Revolutions leave behind artifacts — not always weapons or flags, but the quieter objects that carried a message before anyone knew how far it would travel. A wheat-pasted broadside on a Los Angeles overpass. A hand-lettered cardboard sign held up in the snow outside a Tokyo office building. A newspaper headline, pulled from the front page of The Times of London and encoded permanently into a piece of software that would go on to challenge the architecture of global finance.

The works gathered in Relics of a Revolution at the Bitcoin 2026 Conference in Las Vegas trace a specific lineage of dissent — one that connects street-level protest to the birth of Bitcoin itself. Mear One (b. 1971, Santa Cruz, CA) has spent nearly four decades using the walls of Los Angeles as a medium for political and economic confrontation. He pioneered the Melrose graffiti art movement in the late 1980s, was the first graffiti artist to exhibit at the 01 Gallery on Melrose and at 33 1/3 Gallery in Silverlake — where Banksy would later debut his first North American show — and in 2004 joined Shepard Fairey and Robbie Conal on the Be the Revolution tour, a nationwide series of anti-war street art interventions during the Bush administration. His work was part of the landmark Art in the Streets exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2011 and resides in the permanent collections of the Laguna Art Museum among others. From anti-Gulf War broadsides in the early 1990s through the Occupy Wall Street encampments of 2011, Mear One has been making work that insists the root problem is the system itself — not the politicians or the policies, but the underlying architecture of money and power.

I sat down with Mear One ahead of his panel at Bitcoin 2026 to talk about protest, art, broken systems, and why the revolution is not over, or how to exit a loop.

BMAG: Mear One, you started writing on walls in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, at a moment when graffiti was still broadly criminalized and the idea of it entering museum collections would have seemed far-off. By the early 1990s, you were making large-scale political work — anti-Gulf War broadsides, pieces confronting economic power structures head-on. What was driving you to use the street as a political medium at that point, and who were you trying to reach?

Mear One: Graffiti is the voice of the dissatisfied soul, and back then it was a vehicle to reach the masses before the internet took off & social media ever existed. When you illegally spray paint your ideas in the public realm it resonates with the urbanite caught in traffic, angers the city officials whose dilapidated walls we scribe like a big middle finger to their failed policies. Conscious art speaks to conscious people, and the act of vandalism carries with it an energy that helped instigate a movement which was lacking. The streets were our meeting ground, and getting away with it kept us all anonymous, permissionless.

BMAG: There’s a phrase that circulates in bitcoin culture — “all wars are banker’s wars.” The Genesis Block itself contains a newspaper headline about a bank bailout. When you look back at the work you were making during the Gulf War era and later during Occupy Wall Street, how much of it feels like it was pointing toward the same structural critique that bitcoin would eventually encode into its protocol?

Mear One: Quite honestly, when I discovered bitcoin it immediately reminded me of the graffiti, hip hop, and punk rock culture I grew up in, it mirrored the revolutionary necessities I was communicating through my art. I think we all desire an ideology or movement that speaks to and offers a solution to the endless new world order slave trap that so many have become accustomed to. And it turns out the architects who created this current economic matrix are the same builders of our prison schools, creators of our bankers’ wars. Satoshi knew this. Humans don’t really have world war issues with one another, these issues stem from economic and political power struggles outside of our fundamental human desires like freedom, love, a spiritual connection to a higher purpose. My goal as an artist is to always experience freedom, to set myself free from the system, this is the basis of my art, philosophy and resistance.

BMAG: In 2004, you joined Shepard Fairey and Robbie Conal on the Be the Revolution tour — taking anti-war, anti-corporate street art across the country during the Bush administration. That was four years before the financial collapse, and three years after 9/11 had already been used to justify unprecedented expansions of surveillance, military spending, and executive power. What did that experience teach you about using art as a tool for economic and political resistance, and how did it shape your thinking when the crash actually arrived?

Mear One: Be the Revolution with Robbie and Shepard was more so an outlet to express my angst and dismay of American politics at the time. Fighting wars for foreign resources to sell for profit exacerbating this hierarchy of haves and have nots still weighs heavy on my philosophical heart. 

