialoguefilm"Ethics" of breaking the consensus rules to win493
252017-04-18The Bitcoin Miracle is for all of us MadTrilogy #3Scrooged (1988) — Bill Murray's "the miracle" closing speechfilmA redemptive vision of a unified, low-fee Bitcoin731
262017-06-21OB1 Mobile Sneak Preview ParodyOB1 / OpenBazaar 2.0 product trailercommercialSending up a crypto-startup demo video378
272017-06-21Never stop fighting for BitcoinTerminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)filmUASF preparation, Game-Theory mode639
282017-07-10MadBitcoinsamania in San Francisco at the Cow PalaceHulk Hogan — 1988 WWF Cow Palace promowrestlingSan Francisco Bitcoin scene as wrestling kayfabe576
292017-08-08Introducing the Secretary of Bitcoin Scaling… Segwit!Idiocracy (2006) — cabinet introduction scenefilmSegWit locking in; the comedy of governance by hype1,321
302018-05-23B is for BitcoinSesame Street alphabet blockTV formatLas Vegas meetup recruitment1,832
312019-12-27What if YouTube deleted all of the Bitcoin videos?Counterfactual essay format (cf. Lebowski self-ref'd in description)formatLate-2019 YouTube purge fears among crypto channels609

View counts as of 2026-05-18 pull. MadBitcoins on Shark Tank is the outlier (19,465 views): it is the literal Shark Tank segment Thomas filmed himself appearing in, not a re-enactment.

§ 03 · The Centerpiece

The MadTrilogy — three parodies, one day, one argument

On April 18, 2017, four months before the Bitcoin Cash hard fork would split the chain on August 1, Thomas Hunt uploaded three parodies back-to-back-to-back. He grouped them on his channel as The MadTrilogy — Bitcoin Scaling Parodies. They are the closest thing the corpus has to a sustained essay: three classic films, three rhetorical modes, one argument about who gets to change Bitcoin.

The historical moment

  • March 2017 — Greg Maxwell publishes the ASICBoost disclosure implicating Bitmain hardware in covert-mining advantages. Roger Ver and big-block backers respond by hardening their case against Bitcoin Core.
  • April 2017 — The "user-activated soft fork" (UASF / BIP 148) proposal gains momentum. Bitcoin Unlimited has just suffered a node-killing bug. The community is in open civil war about block size.
  • April 18, 2017 — Thomas uploads all three MadTrilogy entries in a single day.
  • August 1, 2017 — Bitcoin Cash forks from the main chain. The argument the MadTrilogy made — that consensus rules are not yours to "fix" alone — is on the wrong side of an actual split.
  • November 15, 2018 — BCH itself forks into BCH (ABC) and BSV (Wright/CoinGeek), as predicted by anyone who'd watched Thomas's videos closely.

MadTrilogy · #1 · 268 s · 617 views

You have meddled with the primal forces of Bitcoin

Source: Network (1976), Sidney Lumet — Arthur Jensen's "primal forces of nature" monologue to Howard Beale.

"Adapted from the movie Network (1976)" — video description, verbatim.

The film moment Thomas chose is the one where a CEO informs a TV anchor that the rules he thinks he understands are not the rules that actually run the system. In April 2017 the analogue lands on big-blockers who claim to be "fixing" Bitcoin: the primal forces are protocol consensus and Nakamoto incentives, and they are not yours to alter unilaterally.

Uploaded 2017-04-18 · WBzAtv2RErU

MadTrilogy · #2 · 319 s · 493 views

If you can't trust a fixed bitcoin, what can you trust?

Source: Miller's Crossing (1990), Coen Brothers — the "ethics" exchange between Leo and Tom Reagan.

"Adapted from the movie Miller's Crossing (1990)" — video description, verbatim.

The Coens' line is about the inversion of trust in a world where men say one thing and do another. "Fixed" is doing two jobs at once: a fight that's rigged, and a protocol that's been changed. The middle pillar of the trilogy is the cynical pillar — the one that says once you've decided you can rewrite the rules, you've already lost the thing the rules were protecting.

Uploaded 2017-04-18 · 4_gVHjUKqaU

MadTrilogy · #3 · 301 s · 731 views

The Bitcoin Miracle is for all of us

Source: Scrooged (1988), Richard Donner — Bill Murray's live-broadcast closing speech.

