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.
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.
When I got into it, 2012, there was almost nothing else. I vividly remember saying on freenode bitcoin chat "bitcoin is an avenging angel that will bring a wealth transfer from the most evil and vicious to the good".
My intro was via Silk Road. I landed in jail and did some time homeless for a lot of the last decade and finally broke into the dev biz working on a craptocurrency called parallelcoin. I was intimately experiencing several parts of the protocol design, and at the same time mastering Golang.
Then, thanks to this experience I got the confidence, and I emphasise confidence because my reason for not going all in on Bitcoin was the cost of running a node, the big hump of buying a miner, and being so far from where I was born, caught up in the struggle of where to live.
Then I got some work working for kleptocurrencies. Ethereum clones at first, and then this year I finally got a paid gig working on a Cosmos based system.
My consistent experience out of 3 projects was that kleptocurrencies are run by psychopaths.
As I was in the middle of the Cosmos project, Luna blew up, and that's a Cosmos based chain.
It flipped me. At that point, I'm like, ok, I am still teh crypto system programmer but I can't do this working for scams business anymore. From the perspective of enabling psychos, to the fact that the guys inside these companies are, well, psychos too.
I am only just scraping by right now, I have enough bitcoin stashed to scrape another 2 months and I have to have already done a month before that time ends or I'm in the poo.
I also have an extra double plus disability in that I absolutely hate the trendy programming language so many kleptocurrencies embraced, Rust, Oh yes I can work with that junk but I SO DON'T WANT TO. To me, Go is to programming as Bitcoin is to money. There just is no substitute. To me, this is why Lightning is all written in Go. The best bitcoin light client is written in Go. Only garbage programmers hate go.
To me, the vision of the future is with Bitcoin and Go at the top of the pile, where they just simply are. So I'm maybe a little precarious here but I know this is the right way to go. Mozilla, the creator of Rust, refused to ratify W3C DIDs because they were going to be notarized on Bitcoin.
C'mon, bitcoiners, let's not comfort the crappy C++ clone that is Rust, build our stuff as much as possible in Go, the language of choice of all of the old school hard core Bitcoiners from the early days after Satoshi left.
Thank you for this article, Niko. Many people misunderstand what “maximalism” means and immediately associate it with a hate for altcoins, etc. Rather, maximalists are just choosing to prioritise Bitcoin.
I am curious though--do you think that we can make progress on both the Bitcoin and broader crypto front simultaneously?
By the way, I’d really love to hear your thoughts on this recent piece I made on economic arguments for Bitcoin (it is a response to Noah Smith’s piece). Would deeply appreciate any thoughts you might have!
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
When I got into it, 2012, there was almost nothing else. I vividly remember saying on freenode bitcoin chat "bitcoin is an avenging angel that will bring a wealth transfer from the most evil and vicious to the good".
My intro was via Silk Road. I landed in jail and did some time homeless for a lot of the last decade and finally broke into the dev biz working on a craptocurrency called parallelcoin. I was intimately experiencing several parts of the protocol design, and at the same time mastering Golang.
Then, thanks to this experience I got the confidence, and I emphasise confidence because my reason for not going all in on Bitcoin was the cost of running a node, the big hump of buying a miner, and being so far from where I was born, caught up in the struggle of where to live.
Then I got some work working for kleptocurrencies. Ethereum clones at first, and then this year I finally got a paid gig working on a Cosmos based system.
My consistent experience out of 3 projects was that kleptocurrencies are run by psychopaths.
As I was in the middle of the Cosmos project, Luna blew up, and that's a Cosmos based chain.
It flipped me. At that point, I'm like, ok, I am still teh crypto system programmer but I can't do this working for scams business anymore. From the perspective of enabling psychos, to the fact that the guys inside these companies are, well, psychos too.
I am only just scraping by right now, I have enough bitcoin stashed to scrape another 2 months and I have to have already done a month before that time ends or I'm in the poo.
I also have an extra double plus disability in that I absolutely hate the trendy programming language so many kleptocurrencies embraced, Rust, Oh yes I can work with that junk but I SO DON'T WANT TO. To me, Go is to programming as Bitcoin is to money. There just is no substitute. To me, this is why Lightning is all written in Go. The best bitcoin light client is written in Go. Only garbage programmers hate go.
To me, the vision of the future is with Bitcoin and Go at the top of the pile, where they just simply are. So I'm maybe a little precarious here but I know this is the right way to go. Mozilla, the creator of Rust, refused to ratify W3C DIDs because they were going to be notarized on Bitcoin.
C'mon, bitcoiners, let's not comfort the crappy C++ clone that is Rust, build our stuff as much as possible in Go, the language of choice of all of the old school hard core Bitcoiners from the early days after Satoshi left.
You will all be assimilated. It is fate.
Thank you for this article, Niko. Many people misunderstand what “maximalism” means and immediately associate it with a hate for altcoins, etc. Rather, maximalists are just choosing to prioritise Bitcoin.
I am curious though--do you think that we can make progress on both the Bitcoin and broader crypto front simultaneously?
By the way, I’d really love to hear your thoughts on this recent piece I made on economic arguments for Bitcoin (it is a response to Noah Smith’s piece). Would deeply appreciate any thoughts you might have!
https://nanithemoney.substack.com/p/economic-misconceptions-of-the-anti