Laser Eyes

On February 16, 2021, with bitcoin trading near fifty thousand dollars per coin, a Twitter user posting under the handle @CHAIRFORCE_BTC changed his profile picture to add two glowing red beams shooting out of his eyes. He attached a hashtag: #LaserRayUntil100K. The proposition was simple. Keep the profile picture. Take it down only when bitcoin hits a hundred thousand dollars.

Within seventy-two hours, members of Congress, the CEOs of Tesla and MicroStrategy, and the majority of bitcoin Twitter had done the same. Within a year, the laser eyes had appeared on the avatar of a head of state.

The campaign would not resolve for nearly four years. When it did, it resolved on schedule.

How it actually started

The image of a person with red beams shooting from their eyes was not invented in February 2021. It is a stock cinematic device — Superman, Cyclops, the various villains of Mass Effect 2 — translated into meme form sometime around 2010. Bitcoin Twitter had used variations of it sporadically before 2021. None had stuck.

What made February 16, 2021 different was framing. According to the creator’s own account, published in Bitcoin Magazine after El Salvador’s president put on the laser eyes that June: he was working with a small group of bitcoin meme accounts informally calling themselves The Meme Factory. One of them, Pedro, had requested help adding laser effects to a meme involving a kangaroo. The creator obliged, then on impulse added laser eyes to every member of the group’s avatars. He wrote, internal to the group, “When the day comes that we have to go to aggressive offensive meme warfare… we enact laser eyes.”

The formal kickoff was February 16, with the #LaserRayUntil100K tag attached. The creator’s tweet linked to a “You guys always act like you’re better than me” reaction-image template — a wink at how bitcoin was perceived by the broader crypto and finance worlds at the time.

It went viral within hours.

Who put them on

The list of public figures who adopted laser eyes within the first ten days reads, in retrospect, like a directory of who was paying attention to bitcoin in early 2021:

Elon Musk added them to his Twitter profile shortly after adding #bitcoin to his bio. Michael Saylor put them on the same week MicroStrategy announced an additional six hundred million dollars of bitcoin purchases. Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, the only sitting U.S. senator who held bitcoin at the time, briefly adopted them and noted, on removing them, that “my support for sound money continues.” The Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler. Kraken’s Dan Held. Binance’s CZ. ShapeShift’s Erik Voorhees. Coin Center’s Neeraj Agrawal — who had previously dismissed bitcoin culture as cringe — explained the meme to Decrypt in a tone of gentle resignation.

Tom Brady put on laser eyes in June 2021 and announced an equity stake in FTX shortly afterward. (That part of the story did not age well.) Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, donned them on the same day in June 2021 that Jack Mallers announced from the Bitcoin 2021 conference stage that El Salvador would adopt bitcoin as legal tender. The image of a sitting head of state with red lasers shooting out of his eyes was, briefly, the most-shared political photograph in the world.

What kept it going

Most internet movements do not have endurance. They peak in a week. The laser-eyes campaign lasted, in active form, the entire 2021–2024 bitcoin cycle — three years and ten months — because it had a built-in resolution condition. Holders had committed publicly to keeping the avatar until bitcoin hit one hundred thousand. There was no graceful way to take the image down before that target was reached. Doing so would constitute, in the visible-honor economy of bitcoin Twitter, a kind of capitulation.

This proved durable in a way the campaign’s creator probably did not foresee. Bitcoin fell from sixty-five thousand to sixteen thousand over 2021–2022. Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, FTX all collapsed. The laser eyes mostly stayed on. Some of the people who had put them on in February 2021 were, by November 2022, broke; others were under federal indictment. The avatars persisted.

How it ended

Bitcoin first crossed one hundred thousand dollars on December 4, 2024 — exactly three years, nine months, and eighteen days after the campaign began. (Sources differ slightly on the precise hour; bitcoin closed above $100,000 on most exchanges late evening U.S. Eastern Time on the 4th, with the cleanest broadcast crossing reported on the 5th.)

The reaction on bitcoin Twitter was anticlimactic in a particular way. There was no organized celebration. People removed the laser eyes quietly, over the course of a few days, in some cases without commenting on it at all. The campaign creator, @CHAIRFORCE_BTC, posted a brief acknowledgement and then moved on. A small subset of bitcoiners replaced the lasers with the new tag #LaserEyesUntilFiatDies — a deliberately unreachable target — but the energy of the original was gone. The thing it had been built to do had been done.

Why it lasted

Laser Eyes is unusual, among bitcoin memes, in that it had a defined victory condition. Most memes drift. Magic Internet Money drifts. HODL drifts. Have Fun Staying Poor drifts. They mean what they meant on the day they were coined and continue meaning it indefinitely.

Laser Eyes, by contrast, was a pre-commitment device. It bound a public group of people to keep a visible signal up until a specific number was reached. The signal was costly to maintain — every time bitcoin fell, the laser eyes looked sillier — and impossible to drop without losing face. The campaign’s persistence, and ultimately its successful resolution, are part of what makes it durable as cultural memory. It worked. The number was hit. The avatars came down.