But when the financial crash hit in 2008 my revolutionary lens shifted drastically, and for the first time in my life I became interested in learning how the system of money actually operates, what money is, and seeking to articulate through my art a more accurate definition of the new world order culminating in my most controversial work to date False Profits.

“You cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.” Subversive art, subliminal art, illegal art, art that punches you in the gut with facts and satire using a spray can, paint brush, wheat pastes, music, comedy, film, whatever tools are in your creative kit, art is the most effective way to create change. I think great art stands the test of time for its quality of being somewhat psychic, narrating the cause before the effect is widely understood by the masses, before it’s too late.

BMAG: Street art is ephemeral by nature — it gets buffed, painted over, torn down, rained on. Some of your protest works from the Occupy era and earlier have survived. What does it mean to you that objects made in that spirit of urgency — work created to be temporary — are now being shown in a gallery context as historical artifacts?

Mear One: They’re still relevant, ironically, because nothing’s changed! Same circumstance, different puppets. These works point out a condition that is ongoing within our human story, and it’s important as Bitcoiners to pay memory to our past struggles and the remedies which we choose to solve them. In this spirit of urgency these Relics of Revolution are calling out for exactly that – the time for change is always now!

BMAG: You were making anti-war street art during the first Gulf War. Now, more than thirty years later, we’re watching another military escalation in the Middle East — this time with Iran. The machinery looks different, the justifications sound different, but the economic architecture underneath it is remarkably similar. For a generation that came of age watching 9/11 become the justification for two decades of war and then watched the 2008 crash reveal that the financial system underwriting it all was itself a fraud — when you see this cycle repeating, does it feel like confirmation of something you’ve been saying on walls for decades, or does it feel like failure — that the message didn’t land?

Mear One: Like you said, all wars are bankers wars. And for hundreds of years we’ve been fed a false narrative about who our enemy is. There’s a lot of truths I’ve tried to point out through my art and it has made my life much harder for it. I’ve been criticized, censored, nearly cancelled, had my life threatened, labelled all sorts of heinous things. But I resisted, I was unapologetic, and I continue to do my work unfazed. Sometimes it feels like I’m standing on the street corner pointing up in the sky, screaming at the top of my lungs about the chemtrails, and everyone just thinks I’m crazy – it’s always like that in the beginning – but people are waking up. It’s not easy to do art that points out what’s wrong with the system. But it’s also not easy to be honest with yourself and accept the mediocre mundane pointless reality that is the social norm. The reward in doing this is to see a movement like bitcoin spawning and like-minded people sharing the joy and vigor for revolution.

BMAG: There’s an argument — and it runs deep in Bitcoin thinking — that wars are not really fought over ideology or territory but over monetary control. That every major conflict is ultimately about protecting or resetting an economic order that benefits the people waging it. Your work has been making that case visually since the 1990s. How do you articulate that connection between war and money to someone who hasn’t thought about it that way?

Mear One: I create an allegory that consists of the main factors, I am challenged to present it in its most digestible form; yet this is complicated subject matter so this challenge causes me to include subliminal psychedelic mythological archetypes and symbolism all coming together to assist in this complicated narrative, not only to create something visually compelling, but to give the subject matter a focus and a place to become a discussion amongst people. Through narrative art you can introduce ideas that people struggle with in the abstract.

BMAG: The 2008 crash, the bailouts, Occupy, and now what looks like another cycle of inflation, debt, and military spending — do you see Bitcoin as the first real exit from that loop, or just the latest attempt to build something outside a system that keeps absorbing its opposition?

Mear One: I’m a non-dogmatic being by nature. Bitcoin to me is the first wave in new technology that might steer us away from the fiat slave system. But I’m not convinced that it is the be-all and end-all for our current predicament. As we observe Wall Street attempting to hijack bitcoin all the while in-fighting amongst internal ideologues rages on, all that noise obscures bitcoin’s original ethos. These are its problems that are being worked out. I’m much more a believer in innovation and I welcome many more new inventions to enter our realm. I think that the monetary reality needs to run its course though, and what eventually follows I hope is a spiritual revolution. I see bitcoin as a crowbar in an emergency break the glass situation where it is necessary for the next iteration of where we’re heading into the 2030s. I do believe that is towards a state of ultimate freedom where the concept of money itself will become obsolete as we migrate closer to rebuilding a new world.

