A hand-drawn bean wizard, a 2013 Reddit ad, and the magical assets your mother said would never be worth anything. $BEANS — fair-launch, no premine, no presale — the way the old wizards did it.
r/beans
A 2013 MS Paint wizard that became one of the most recognized memes in crypto — the face of a coin, an NFT, and a cultural moment name-dropped by the likes of CZ and Elon. Even Robinhood's own learning center explains assets with magic beans. This is the lore we're carrying forward.
The lore goes that r/Bitcoin's moderator asked the community for ideas for a paid Reddit ad. Within about an hour, a user named mavensbot replied with a crude MS Paint drawing of a bearded wizard in a starry robe, holding a Bitcoin staff, captioned "Bitcoin: Magic Internet Money." The amateur, self-deprecating style was the whole point — it looked made by a regular person, not an ad agency. It won.
↗ bitcoinwizard.com — the original 2013 wizard
The wizard went live as a site-wide Reddit ad on November 6, 2013, when Bitcoin was around $287. It became one of Reddit's most successful community ads ever. Over the following weeks Bitcoin surged past $1,000 for the first time. The broader bull market did the heavy lifting — but the ad and the meme are credited with helping popularize Bitcoin's quirky, fun image at the key moment.
↗ knowyourmeme — the ad that went viral
"Magic Internet Money" became a self-aware, affectionate way to describe Bitcoin — magical because digital scarcity works via math and incentives, internet-native, and actual money. The wizard became a mascot: merch, artwork, later a community attempt to put him in the Wall Street Journal. Crypto folklore remembers it as one of the memes that survived every cycle.
↗ dergigi.com — the bigger point
In the Ordinals era the wizard came back, fully on-chain. Taproot Wizards leaned into "Magic Internet JPEGs," and the original artist later fair-launched $MIM as a BRC-20 (later Runes). No premine, no presale — public mint, fairness emphasized. These are culture tokens with deep provenance, not utility projects. We're paying respect to that lineage with beans.
↗ coindesk.com — the return
Even Robinhood's own learning center explains assets with magic beans. The lore goes:
So if a bean can be an asset, and an asset can be magic, and magic can live on the internet — then magic internet beans were always just a matter of time. We are the punchline a 2013 wizard drew and forgot about.
↗ robinhood learn — what is an asset?
Even Robinhood's learning center explains assets with magic beans. Jack traded his cow for a bag of magic beans — his mother got upset, but Jack believed they'd lead to something valuable. Go learn what an asset actually is.
↗ robinhood learn — what is an asset?