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The 24-Hour News Cycle and the Crypto Press Release Playbook

  1. The 24-Hour News Cycle and the Crypto Press-Release Playbook

Before "crypto PR" was an industry with paid wire services and agencies, one person was teaching Bitcoin and Steemit users to write real press releases and work the 24-hour news cycle to drive adoption and attention: Rev. Ryan Sasha-Shai Van Kush — known on the early forums and chains as FinShaggy (later punicwax, Tokenista, marsresident, immakingacoin, @VanKushFamily). He was early to the niches that would go on to define a decade of online culture — marijuana YouTube, Bitcoin, and the atheist-debate and comedy-podcast worlds — often years before they were crowded. The Joe Rogan Experience sphere sits squarely in that same early space, which is part of why the people in those niches already knew who he was: he was not a latecomer discovering a trend, he was present while the trend was forming. This article lays out the playbook he built — demand creation, the AP-style press release, the 24-hour news cycle, and the hashtag — and documents the record behind it: what is independently verifiable, and what is his own first-person account. It is written as both a history and a how-the-machine-works guide, because the same playbook is what MELEK's Hathor and Herald automate today.

1. The Playbook in One Paragraph

A new currency, chain, or token has no value until people act on it — spend it, cover it, argue about it. The playbook manufactures that action: (1) create demand directly (ask merchants to accept it), (2) teach a whole community to issue real press releases so the story travels, (3) time it to the 24-hour news cycle so coverage compounds, and (4) use hashtags to make the public itself the distribution network. Done together, these move prices and get the attention of newsrooms and, eventually, Washington. That is the through-line from Bitcoin at $5 to STEEM at $4 to HIVE at its all-time high.

2. Demand Creation — Asking Merchants to Accept Bitcoin

In the Bitcoin-at-~$5 era (roughly 2012–2013), the work was not trading or mining — it was demand creation at the merchant level. By his account, he emailed major corporations directly: "I have Bitcoins I want to spend at your store — can you please start accepting Bitcoin?" One documented reply came from Brookstone, which answered "Soon." The point was simple and ahead of its time: a currency becomes real when you can buy things with it, so the fastest way to legitimize Bitcoin was to generate visible merchant demand rather than wait for speculators.

3. The Press-Release Training — Teaching a Community to Make News

The second move was teaching ordinary crypto users to write AP-style press releases — the inverted-pyramid lede, the dateline, the boilerplate, and the "###" end mark that tells an editor the release is over. He taught this first in the DevCoin community and then, at scale, on Steemit. The insight: a blockchain that pays people to post is also a newswire if its users know how to write news. Instead of one PR person, you get a thousand — each publishing to a censorship-resistant chain and emailing it out.

4. 2016 — The Steemit Wave and the STEEM Surge

The clearest documented result came in mid-2016. As Steemit's reward model drew users and the press-release wave pushed the story outward, STEEM went from about $0.23 on July 1, 2016 to a high of ~$4.45 on July 19, 2016 — briefly one of the top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization (~$405M), before a hack and a sharp decline. Mainstream and business press began covering Steemit in that window (Rolling Stone's Neil Strauss wrote about it; Investopedia's Adam Hayes called it a "disruptive blockchain-based media community"); by his account, CNBC also covered Steemit after the press-release training, which he ties directly to the surge. The price move is a matter of public record; the specific chain of cause and effect is his account of a campaign he was running at the center of.

5. The 24-Hour News Cycle

The timing layer is the 24-hour news cycle — the fact that cable and online news must fill every hour, every day, and are therefore hungry for a story, an angle, or a fight. The playbook feeds that hunger on purpose: release when the cycle is open, give reporters a ready-made narrative (a price move, a confrontation, a quotable line), and let each outlet's coverage become the next outlet's reason to cover it. A small actor who understands the cycle can punch far above their budget, because the cycle amplifies whatever it is handed. This is the same logic behind MELEK's modern Herald outreach engine and Hathor — automate the release, the targeting, and the timing.

