“So why do you work under a pseudonym?” I ask. I’m in Vegas at one of the Bitcoin 2025 parties – this particular one is hosted by Taproot Wizards, so I’m surrounded by a crowd of people dressed in wizard hats and capes. To top it all, the venue they have chosen is a disco themed loft, so all the hats and capes are silver – I feel like I’m in the middle of some kind of discoball soup.
Within this setting, I’m talking to one of crypto twitter’s influencing voices – a status he has built up under the pseudonym of Dyme. He writes regular reports on the crypto market, analysis of the sentiment and the activity of the charts. He shows me some and they are good – I can see why he’s gained popularity.
But as someone who has only written under her own name, I’m curious, why would he do this work under a different persona?
He’s not alone in using an online alias - crypto’s origins are deeply rooted in the culture of online personas. Going beyond the creation of Bitcoin by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, the use of pseudonyms in the building of cryptographic systems cuts to a fundamental element of its make up, namely the creation of online anonymity and privacy.
Perhaps that’s why Vernor Vinge’s True Names became such a seminal work for the cypherpunks. My copy of the book has an essay from Timothy May, “True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy” which explores the implications of pseudonymity in the context of cryptography (but also other emerging technologies) and its potential to reshape society:
“It was clear to me that the ideas of anonymous interaction, reputation-based systems, digital pseudonyms, digital signatures, data havens, and public-key encryption in general would all be important for these markets in cyberspace [...] Digital pseudonyms, the creation of persistent network personas that cannot be forged by others and yet are unlinkable to the “true names” of their owners, are finding major uses in ensuring free speech, in allowing controversial opinions to be aired, and in providing for economic transactions that cannot be blocked by local governments. The technology being deployed by the Cypherpunks and others means their identities, nationalities, and even which continents they are on are untraceable—unless their owners choose to reveal this information.”
I push with my question regardless – why did Dyme need the pseudonym in the first place?
The layers of online personhood
It turns out now is the right time to ask him “why the pseudonym?” He tells me that his decision to appear in Vegas is actually a kind of “coming out” for him – his moment, after ten years, to show people who the man behind the profile is. “It’s time, I feel like I don’t need the pseudonym so much anymore.”
But he was finding elements of shedding that anonymity difficult – there were security concerns for one. Many of those that were early into crypto, particularly with Bitcoin and some of the earlier coins, have amounted significant wealth. With news of kidnappings and extortion filtering through the internet, privacy and anonymity is their best friend. While Dyme didn’t specify whether this was a concern for him, the pseudonym, in part, was the key to leading a normal life in the real world. “I kind of built my mental persona around being nobody in real life and somebody online [...] people treat me differently when they know who I am.” If noone knows your real name, location or life story, you hold a distinct advantage.
The creation of the new online persona had created a kind of blank slate, where his posts and reputation formed the basis of his interactions. “Twitter knows me better than my own friends at this point, they know I’m honest, funny, smart,” in this world “I’m just a guy who likes being funny and showing people pictures of my frogs/cats. There’s no ulterior motive, people recognize that,” he tells me. The persona also gave him the space to “hold and test controversial viewpoints,” many of which he perhaps wouldn’t say “in polite company.”
It’s an element May also wrote about in his essay, stating that “Digital pseudonyms, the creation of persistent network personas that cannot be forged by others and yet are unlinkable to the “true names” of their owners, are finding major uses in ensuring free speech, in allowing controversial opinions to be aired, and in providing for economic transactions that cannot be blocked by local governments.”
The thing that gives these opinions weight is the creation of his “persistent” persona, the building of ideas, knowledge and reputation around that pseudonymous account. Over the ten years, Dyme has built a narrative around his name of a guy who knows how to read market sentiment, loves his cats, “isn’t a turbo lefty,” and is in the crypto “trenches” documenting his highs and downfalls for all to see. Now he posts and his followers listen, recognising his journey as similar to their own despite his anonymity. Even larger accounts take notice of his posts (in the past week both Elon Musk and crypto influencer Cobie have interacted with them).