BMAG: How did you first encounter Bitcoin, and was there a specific moment where it clicked for you as connected to the same values and frustrations that had driven your street practice for decades?

Mear One: Back in 2009 I ran into a mathematician at a coffee shop in my neighborhood, we struck up conversation over my art and he hipped me to bitcoin for the first time. I never saw myself as one who would invest money into money, so it was just an interesting idea in the back of my mind. As I deepened my education into what money is through Occupy and to the creation/fallout of my London mural in 2012, my path eventually led my lady and I to our first bitcoin conference down in Mexico at Anarchapulco. We were introduced to a tribe of anarchists who shared similar sentiments on politics and lifestyle. I had millions of questions, everyone had answers, and like a sponge I absorbed this knowledge. I rocked two live art pieces for the community, which I auctioned off. Those collectors helped me set up my first wallet (shout out EDGE) as well as the transactions in exchange for my proof-of-work. That’s when it clicked for me, when I earned my first coins.

BMAG: Your work is in a show called Relics of a Revolution. Do you think the revolution it’s referencing is over, still happening, or something that hasn’t fully begun yet?

Mear One: Revolution is a daily occurrence, it is one of the inevitable aspects of life that you either take part in or it’s gonna take a part of you. Revolution literally means a cycle that we experience in different seasons across different cultures, time and space. There’s a variety of revolutions currently taking place. What’s great about bitcoin is it somehow is able to connect and bridge to them all at once because ultimately it seeks what we all desire – freedom from the system.

BMAG: This exhibition is called Relics of a Revolution, and it includes your protest works alongside an original copy of The Times from January 3, 2009 — the newspaper whose headline Satoshi embedded in the Genesis Block. That newspaper is the moment a diagnosis became a protocol — the moment the frustration that Mear One had been painting on walls and that Kolin would later carry on a sign in Tokyo was encoded into something that could not be buffed, censored, or bailed out. When you see your work displayed alongside that artifact, what do you want someone walking through this exhibition to take away — someone who may know Bitcoin as a price ticker but doesn’t know the history of why it exists?

Mear One: Collect these works of art! And I don’t mean that facetiously. Every great art movement had their Medicis, those whose power and influence defined the style & ideas of a generation. All the works you see here in the gallery is art denominated in bitcoin, created by artists whose works are inspired by the philosophical principles underlying the greatest bitcoin artwork of them all, the Genesis Block. Like bitcoin, art is the greatest store of value. But cultural preservation of these fine art assets of freedom by accomplished artists requires the patronage of those with passion for these aesthetic visions. Currently we face WW3, economic destruction, trade & agriculture collapse. Bitcoin cuts that circuit of suffering & punishment. Our ultimate fight is with the controllers of money and their bullshit fiat institutions, rendering their scheme obsolete and irrelevant.

This is Part II of a three-part interview series accompanying the Relics of a Revolution exhibition. Part I features Kolin Burges. Part III, featuring Afroman, is forthcoming.

Fix the money. Fix the world.

Mear One will be painting live in the BMAG art gallery throughout Bitcoin 2026, April 27–29, at The Venetian Resort, Las Vegas, and will appear on a speaking panel moderated by Dennis Koch titled “Looking at Bitcoin Art Through a Protest Lens.” A unique print by Mear One entitled The Magician is available exclusively through BMAG. Preview Mear One’s historic protest works included in the Relics of a Revolution exhibition in the BMAG B26 auction HERE. 

The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) is the curatorial and cultural programming division of BTC Inc and the Bitcoin Conference. Since 2019, the BMAG conference art gallery has facilitated more than 120 BTC in art and collectible sales. Learn more about BMAG at museum.b.tc. Follow BMAG on twitter @BMAG_HQ. Bundle your Bitcoin 2026 pass with a stay at The Venetian and get your fourth night free. Use code AFTERS for a free After Hours Pass, or get your pass alone here.