Have fun staying poor is the phrase deployed by bitcoin holders against critics, skeptics, and the merely indifferent who have argued that bitcoin is a scam, a bubble, an environmental disaster, a Ponzi scheme, or in some other respect not worth holding. It functions as a kind of conversational closing argument: the bitcoin holder, having declined to defend their thesis any further, wishes the skeptic well in the alternative life choice they have made. The phrase’s bitcoin-community popularization is documented to a single account: Udi Wertheimer, a Tel Aviv-based developer and Bitcoin Twitter personality, who began replying have fun staying poor to DeFi promoters and altcoin enthusiasts in September 2020. The phrase pre-existed Wertheimer’s usage in non-bitcoin internet culture, but its specifically bitcoin-coded form is his. By the analysis of Jameson Lopp, who tracked the spread, Wertheimer had repeated the phrase nearly 350 times across four months by early 2021 — an act of memetic persistence that successfully installed the phrase in the bitcoin lexicon. The abbreviation HFSP followed shortly after, along with a Telegram channel and a single-purpose website at the matching domain.
The phrase’s tone is significantly harsher than stay humble, stack sats. Where the latter is internal-facing — advice from bitcoiners to bitcoiners — have fun staying poor is external-facing, deployed against people who have explicitly declined to participate. The instruction is not to take the bitcoin holder’s advice; the instruction is to reap the consequences of having declined to take it. The implied future state is one in which the bitcoin holder has become wealthy through the asset’s appreciation while the addressee, having missed the opportunity, has not. Have fun staying poor is, in this construction, a wish for the addressee’s continued poverty extended in approximately the spirit one extends a holiday greeting.
The phrase’s cultural reception has been correspondingly polarized. Its supporters argue that it is a useful and appropriate response to skepticism that has, over a sufficient time horizon, been consistently wrong; that the bitcoin community’s fifteen years of being told the asset was worthless have earned the right to a certain triumphant rudeness; and that the phrase’s edge is what makes it memorable. Its detractors — including a substantial fraction of the bitcoin community itself — argue that the phrase is gratuitously hostile, that it confirms every unflattering stereotype outsiders hold about bitcoiners, and that it makes the work of converting skeptics into participants substantially harder than it needs to be. Coin Center’s Neeraj Agrawal, in a March 2021 CoinDesk article, called the phrase gross and argued that, however meaningful it might be to those steeped in the lore, the optics for outsiders were uniformly bad. Both readings are, in their respective frames, correct.
The phrase’s most notable effect has been to establish a baseline level of acceptable rudeness in bitcoin discourse that did not previously exist. Before have fun staying poor became standard, bitcoin community responses to skepticism had tended toward earnestness — the patient explanation, the recommended reading list, the offer to discuss further. After the phrase’s adoption, the offer was retracted. The skeptic who had declined the recommended reading list was, after a certain point, simply wished good luck and abandoned to whatever financial future awaited them. Adam Back, the cypherpunk and Blockstream chief executive whose proof-of-work scheme Hashcash had been cited in Satoshi’s whitepaper, observed that have fun staying poor was the short form of an older line from Satoshi Nakamoto himself: if you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry. The continuity, in this reading, was older than the meme.
Whether have fun staying poor is good for bitcoin remains, like most questions about bitcoin’s discourse, contested. The phrase has migrated outward into broader cryptocurrency communities, into stock-trading communities, and occasionally into general financial discourse, where it has lost most of its specifically bitcoin associations. Within the bitcoin community, it is still deployed several times a day on Bitcoin Twitter, frequently with attached price screenshots, frequently in response to journalists, economists, and politicians whose previous skepticism the deployer believes to have been vindicated by the asset’s subsequent appreciation. The phrase is not going away. Whether the future generation of bitcoiners will inherit it, or develop something more conciliatory in its place, is a question the next cycle will probably answer.