6. Hashtags — Making the Public the Distribution Network

The fourth move turns the audience into the wire. A hashtag lets a message travel without any newsroom's permission, and a well-timed one can become the story itself. The record and his account include several:

7. Roots: Cannabis Activism and the Denver 4/20 Scene

The organizing instinct behind all of this began in cannabis activism — marijuana YouTube, the forums (Rollitup, Shroomery), and the on-the-ground 4/20 rallies. The era's flashpoint is well documented: at Denver's Civic Center Park 4/20 rally on April 20, 2013, gunfire broke out around 5 p.m. — after the mass 4:20 smoke-out, during a performance ahead of the closing remarks — and three people were wounded (a man, a woman, and a juvenile; all expected to recover). The rally's organizer, Miguel Lopez, was nearly trampled in the stampede and canceled the festival's second day out of respect for the victims. It was national news (CBS News, PRI/Reuters, Westword, Reason). By his account, the operator was part of that Denver cannabis-activism world — the same scene of rally organizers (Miguel Lopez and others), hash-makers, and street-level advocates, among whom he names Tiny Martinez and AJ the Hashman. (Those two are from his own account; they did not surface in the public record on a first pass — the publicly documented Denver-4/20 figures include Ken Gorman, Miguel Lopez, Larisa Bolivar, and attorney Rob Corry — so they are noted here as his recollection pending a source.) The through-line to everything else in this article is community organizing: the same person who later taught crypto users to write press releases also taught people to petition the DEA under the RFRA — using the DEA Form 225 religious-exemption pathway the Supreme Court forced open in Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita (2006) — turning activism into a repeatable, teachable procedure.

8. Reaching the Anchors — and Washington

The campaigns increasingly pointed the public at the newsrooms: getting people to tweet directly at cable hosts — most clearly Megyn Kelly (documented via #Fuckabee and the subsequent lawsuit), and, by his account, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity as well. By his own account — the part he frames as "things we know but can't fully prove" — the bridge that carried his name from the online subcultures into the main seam of the news was TYT (The Young Turks). From the Harlem atheist-vs-Christian "Great Debate" and his #MelaninExplosion hashtag, he was watching and commenting live on TYT (Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian) and on Joe Rogan, and then on Fox; in his telling the thread ran "from Hollywood to DC," and the on-air talent began to register that he was watching and tweeting at them. His marker for the reach: a period when typing "Wag" into search auto-suggested "Waging a Real War on Christmas," the line he was pushing in those comment sections. That layer is explicitly his recollection, not a documented chain — but it is the exact bridge he describes, and what IS documented is where it landed. The documented end of this thread is institutional attention — and it is verifiable in the federal docket system. In 2018 he filed a federal lawsuit docketed as Gallagher v. NSA, No. 1:18-cv-01525 (U.S. District Court, District of Colorado, filed June 18, 2018; appealed to the Tenth Circuit as No. 19-1287 in 2019). The complaint — public on Scribd as "NSA-Journalist-Lawsuit" (document 385527169) and confirmed on CourtListener — names the NSA, FBI, Twitter, Megyn Kelly, Joe Rogan, and American Atheists together, and reaches into Southern-District-of-New-York surveillance case law (WikiMedia v. NSA; Jewel v. NSA; US v. Awadallah). The "Washington got involved" thread is literal: a companion case, Gallagher v. Congress, No. 1:18-cv-02327, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on September 25, 2018. The record also notes Fox News analysts confirmed reading his material. He was directly present in Joe Rogan's world in this period: active on the Joe Rogan forum and commenting live on Rogan's YouTube broadcasts as he watched them — the forum (after some eighteen years) was later taken down, and Rogan is named as a defendant in the federal complaint. In parallel he ran with the American Atheists circle — appearing on the YouTube show "Atheist Analysis," which connected to David Silverman, the then-president of American Atheists, and the surrounding atheist-debate networks. The same documented presence placed him in the comedy-and-cannabis world of the era: his 2014 posts list Doug Benson — alongside Joe Rogan, Sa Neter, Adam Kokesh, Tommy Sotomayor, and Norm Macdonald — among the shows he watched and commented on live, and by his account Benson knew who he was. (Note on the record: the documented "Silverman" here is David Silverman of American Atheists; a claim about the comedian Sarah Silverman is not something the evidence supports, and should not be asserted without a source.)

9. The Graphene Years — BLURT, HIVE, VKBT, and the Secret Service

The playbook carried onto the Graphene social chains (Steem, Hive, Blurt), and the reach kept showing up in the numbers:

10. Why This Is in the Library

This is the origin story of the machine MELEK now runs on purpose. The press release, the 24-hour news cycle, the hashtag, and the "teach everyone to publish" principle are exactly what Hathor (the AI witness) and Herald (the outreach + creative engine) automate — on a chain that pays the people doing the posting, instead of a platform that merely uses them. The playbook was proven by hand, over a decade, by one person; MELEK is that playbook built into infrastructure. (See Economics 101 and 102 for how attention moves markets, and Money, Currencies, and the Debt System for the merchant-adoption logic of demand creation.)

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