“We keep inventing memes to try and encapsulate this complex system into a four-second soundbite. And I was here for this. I probably had the bat speaker emoji on my X account for a while. But ultrasound money was such an effective meme that it took over the discourse. It became about what can we do to burn more. There were all these burn trackers. It got a little bit out of hand.”
Unchained · Crypto & Web3 · November 2026
Context
Kain Warwick argues EIP-1559 was originally meant to fix Ethereum's fee-market UX, and the burn was a late design choice. The "ultrasound money" meme then distorted what people paid attention to.
Transcript
…thing ever, but it's hard to explain to people why it's good, like genuinely. Like, it's like, it's like, how long do you have four hours? Oh, like you don't have four hours for me to explain to you why this thing is good, right? You want like a four-second soundbite, right? And a lot of times, you
don't need decentralization until you do, until you're getting censored, until you're there's
so many, there's so many things. It's it's a complex, amazing system, and it's beautiful. And you can't really distill it down to like a four-second soundbite, unfortunately. But what if you could? How good would that be? And so, we keep trying to invent these like self-summoning money, yeah, like whatever, man. We keep inventing memes to try and like encapsulate this complex system into like a four-second soundbite. And I think that's fine, like you know, whatever. Like, we need to do something with our time. Um, and and but this one, and I was here for this, right? Like, I was like, ultrasound money, it's great. Um, I probably had the bat speaker emoji on my uh X account for a while, like, whatever, right? Um, but the problem was it, um, I think was such an effective meme that it sort of took over the like discourse and and you know, it became about like what can we do to burn more? There were all these burn trackers, like it, it just got a little bit out of hand, right? Um, and it wasn't the intention, the intention of 1559, to your point, Austin Griffith, was not burn ETH. That was like a weird mechanism design choice.
Yeah, what else are we going to do with the ETH? We can't like send it to a thing and govern over it because then we get a bunch of people extract it, yeah. We
did try to get the real elegant way we're going to send Greg like a million dollars a year to like do whatever the fuck he wanted. That was the plan.
Yeah, that would be great. You'd be okay with that. I have an EIP for you know the Zcash style funding from that era, and that was a terrible experience. Um,
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