Bitcoin maximalism is the idea that you need to fix the money first
The market for money has been distorted by the state for so long, it hardly existed before Bitcoin arrived. So excuse us for concentrating on the main issue at hand.
Alright. It seems like we have decided to spend the "cryptowinter" arguing about who is the coolest kid on the block: Bitcoin maxis or altcoiners.
This isn't a new debate but the recent defection of Nic "rising star" Carter and some others from the camp of "toxic maxis" has restarted it. Then there was this thread by Bitcoin core dev Matt Corallo.
Now I'll gladly start here. Obviously Matt knows what he is talking about regarding Bitcoin. He knows way, way, way more than I do when it comes to the technical side of things. Compared to him I'm nobody.
But still, I'd call myself a "Bitcoin maxi".
And I disagree that they are a "dying breed". In fact, if anything, our camp is growing.
Have people forgotten about Luna already? A whole new class of maxis was born the day it collapsed…
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We all have our reasons for focusing on Bitcoin. Mine is deeply personal: I want to fix the money. Maybe that's cheesy or arrogant. But ever since I realised that our monetary system is broken, this has been my obsession.
I didn't get Bitcoin for years! I was a goldbug, a nocoiner, an altcoiner first.
It took me about seven years to end up a "Bitcoin maxi" and the pivotal moment was when I decided for myself that it's now probably too late to "get rich" with Bitcoin.
That little thought opened up a whole new world to me.
So where do all the non-maxis come from?
Since then I've met all kinds of people. And one things for sure. The real Bitcoin maxis are a completely different group than the rest of the crypto people. They think and act differently. They are building a social network on top of the monetary network.
So what about the non-maxis?
My experience has been that many people who came to Bitcoin with a purely technical perspective like to look at newer projects (altcoins) and what they want to achieve. After all, wasn't it the intellectual curiosity that brought them to Bitcoin in the first place?
Many of these "nerds" (I mean this in the nicest way possible, I love you all!) also came to Bitcoin early and are now rich beyond their imaginations - they might even be a little bit bored with Bitcoin by now.
For them, being "Bitcoin only" doesn't make much sense. Matt has contributed more to Bitcoin than I ever will. Why shouldn't he be curious about other things? Good for him!
Number go up - that’s how Bitcoin lures you in
Nic Carter comes from the "investing money" side of things. This is where most altcoiners come from, the small and the big ones.
That's a different group.
Some were early and already got rich with Bitcoin. They now look for their next big payday.
Others feel they "missed" Bitcoin and look for their opportunity to grow.
I can understand them better because I was one of them.
In fact, I imagine that almost all newcomers fall into this group.
Number go up.
That's how Bitcoin (and crypto) lures you in.
And that's ok. It's like a Trojan horse. Someone once said: "Bitcoin is a revolution that protects itself by making the revolutionaries rich and incorruptible."
Well, turns out the lust for ever more wealth and status is part of human nature today and even rich Bitcoiners can be enticed by even more money. No surprise after decades of inflation, fiat money, consumerism and high time preference.
That’s also the crux of my argument here.
We need to separate money and state
Clausewitz said that "war is the continuation of politics by other means."
Altcoins, DeFi, NFTs, proof of stake and all that is the continuation of fiat money by other means.
I get way more out of fighting to fix the money than to chase the next fiat high.
I want to play my part in making sure that the Bitcoin network survives and thrives. I don't know much about computers or trading but I know how to write, talk, make podcasts and videos - so that's what I'm doing.
I want to see the fiat experiment end. I want to know what that will do to our precious investment theories.
And to be honest, I don't see this as limiting either. Scarcity is so important to us as human beings, it literally is what gets us going. Ask any trust fund baby about their life.
I think money is a good like any other. I think the market for money has been distorted by the state for so long, it hardly existed before Bitcoin arrived.
We need to separate money and state.
I think Bitcoin is our best (and maybe only) shot to do this.
That's why I Bitcoin. That’s why I’m a maximalist. We need to fix the money first.
Then we can talk about the value of your JPG of an ape :)
This post is sponsored by…
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21bitcoin is a Bitcoin-only app, not an exchange. No distraction, individual savings plan, very low fees, first class personal support, and a German bank account. Based in the Austrian Alps, available throughout Europe. Download now.
I didn't start off as a maximalist. I was interested in ethereum, thought iota sounded pretty cool, maybe ripple would go somewhere, etc. I still remember the exact moment I became a bitcoin maximalist; i was sitting on the toilet thinking about the precise mechanism bitcoin's proof of work algorithm uses, and realized that even slight changes break it.
During the 2017 ICO boom i thought about making my own coin. "Proof of work is wasteful", i mimicked other people saying. It sounded right. Bunch of coal being burned to generate random numbers? Isn't there something useful we can do instead? I thought i knew just what would work.
I was long obsessed with the P vs NP problem (I have a tattoo, even) and thought that it might be doable for a blockchain to generate solutions to NP complete problems as proof of work. Storing the solutions to the problems on chain would then lead to an ever-growing database of solutions to NP complete problems. Wouldn't that be amazing? Any time someone needs a solution to one of these problems, they could first look up on the chain and see if a solution already exists.
But i wanted to make sure i wasn't selling people on something i couldn't deliver. So I wanted to make sure this thing could actually work. I remember the precise moment i figured out it couldn't, i was sitting on the toilet thinking about _why_ bitcoin is setup the way it is, and what kinds of strategies bad actor could pull off under my imagined coin, that bitcoin's design presents. And that's when I became a maximalist.
I have also experimented a lot with alternative usecases for decentralized blockchains. I’ve tried to build a chain for selling products (e.g. second hand). The idea was not even to add a coin to it, but just a way to interface with product offerings.
I realized at some point that it made no sense to have all offerings permanently on a blockchain, or anything other than money for that matter.
I’m still fascinated by the idea of doing opensource decentralized platforms (e.g. for sales), but I’m now focussing on leveraging Bitcoin nodes for running such decentralized applications and using the Lightning as the underlying monetary network.
I’m also writing an article on this and I have a project up on GitHub: GitHub.com/bureaugewas/Ddist