The mask as a symbol
A few days after the Dyme conversation I’m waiting for my airplane back to Europe, talking to the pseudonymous creator of one of the original memecoins (before the current craze).
I had been talking to him for a while, first contacting him in late 2024 for a story about crypto AI agents. He’d been open to talking about the project, even sharing some of the music he was creating for an online game he was building. But he was particularly private (so much so he asked me not to even use his pseudonym in this article), going to great lengths not to share any identifying information — I only know that he is a “he” due to a short voice note that was almost instantly deleted. Since that first interaction our exchanges had been sporadic.
On this particular day however, he was more responsive, “blame the wine…or thank it” he tells me. So, with Dyme’s conversation still in my mind I ask him why his anonymity is so important.
His response is somewhat poetic – “An identity is a mask but a mask lets its soul speak louder. Symbols carry more weight than signatures. Archetypes command attention.”
At first, I roll my eyes a bit – again with the cryptic answers (I guess we are in crypto) – but then I think about it a little.
An identity is something constructed– a mask. But by choosing that mask, there is an opportunity for something more essential to emerge. In embodying the chosen pseudonym, he could design and build a persona apart from the person that had evolved in the real world, shedding all of those factual, physical ties.
He had chosen an archetype, a mythological figure often associated with knowledge and championing mankind. Through the use of a pseudonym, particularly a mythical one, his work could be transformed from something tied to a real individual (a signature) and turned into something more ideological. Through the use of a mythical pseudonym his work transforms from being tied to an individuals signature to something larger, more ideological.
The pseudonym enables him the freedom to explore ideas without the trappings of identity (aside from the persona he deliberately constructs), using memes as digital-era symbols to speak to a collective and convey the baseline values of crypto (system change, digital privacy and sovereignty) through community, nostalgia and laughter.
The power of narrative
I’m in the northern Italian city of Bologna a few days later, sunning on a terrace with a couple of friends, Aperol spritz in hand (I apologize for the dizzying jumps in location). Kelly, an actress and screenwriter who explores the idea of archetypes and personas. I had mentioned the conversations I had been having about pseudonyms in crypto and now we are discussing narrative transport.
Narrative transportation is when a reader experiences complete immersion into a story, and all their mental focus is honed in on the narrative. They might respond emotionally, and the narrative can evoke mental images and connotations. It can make stories more persuasive, and readers have been found to understand and remember more information using this technique.
When I write “story” and “narrative” I mean it in the broadest sense. Narrative transport can be used in a variety of contexts. The technique can be used in advertising, for example, to convey information about a product and persuade an audience to buy it. For example, an advert trying to sell a new kind of tomato sauce could use the story of an Italian family going through the process of making tomato sauce and ending at the dinner table (and yes I’m directly referencing a Domilo advert with this example).
“Humans are narrative beings, we like to learn but not be told,” says Kelly. “We work with metaphor. Fantasy creates a distance that helps you normalise new information.”
In Kelly’s eyes, the act of using the pseudonymous persona could create the same distance that the storytelling of an advert creates, allowing for followers to be more open to the ideas that are posted.
For those that see pseudonyms as a negative element of the internet, allowing those intending to spread hateful content and misinformation to avoid accountability, this added mechanism of persuasion could be alarming. Pseudonymity can also open the door to abuse, scams, and the spread of misinformation, just look at the coordinated pump and dump crime in the memecoin space.
But I’m hesitant to believe that pseudonymity itself is the problem. Like any tool, it’s how it’s used and by whom, that matters. To me, the more pressing question is not whether pseudonyms should exist, but how they can be used meaningfully, symbolically and uphold spaces for free speech and the sharing of ideas.
