It was February 18, 2013. A Reddit moderator named /u/theymos posted a call for advertisement submissions for the r/Bitcoin subreddit. Bitcoin's price sat at a humble $287. Most of the world had never heard of it.
Within one hour, a digital artist known only as /u/mavensbot answered — not with a polished agency concept, not with a professional design, but with a crude MS Paint wizard and four words that would echo across the internet forever.
MAGIC INTERNET MONEY
— /u/mavensbot, February 18, 2013. One hour. MS Paint. A mouse.
The wizard wore a blue pointed hat and blue robes. His face glowed golden. His beard was silver. A staff of ₿ raised to the sky. He was drawn with a mouse, with all the deliberate imperfection the Bitcoin community would come to love.
As the creator later explained: hiring a professional agency would have produced "an overly thought out abstract concept." Instead, he chose the purest tool available — MS Paint — and created something timeless.
On November 6, 2013, the Bitcoin Wizard advertisement went live. The subreddit had 56,000 members. Bitcoin traded at $287. The ad earned over 1,600 upvotes with a 98% approval rating — numbers unheard of for any Reddit advertisement in history.
In the 22 days that followed, something extraordinary happened.
The subreddit swelled from 56,000 to over 74,000 subscribers. Conversion rates leapt from 0.018% to 2.753%. The world was waking up — and a hand-drawn wizard was leading the charge.
It's disarming and charming. It doesn't feel like self-promotion because it pokes fun at itself, and on Reddit that is hugely important.
— Community member on why the wizard worked
One month later, South Park aired "Black Friday" — and its art department produced a character nearly identical to the wizard. Coincidence or tribute? The Bitcoin community debates it still.
A meme forged in the fires of r/Bitcoin does not die. By 2017, the community launched the most audacious troll campaign in crypto history: a crowdfund to place the wizard as a full-page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal.
The wizard is born in MS Paint. One hour. The ad goes live. The world is never the same.
Bitcoin crosses $1,000. South Park airs "Black Friday." The wizard watches from above.
The community launches the Initial Troll Offering — a campaign to print the wizard in the Wall Street Journal. ~$1,000 in Bitcoin donated in days.
The wizard is inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain as an Ordinal. Magic Internet Money becomes Magic Internet Property — permanent, immutable, forever on chain.
The wizard endures because it captures something the institutional world never understood: Bitcoin was built by pioneers who were passionate long before it achieved any public relevance. It represents a time when this was fun, irreverent, and genuinely revolutionary.
A decade after /u/mavensbot summoned the wizard into existence, the original meme found its final, permanent home: inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain as an Ordinal. The very protocol the wizard helped birth became the medium for its immortality.
Magic Internet Money — once four words on a crude Reddit ad — is now a cultural artifact encoded in the most immutable ledger humanity has ever created. It cannot be deleted. It cannot be censored. It cannot be stopped.
The Bitcoin Wizard represents the ethos of decentralization, creativity, and defiance of traditional systems. It symbolizes a period when Bitcoin was more about ideology and community than corporate adoption.
— The Bitcoin Wizard Legacy
The torch now passes to the next generation of wizards. Those who understand that every inscription is an act of magic. That writing data to Bitcoin is not a transaction — it is a spell.
Join the inscription queue. View what is being cast onto the blockchain next. Community members may replace any pending slot before the spell is sealed.
⚡ View Inscription Queue Mempool ↗