"Adapted from the movie Scrooged (1988)" — video description, verbatim.

After two parodies of mistrust and consequence, the closer is sentimental on purpose. Murray's Scrooged speech is a Christmas-Eve plea for collective generosity; Thomas's version is a plea for a Bitcoin that remains usable by everyone — small-blocker, big-blocker, miner, holder, merchant — once the fork dust settles. It is the only entry in the corpus that resolves on hope rather than scorn.

Uploaded 2017-04-18 · RJI3OXI65z8

Why three? Why those three films?

Read in order, the trilogy is a three-act argument: (I) you don't get to rewrite the rules because they're bigger than you; (II) if you do rewrite them, trust collapses and so does everything trust paid for; (III) the answer is not victory for either tribe, it's a Bitcoin that keeps working for all of them. The film choices are not random. Network is the canonical English-language film about institutional capture of mass media — recast as institutional capture of an open-source protocol. Miller's Crossing is the canonical Coen-brothers film about the cost of "fixing" a fight. Scrooged is a film about a cynical broadcaster who finally says the thing he means on live TV. Thomas Hunt was, in 2017, a cynical-leaning Bitcoin broadcaster. He cast himself in the Murray role.

The corpus does not use the word "Roger Ver" inside any of the three trilogy videos' titles or playlist title, and only one parody outside the trilogy — The Bitcoin fork is tearing me apart (2017-03-18) — explicitly frames the Core / Unlimited split in personal-relationship terms. Treating the MadTrilogy as "the Roger Ver trilogy" is fair shorthand, but on tape it is more carefully aimed: at anyone who would change Bitcoin to win a fight.

§ 04 · Themes

What the parodies are actually about

Across 31 entries six themes recur. They are not balanced — fork wars and price-cycle gallows humor dominate; regulators and Mt. Gox barely register inside the parodies themselves, despite saturating the 594-episode main feed. The parodies are where Thomas processes the events he can't simply cover.

1. Tribal warfare (BCH / Core / BSV)

The single biggest theme. Tearing Me Apart (Mar 2017), the entire MadTrilogy (Apr 2017), Never stop fighting for Bitcoin (Jun 2017), and Segwit Secretary (Aug 2017) form a 5-month continuous run of fork-war commentary. Thomas's stance is small-block / soft-fork — but always argued through film, never through screed.

2. Price-cycle gallows humor

I'm Mad as Hell (Jul 2013, mid-crash), Rebel Bitcoiners plan to break $1,000 (Nov 2013, mania), Bitcoin Independence Day (Dec 2013, crash), A Sudden Loss of Bitcoin Leverage (Jan 2017, China crackdown). The parodies are date-stamped to the local sentiment, almost without exception.

3. Recruiting and meetups

Fireside Chat on Bitcoin Evangelism (Jun 2013), Inaugural Address (Jul 2013), Bitcoin Indian Food Night (Apr 2014), B is for Bitcoin (May 2018). The parodies double as meetup ads. Hunt is always selling Bitcoin to the person who has not heard about it yet.

4. Exchange and infrastructure anxiety

Implicit in everything but explicit in A Few Good Tips ("you weep for Satoshi and you curse the VCs"), A Sudden Loss of Leverage (China), and Pulp Fiction Bitcoin (custody as generational trust). Mt. Gox itself never gets its own parody — but its shadow is over the early ones.

5. Platform precarity

Big Trouble in Little Youtube (2013), What if YouTube deleted all of the Bitcoin videos? (2019). Six years apart, same anxiety: the channel itself is one platform decision away from disappearing. The 2019 entry is also the last parody in the corpus, and reads in hindsight as a clean wrap-up of the run.

6. The Bitcoiner as outsider hero

Patton, Churchill, Pullman/Independence Day, Terminator 2, Hulk Hogan Cow Palace. The casting is consistent: Bitcoiners are the few against the many, the rebels against the empire, the wrestlers running into a hostile crowd. Thomas is unfailingly on their side.

What's not here

No Mt. Gox / Karpeles parody. No Saylor parody. No BitLicense / Lawsky parody, despite Hunt having broadcast both 2014 NY hearings live (playlist #18 and #34 on the channel). No Craig Wright / Faketoshi parody, despite years of contempt for the character on the main feed. No Andreas Antonopoulos parody (he's a friend of the show). The parodies are aimed at structural targets — the fork, the market, the platform — and almost never at individuals by name. That is itself a craft choice.

