Bitcoin Cash now has an eponymous hip-hop track (styled “Bitcoin Ca$H”), which is a trap-heavy banger that advertises the cryptocurrency. Oddball Canadian rapper Lil Windex dropped the music video on Wednesday to fans who weren’t sure if it was earnest or meant in jest.
The song and accompanying video follows Lil Windex’s journey from washing cars on the side of the road to living in a mansion in the Hamptons by mining Bitcoin Cash. It’s unclear whether any of the details of the story are true, though the narrative arc of the song follows in the long tradition of rappers celebrating their Horatio Alger ascents to wealth.
What’s bizarre about the song is just how dedicated it seems to educating listeners about Bitcoin Cash, often resorting to wordy verses to explain the finer points of cryptocurrency. The excessively detailed lyrics are an unusual fit for a genre of rap that usually features scatting and successive non sequiturs.
At one point in the track, Lil Windex helps us to understand how bitcoin mining works. He raps: “The miners make money by taking a fee every time a transaction is made and complete/ and they work every minute and day of the week.” In the next line, Lil Windex gives a hat tip to the anonymous author of the original bitcoin white paper, who goes by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto: “A guy named Satoshi created this all/ he’s the mastermind of it.”
Then, at the end of the video, Lil Windex spouts an a cappella verse clarifying where he stands on an esoteric cryptocurrency debate between the developers of Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Here’s the transcript from Gizmodo:
Hey fuck Bitcoin Core. You’re just a buncha names. We the BCH gang. We run this game. So before you start talking just consider the fact that we’re the real money makers. We got millions in cash. And bitch we: strive for success/ we’re defined as the best/ and if you want your/ life to be blessed/ then come on by and invest/ just like I did/ and now my wife’s breasts/ have doubled in size on her chest/ Rrrrikikiki/ Ya [inaudible] motherfucker. BCH gang!
Bitcoin Core is a term commonly used to refer to the original bitcoin, while Bitcoin Cash is a fork that was created last August after developers couldn’t agree on how to properly scale the currency. The debate boils down to the fact that transactions for Bitcoin Core often get bottlenecked because there can only be a handful of transactions per second. Bitcoin Cash has a higher capacity for transactions, though defenders of the original bitcoin believe that this modification threatens the decentralized nature of the currency. The two sides have been fighting to promote their own version of Bitcoin, which Forbes has described as a “civil war.”
Lil Windex’s last verse speaks to the overwhelming ambition of the song: He is not only attempting to quickly run through the basic mechanics, benefits, and history of mining cryptocurrency, but is also encouraging listeners to steer clear of the original bitcoin algorithm in favor of its lesser-known offshoot. It’s a lot for a three-minute song that has the Canadian rapper caressing stacks of cash in his mansion for about half the runtime.
