On the evening of February 18, 2013, at 23:21:15 UTC, a Reddit user posting under the handle u/mavensbot uploaded an MS Paint drawing to the bitcoin subreddit. The drawing depicted a long-bearded wizard in a star-spangled robe, hovering against a black void, casting some kind of spell. Beneath the wizard, in white type, were the words:
Bitcoin: Magic Internet Money
The drawing was a response to a thread the moderator u/theymos had opened earlier that day soliciting submissions for a paid Reddit advertisement for the subreddit. Reddit, at the time, allowed communities to purchase site-wide promotional spots; r/Bitcoin, then with roughly fifty thousand subscribers, wanted one. Mavensbot’s submission was casual, jokey, and visually crude. It was made in MS Paint. It was drawn with a mouse.
It won.
Why MS Paint
The deliberate amateurism is the whole thesis. Reddit’s culture, in 2013, was suspicious of polish. Anything that looked like marketing was, by the standards of the platform, marketing — and therefore presumed to be lying. A glossy, agency-produced ad would have been instantly disqualified by users’ skepticism. A wizard drawn in MS Paint by someone who was clearly not trying to sell anything, on the other hand, looked like it had wandered into the ad slot by mistake. It looked like a Redditor.
Mavensbot, in subsequent commentary, has been frank about the choice. The roughness is not a failure. It is the entire point. The ad communicated, before its actual content registered, that it had been made by someone in the community rather than by someone trying to extract money from it. That perceived authenticity is what allowed the message — bitcoin: magic internet money — to land as a self-aware joke rather than as a pitch.
A reader on the original thread, u/Amanojack, said it best at the time: “It doesn’t feel like self-promotion because it pokes fun at itself.”
The numbers
The advertisement went live across Reddit on November 6, 2013. Bitcoin’s price that day was approximately $287.
Twenty-two days later, on November 29, 2013, bitcoin closed at $1,132. It was the first time bitcoin had crossed $1,000.
The bitcoin subreddit’s subscriber count grew by approximately 36% over the same window — from roughly 54,000 to roughly 74,000. The ad would go on to be reported, in Reddit’s own internal data, as the most-clicked community advertisement in the platform’s history at the time.
How much of the price action was caused by the ad and how much by the broader 2013 bull market is impossible to disentangle. Reasonable people have argued both ways. What is not in dispute is that the ad ran during the precise window in which bitcoin’s first crossing of $1,000 occurred, and that subscribership to the subreddit — the most-visible bitcoin community on the open web at the time — increased dramatically in lockstep.
South Park
There is an additional artifact worth recording. On November 13, 2013, exactly one week after the Reddit ad went live, South Park aired Season 17 Episode 7 — Black Friday, the first part of a three-episode arc parodying Game of Thrones. The episode prominently featured a hand-drawn flyer of the character Eric Cartman, depicted as a wizard king in flowing robes, in a composition that bears a striking — and many would say unmistakable — resemblance to the Magic Internet Money wizard.
South Park’s art department drafted the flyer in early November 2013, three days after the bitcoin ad went live. The episode was already in production by then. Whether the resemblance is deliberate homage or coincidence has never been formally addressed by South Park’s creators. It is, regardless, the second time the same image had appeared on a major media platform within seven days, and the timing is difficult to attribute to chance.
What the wizard means
There is something unusually durable about the image. Most internet ads age into illegibility within a year; this one has survived twelve. It still circulates. It is still printed on T-shirts and hoodies. It is still used, unironically, as a stand-in for bitcoin itself in news segments and Twitter threads.
The reason, we suspect, is that Magic Internet Money — as a phrase — captures something true about bitcoin that more sophisticated framings tend to miss. Bitcoin is, in a sense that even its skeptics would grudgingly concede, magic internet money. The phrase doesn’t try to sell you on anything. It doesn’t promise that you’ll get rich. It says, with a kind of cheerful surrender, yes, this is what it sounds like, and yes, it works anyway.
That posture — bemused, self-aware, faintly defiant — is the register most native to bitcoin culture. The wizard in the void was the first artifact to express it cleanly. It has not been improved on since.