§ 05 · Sources

Every cinematic and musical source, in one table

Sources are taken verbatim from the description Thomas wrote for each video — where he didn't link a source explicitly, the source is inferred from the script he typed into the description (which, in most cases, is the parody script).

Parody (short)Source workSource yearTopic momentMB date
Fireside Chat on Bitcoin EvangelismFDR — First Fireside Chat1933Post-Cyprus evangelism2013-06-02
Speech to the Third Bitcoin ArmyPatton (Scott / Coppola)1970Bitcoin as Patton's Third Army2013-06-22
Cryptocurrencies Unite!JFK — Inaugural Address1961Coin-tribe truce, July 42013-06-29
Big Trouble in Little Youtube"Ya Got Trouble" / The Music Man1962YouTube tipping system2013-07-03
I'm Mad as Hell about Bitcoins!Network — Howard Beale1976Mid-2013 price slump2013-07-06
Bitcoin DogsReservoir Dogs — diner scene1992Bitcoin tipping etiquette2013-07-13
The First Rule about BitcoinFight Club1999Evangelism, inverted2013-07-20
Bitcoin is a Game of BitsAny Given Sunday — Pacino "inches"1999Long bear-grind recovery2013-07-27
Rebel Bitcoiners plan to break $1000Star Wars — Death Star briefing1977First-time approach to $1,0002013-11-24
How to get Bitcoin — The Chicago WayThe Untouchables — Mamet/De Palma1987Arguing Bitcoin to skeptics2013-12-05
Bitcoin Independence DayIndependence Day — Pullman + FDR "infamy"1996Dec 2013 China-ban crash2013-12-07
Leave MadPotcoins Alone!Chris Crocker — "Leave Britney Alone"2007Altcoin-coverage backlash2014-03-18
Bitcoin is not over!Animal House — Bluto / "Pearl Harbor"1978Post-Mt.Gox morale2014-04-10
The Bit LebowskiThe Big Lebowski1998Chill-Bitcoiner archetype2014-09-18
Bitcoin is Good — Talk Like a Pirate DayWall Street — "Greed is good"1987Pirate-day promo / Bitcoin Rebel2014-09-19
MadBitcoins on Shark TankShark Tank — ABCS5E20Bitcoin on prime time2014-09-23
Pulp Fiction BitcoinPulp Fiction — Captain Koons gold watch1994Custody / inheritance2014-10-27
A Few Good TipsA Few Good Men — "You can't handle the truth!"1992Reliance on VC infra2015-01-29
"We shall fight for Bitcoin"Churchill — beaches speech1940Defiance ahead of forks2016-11-29
A Sudden Loss of Bitcoin Leverage(MB news short)—China exchange policy2017-01-13
BITCOIN BITCOIN BITCOIN"RAGE RAGE RAGE" — Redkiller66 (YouTube)2014Pure-yell satire2017-03-02
Tearing Me Apart — Rebel without a chainRebel Without a Cause1955Unlimited bug; emotional fork2017-03-18
MadTrilogy #1 — Primal forcesNetwork — Arthur Jensen1976Fork war: rules > you2017-04-18
MadTrilogy #2 — A fixed bitcoinMiller's Crossing1990Fork war: trust collapse2017-04-18
MadTrilogy #3 — The Bitcoin MiracleScrooged — Bill Murray closer1988Fork war: reconciliation2017-04-18
OB1 Mobile Sneak PreviewOB1 / OpenBazaar product trailer2017Send-up of startup demo2017-06-21
Never stop fighting for BitcoinTerminator 2: Judgment Day1991UASF prep2017-06-21
MadBitcoinsamaniaHulk Hogan — WWF Cow Palace promo1988SF Bitcoin scene as kayfabe2017-07-10
Secretary of Bitcoin Scaling — SegwitIdiocracy — cabinet scene2006SegWit governance theatre2017-08-08
B is for BitcoinSesame Street alphabet block—Las Vegas meetup2018-05-23
What if YouTube deleted all of the Bitcoin videos?Counterfactual essay (self-ref. to Lebowski)—Late-2019 YouTube purges2019-12-27
§ 06 · Inside jokes

Glossary — characters, callbacks, running gags

The parodies were made for people who watched the nightly show. A 2026 reader doesn't have that. These are the 16 references most readers in 2026 will need explained. Where evidence in the descriptions or surrounding episodes can't carry the explanation, the entry says so plainly.