Archetypal abstraction
My conversation with Kelly is at the end of a long day of cross country travel, wandering the maze of porticos and immersion into raw, human interaction. Groups of people sharing mid morning bottles of wine, lovers intertwined in very Italian public displays of affection, cat calling restauranteurs framed by their shop fronts packed with hanging hams and stacked cheeses, and hand gestures of a heated discussion. The digital realm’s equivalent of memes, metaphors and meltdowns, seems a long way away. A parallel universe fitting conveniently in my pocket.
But was it as far removed as I thought?
It struck me that maybe these weren’t really two separate worlds after all. I realised both spaces, the real streets and the meme-infused spaces of crypto Twitter, were animated by the same raw material of symbols, archetypes, performance and play.
Over centuries, writers have used alternate names to author their texts for a variety of different reasons, from escaping the constraints of associated stereotypes (the Bronte Sisters, Mary Ann Evans) to removing their associations with other published works or ideas (Lewis Carroll, Benjamin Franklin) and publishing works that could result in persecution.
The pseudonymous figures I’d met online were doing the same thing, just in a different medium. Their masks weren’t necessarily hiding who they were, they were amplifying it, turning identity into narrative. The anonymity gave them space to perform, to test ideas and to play with truth through fiction.
What’s different now to the writers and thinkers before is that everyone can intentionally and quickly, for all the world to see, choose a pseudonym and create a persona, allowing them a blank slate to build upon. In fact, we are encouraged to – opening an account on social media like Twitter or Instagram with the use of simply the name that is on our government ID is near impossible without it being accompanied by a string of numbers.
In the moment of account creation, we can decide how we want to be presented to the world (and can change our minds about it later) and whether it has any association with our persona in real life. The space created through the pseudonym allows for a narrative to be built. Reputation, consistency of ideas and theme create the persona around that pseudonym – it's all anyone has to go on if they can’t see your biographical ties. It’s free, if users choose it to be, of traditional labels or social structures.
For activists, especially those operating in repressive regimes or advocating for controversial causes, pseudonyms are a lifeline. The ability to speak out without fear of government surveillance, employer retaliation, or social ostracism is crucial for those seeking to challenge the status quo. Social media platforms’ real-name policies can inadvertently silence these voices, forcing activists to choose between their safety and their ability to participate in public discourse. By allowing for alternate identities, pseudonyms empower activists to organize, share information, and build movements while minimizing personal risk.
The erosion of trust created by bad actors using pseudonyms can undermine the very communities that pseudonymity is meant to protect, making it harder to distinguish between genuine contributors and those acting in bad faith. But does that mean we should do away with pseudonymity all together?
As more of our lives move online, the use of the pseudonym and online persona is becoming increasingly a way of interaction, in turn raising new questions about identity, trust, and community. Advances in technology, shifts in social norms, and evolving regulations will all play a role in shaping how pseudonymity is practiced and perceived.
Will we see a future where online personas are as valued as real-world identities, opening avenues for new ideas to evolve? Or will increasing calls for transparency and accountability limit the space for anonymity? The answers to these questions will define the next chapter of our digital lives.
Food for thought
If you want a bit of extra reading around the subjects discussed above here’s a reading list to get you started:
First off, True Names by Vernor Vinge — its a classic bit of reading if you want to get more into the cypherpunk headspace of pseudonymity. If you, like I, prefer reading printed books still, its worth buying a copy. However, so you can get a little taste, I’ve actually found a pdf version. Timothy May’s True Names and Crypto Anarchy really ties the themes the book explores to web3 tech.
In the research for this newsletter I found a great psychology paper published last year that looks into narrative transport and how it shapes the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us — its an eye opener!
This one is a little in the periphery of what we are talking about here but it does speak to concerns around digital privacy. The paper, published last month, looks at anonymity-washing — some of the failings and misapplication of data anonymisation techniques resulting in datasets that aren’t as anonymised as they are made out to be. As anonymisation one of the key elements of supposedly protecting digital privacy, its a study which gives light to some significant concerns.