The Third Bitcoin Army

From Patton (2013-06-22). "Third Army" was Patton's actual command; Thomas's version casts the early Bitcoin community as a small, scrappy, late-arriving force. The framing reappears in the 2016 Churchill parody and the 2017 Terminator parody.

"Tulips, Ponzi, dot-com bubble"

From The Chicago Way (2013-12-05). The three rhetorical hits any skeptic has ever thrown at Bitcoin. The video formalises the comeback list: when they say tulips, you say money transfer; when they say Ponzi, you say protocol; when they say bubble, you say internet.

Indian Food Night

From Bitcoin is not over! (2014-04-10), and reprised as #BitcoinIndianFood in the Specials playlist. A running gag turning a real Sacramento meetup at Tandoori Nights into a recurring rallying point. The Animal House framing — Bluto turning a defeat into a mobilisation — is the joke.

MadPotcoins

From Leave MadPotcoins Alone! (2014-03-18). "MadPotcoins" was Thomas's side-segment of cannabis-industry crypto coverage. The Chris-Crocker meme is the joke; the underlying tension — Bitcoin maxis hating altcoin coverage — is the point. This is also the only parody where Thomas appears to argue with his own audience.

The Bit Lebowski

The Dude as the archetypal patient hodler. The parody describes itself, in the description, as set against Pamgaea (Kevin MacLeod) with footage from Méliès's A Trip to the Moon — Thomas's go-to public-domain visuals. This is also the video he self-cites at the top of the description for What if YouTube deleted all of the Bitcoin videos? five years later — the Lebowski parody is the one he most fears losing.

The Bitcoin Rebel

From Bitcoin is Good (2014-09-19). A merch line from Bitcoin Not Bombs that Thomas had a stake in promoting. "Rebel" recurs across the catalog: Rebel Bitcoiners (2013), Rebel without a chain (2017). The self-image is always Han Solo, never the Emperor.

"Greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom"

From A Few Good Tips (2015-01-29). The Nicholson speech, in Thomas's hands, becomes a confession: Bitcoin's infrastructure runs on VC money, and the people who built it weep for Satoshi at night and curse the VCs in the morning. This is the most sincere line in the entire corpus.

"Adapted from the movie X"

A standing format convention. Every MadTrilogy description, and most others from 2017 forward, lead with this exact phrasing and a link to the source clip. Thomas treats the parodies the way an editor treats a remix: source attribution at the top, not at the bottom.

The "primal forces"

MadTrilogy #1's central image — Arthur Jensen telling Howard Beale that he is meddling with forces older than him. In 2017 Bitcoin terms, the primal forces are the consensus rules and the SHA-256 mining incentives; the people meddling with them are anyone with a different white paper. The Beale framing is also a callback to Thomas's own 2013 Beale parody — so the trilogy is layered on top of his own earlier work.

"A fixed bitcoin"

MadTrilogy #2's double-meaning pun: "fixed" as in rigged, and "fixed" as in patched. In April 2017 this is unambiguous: it's about anyone who has decided Bitcoin needs a backroom rule change to stay competitive — and the implicit accusation is that you can't have one without the other.

The Bitcoin Miracle

MadTrilogy #3's frame: Bill Murray's Scrooged finale, in which a cynical broadcaster breaks character to plead for collective generosity. Thomas's broadcast persona had been growing more cynical for years; the trilogy closer is, on purpose, the only entry where he drops the cynicism.

"Cow Palace"

From MadBitcoinsamania (2017-07-10). The Cow Palace is a real San Francisco arena where Hulk Hogan cut an actual promo in 1988; Thomas adapts it because the SF Bitcoin meetup scene felt, that month, like wrestling kayfabe — heel turns, baby-face turns, screaming crowds. The Hogan promo is linked in the description.

"Secretary of Bitcoin Scaling"

From the Idiocracy parody (2017-08-08). The joke is that SegWit, after years of fighting, finally locks in and gets a cabinet introduction — and the cabinet is the Idiocracy cabinet, where ceremonial titles are dispensed by spectacle, not by competence.

ProTip / Patreon / "Donate Bitcoin: 1LAYuQq…"

The standing tip-jar in every parody description from 2014 onward. The cycle (BitTip → ChangeTip → ProTip → Patreon → Tallycoin) is itself a running record of which tipping infrastructure was alive in any given year. Several parodies — Big Trouble in Little Youtube, Bitcoin Dogs — are explicitly about that infrastructure not existing yet.

"B is for Bitcoin"

Posted from BitcoinLasVegas.org in May 2018, this is the only Sesame-Street-format parody and the only one where the audience target is explicitly children-coded. It marks the moment Thomas's evangelism turns to first principles after the 2017 bull run and 2018 unwind: start over, alphabet up.

"What if YouTube deleted all of the Bitcoin videos?"

The final parody in the corpus (2019-12-27). The video opens by pointing back to the 2014 Lebowski parody as the one Thomas would most miss. As a closer to the run, it is funny and bleak in equal measure — six years after Big Trouble in Little Youtube, the platform-precarity joke is no longer a joke.

"Adapted from…" sourcing is what makes this a body of work, not a meme run

If you skim every description you can rebuild every parody back to its source clip with a YouTube link Thomas placed there himself. That is unusual for a comedy channel and is the single best evidence that Thomas thought of these as essays, not jokes — essays that happened to be told in someone else's dialogue.

§ 07 · Closing essay

Comedy as commentary, timeliness as journalism

The most useful way to read the parodies is not as comedy and not as fan-service, but as a journalist's sideband. Thomas Hunt spent thirteen years putting out a nightly Bitcoin news show — 594 numbered MB episodes, 1,568 WCN broadcasts, 482 Bitcoin Group panels, 234 Today in Bitcoin shorts. The parodies are what he made when the nightly format couldn't carry what he wanted to say.

Pulled together, they are timely in a way modern Bitcoin commentary almost never is. I'm Mad as Hell about Bitcoins! goes up in July 2013 mid-crash, with Network's Howard Beale framing miners and speculators in the same breath. Rebel Bitcoiners plan to break Bitcoin $1000 goes up in November 2013, the week the price first runs at four figures, with the Star Wars Death Star briefing standing in for the four-digit barrier itself. Bitcoin Independence Day goes up December 7, 2013, three days after China's first major Bitcoin ban — and lifts FDR's actual December 7 "infamy" line into Bill Pullman's actual Independence Day speech, stacking two American crisis-speeches into a single five-minute reaction shot.

The MadTrilogy is the most journalistic moment in the corpus. April 18, 2017 is not a fork date; it is not a market date; it is not a regulatory date. It is the date Thomas decided that the running argument inside the Bitcoin community had become coherent enough to lay out in three acts. Four months later the chain split. Eighteen months later, the BCH side itself split again. Six years later, when the BSV chain's principal backer was convicted in UK court of perjury, the MadTrilogy's middle pillar — if you can't trust a fixed bitcoin, what can you trust? — read like a thesis statement that had aged better than most of the published analysis.

That is the second thing the parodies are good at: aging. A nightly news show ages badly by design; the price target moves, the regulator changes, the company goes bankrupt. A parody of Patton, or Network, or the Untouchables, ages with the source film. Pulp Fiction is still Pulp Fiction in 2026; the gold-watch monologue, reframed as the inherited bitcoin he hid uncomfortably for two years, is still funny because Tarantino is still funny. Most of the news Thomas covered nightly is now archive-only, of interest mostly to historians. Most of the parodies still play.

And then there is the craft. Thomas wrote his own scripts and typed them into the description boxes; you can lift the descriptions verbatim and they read as drafts. He cited every source film and linked the original clip, the way a remixer does. He cast himself in every part, with no co-stars, often against a Méliès Trip to the Moon background or a Mondex Design loop, with Kevin MacLeod's Pamgaea underneath. The technical means were modest. The intent was not.

What the parodies finally mean, treated as a body of work: that nightly journalism about a young open-source protocol could not, in 2013–2019, be done seriously without also being done comically — because the events being covered were comical, and pretending otherwise would have been a kind of dishonesty. The MadTrilogy is the high point because the fork war was the moment the comedy and the journalism collapsed into each other entirely. Hunt picked three films, lined them up in a row, and used them to say in 16 minutes what nobody else said in any timeframe shorter than years: the rules are bigger than you; fixing them breaks the thing they were guarding; the only victory is one that includes everyone in the room.

Where we cannot confirm a joke from available evidence — the description, an adjacent episode, a linked clip — we have said so above. The corpus rewards careful reading. It does not need any added jokes.

§ 08 · Footnotes

Sources cited

Every parody cited above, in upload order, with YouTube URL. All entries verified against the local mad-bitcoins-mirror/metadata/ archive on 2026-05-18; durations and view counts are from the same pull.

  1. 2mPYzxTGp-0 — Fireside Chat on Bitcoin Evangelism (2013-06-02)
  2. X2XnF9cZypA — Speech to the Third Bitcoin Army / Patton (2013-06-22)
  3. c9rpeqP4kkw — Cryptocurrencies Unite! / JFK Inaugural (2013-06-29)
  4. OaAoLUlGzaU — Big Trouble in Little Youtube / "Ya Got Trouble" (2013-07-03)
  5. anYEeIJbGFw — I'm Mad as Hell about Bitcoins! / Network (2013-07-06)
  6. QoQcx4CuJAA — Bitcoin Dogs / Reservoir Dogs (2013-07-13)
  7. LAG0BCdTZKA — The First Rule about Bitcoin / Fight Club (2013-07-20)
  8. ajKelxJAJhw — Bitcoin is a Game of Bits / Any Given Sunday (2013-07-27)
  9. bz6GzS6JN7w — Rebel Bitcoiners / Star Wars (2013-11-24)
  10. paagdOB9Ee0 — The Chicago Way / The Untouchables (2013-12-05)
  11. tmjF_TvjCes — Bitcoin Independence Day / Independence Day (2013-12-07)
  12. CVyzPqpGkQg — Leave MadPotcoins Alone! / "Leave Britney Alone" (2014-03-18)
  13. QFsyDDdU5Vo — Bitcoin is not over! / Animal House (2014-04-10)
  14. 5zl7Gf8vQzE — The Bit Lebowski / The Big Lebowski (2014-09-18)
  15. -b855sX72G4 — Bitcoin is Good / Wall Street (2014-09-19)
  16. E4fEeUZymDE — MadBitcoins on Shark Tank (2014-09-23)
  17. 12FrdlvwDUU — Pulp Fiction Bitcoin (2014-10-27)
  18. sv6oXEWHcOA — A Few Good Tips / A Few Good Men (2015-01-29)
  19. 1EU0FVHppLA — "We shall fight for Bitcoin" / Churchill (2016-11-29)
  20. pzcd_jet2Do — A Sudden Loss of Bitcoin Leverage (2017-01-13)
  21. nypjSnHWCLI — BITCOIN BITCOIN BITCOIN / "RAGE RAGE RAGE" (2017-03-02)
  22. P517_7Nz5Tk — Tearing Me Apart / Rebel Without a Cause (2017-03-18)
  23. WBzAtv2RErU — MadTrilogy #1 / Network (2017-04-18)
  24. 4_gVHjUKqaU — MadTrilogy #2 / Miller's Crossing (2017-04-18)
  25. RJI3OXI65z8 — MadTrilogy #3 / Scrooged (2017-04-18)
  26. sYhGrnGcvIo — OB1 Mobile Sneak Preview Parody (2017-06-21)
  27. Sw1ZNba06zM — Never stop fighting for Bitcoin / Terminator 2 (2017-06-21)
  28. ovnrf3lFjws — MadBitcoinsamania / Hulk Hogan Cow Palace (2017-07-10)
  29. vqRmQab0OJs — Secretary of Bitcoin Scaling / Idiocracy (2017-08-08)
  30. Ewfrrk9gFfQ — B is for Bitcoin / Sesame Street (2018-05-23)
  31. Nc889Z_gXNU — What if YouTube deleted all of the Bitcoin videos? (2019-12-27)
  32. Channel index: youtube.com/@MadBitcoins/playlists
  33. MadTrilogy playlist: PLbYZp8RGbKd0tOpnnplXcCHQxBqGFBqiJ
  34. Bitcoin Movie Speeches and Parodies playlist: PLbYZp8RGbKd271yrrVqDYf_hLbM0g6wmn
1n2.org / reports / mb-parodies · Compiled 2026-05-18
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→ See also: Thomas Hunt's full Bitcoin portfolio (13 years, every project)