This is an opinion piece by Shinobi, a self-taught educator in the Bitcoin space and tech-minded Bitcoin podcast host.
What is Bitcoin Maximalism? People never stop asking this question either to defend it as a virtuous label or to attack it as a symbol of all evil and corruption in this ecosystem. This question is in my opinion as pointless as the next one.
- “What is liberal?”
- “What is maintenance?”
- “What is a Christian?”
No one has the same definitions or the same concepts. These labels always mean very different things to different people. They are associated with different identities, different behaviors, different morals and values. No matter what the dictionaries and definitions say in the strict sense, there is no consensus on them.
In a discussion on a topic like this, it makes absolutely no sense to stick to labels and try to apply them universally to everyone, rather than focusing on the actual conceptual crux of the conversation. The root of the problem has nothing to do with labels, it’s all about behavior. Now let’s talk about behavior.
One of the core behaviors commonly associated with maximalism is the focus on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the longest running project in this ecosystem. It is the most sane system compared to all systems ever developed and is very conservative in its approach to changes and upgrades. Everything in this area of assets is highly speculative in nature, but bitcoin is the one with the longest running and most consistent market performance, and has been the overall market leader throughout the entire history of all assets in this area. It holds the top spot in terms of value. space. Approaching things from this reality and focusing on Bitcoin over all other assets in this ecosystem is a perfectly rational economic decision. Yes, investing in bitcoin, like everything else, is still speculative, but in terms of the financial risks involved with bitcoin, bitcoin is the least volatile asset trade in the space. I am not a day trader, nor am I a financial expert. The further you move away from Bitcoin from an investment perspective, the more skills and understanding of those activities are required to avoid getting burned. The vast majority of projects in this space blow market momentum once, crash and then never recover. Given that reality, there is absolutely nothing wrong or toxic in sticking with Bitcoin. Trying to make people aware of that reality is by no means unethical.
Another core act is the critique of other technologies in this area. In particular, it aims to demonstrate the lack of decentralization, or, more specifically, to misrepresent the extent to which something is decentralized. Bitcoin is the only system that has demonstrated extreme decentralization in this space. With Mike Hahn and Gavin Andresen still involved, block size increase to the extreme. It repelled later attempts involving large corporations. New York Agreement/UASF Big mistake to do the same.When you survived the only major exchange implosion Mount Gox sunk, bitfinex hack,bust Silk road And even huge nation-states like China are slowly creeping toward banning it. Limit all mining activityBitcoin has stood strong and continued to perform in the face of everything that has been thrown at it.
Compare this to platforms like Ethereum. DAO was launched as the first large-scale experiment in decentralized coordination of financial activities on the platform, with the promise that code is law.This means that the funds locked in the DAO contract are Dead By what appears to be an unauthorized user. However, the code allowed it. It is, so to speak, “law”.
In response, the Ethereum Foundation and development team enacted a fork to trace what happened legitimately according to the rules of the system on the blockchain.Specifically, they did this because of conflicts of interest in the form of many people related to them Lose money invested in DAO.they branched many times to move forward difficulty bomb, features that make mining increasingly difficult to the point of being virtually impossible, features specifically implemented to force a switch to Proof of Stake.they have branched Change the economic issuance policy. The development plan has veered more heavily than I can count, based solely on his Vitalik Buterin’s changing ideas on how to improve the system.
Pointing out these differences is perfectly reasonable and justifiable behavior. They are very real criticisms based on reality, with very real consequences. The less decentralized it is, the more likely it is for sudden, large-scale changes to occur, with a very real impact on the value and usability of the system. This is perfectly demonstrated by recent events regarding Tornado Cash. Yes, the contract is still there.Yes, in theory you can still use it, but in practice all major API providers and wallet backends dominantly Already used blacklisted in that contract. the website was confiscated shut down Through your DNS registrar. Since most of the ways to interact with the system were centralized, interacting with its contracts required technical know-how beyond many users of the system. Pointing out these dynamics is perfectly reasonable and justified.
What are the underlying motivations behind these actions? When you focus on Bitcoin and tell people why that decision was made, set realistic expectations about how it will behave in the market. And to rectify the illusion in most people’s minds of magically figuring out how to time the market, get on the pump, and make it look like a robbery. Because most people don’t. If I were to correct the misrepresentation of the level of decentralization in other projects, it would be about enabling people to make rational decisions when interacting with them, and the potential consequences and varying degrees of is to make people aware of the risks that the decentralization of
Now that you’ve experienced some positive behaviors, let’s look at some negative ones.
Directly from the Holy Gospel prescribing Bitcoin’s success in consuming the entire global financial system and currency markets as a guaranteed divine certainty, constantly preaching as if you were a priest of the church Stock-to-flow is a perfect example of this type of behavior. In fact, all that model is a rather interesting backtest.Backtesting means a model that can verify that the market has taken a certain action In the pastIt has no predictive power and no ability to model what will happen in the future. You literally don’t have the model data needed to do so, namely the demand variables to account for changes in Bitcoin demand. The movement around the model was completely ridiculous and cult behavior. It had no rational basis at all, yet it became the dominant narrative pushed out across space. It didn’t give people any expectations or reasons. It projected the appearance of a cult.
Or, for example, calling something a scam without actually being able to offer reasonable argument or criticism in exactly the same dogmatic way. Crowds of individuals are constantly attacking these systems simply because they centrally issued tokens prior to launch and therefore are almost entirely fraudulent. Little mention is made of the actual technical flaws. For EOS, there is a concept called “virtual RAM” that limits the number of smart contracts that can exist and run on the system. The use of virtual RAM is a scarce financial resource that must be paid to own, while the EOS block signatories have complete control over the supply. This allows blocksigners to buy her RAM, sell it when it’s worth more, create more to crash the price, buy it cheap and repeat. The system-wide incentives are fully gameable by block signers rent-seeking and extracting maximum value from users in a manipulative manner. As another example, one of Ethereum’s greatest value propositions today is its use as a platform for decentralized finance. That means building exchanges and trading platforms on-chain so that people can trade peer-to-peer. A requirement for it to work is smart contracts that everyone can interact with themselves, automatically handling the facilitation of transactions. Coupled with the fact that miners (or stakers) are the first to choose transactions that interact with the contract, anyone who can engage in that interaction can front-run any usage and absorb the profits made in doing so. I can do it. Incentives are broken.
At least as far as I can see, the majority of people who criticize other projects clearly state their criticisms like “It’s an ICO, it’s a scam!” “The RAM market, or MEV, fundamentally breaks the incentives for block producers.” Such actions are neither constructive nor beneficial, and do not actually persuade people to re-evaluate their opinions of the project. . An unsubstantiated argument that “this is a scam” is completely unconvincing and does not trigger introspection or re-evaluation. It creates a jealous perception of the potential for greater profit.
Now consider the left/right classification of political positions and the four-quadrant classification. That is what is happening, and the complex realities of many different behaviors have been oversimplified into left/right categories. It’s a generic and simplistic conception of tribes. It doesn’t change people’s minds, it doesn’t prepare them to make informed decisions, it doesn’t construct them.
Think about all these behaviors, and then think about all the people you know who exhibit them in this space. Can you draw black and white lines to group them? So why is the whole conversation so utterly focused on labels and groups instead of individuals and actions? The other is rational, potentially integrative and productive.
Labels are ultimately nothing but vague and shallow social signals. virtue signaling. Actions and their impact are what ultimately shape and change things. If there is a need for discussion, it should take place. Real substantive action and rational argument, not label stripping. Who gives a shit about the label “Bitcoin Maximalism”.
This is a guest post from Shinobi. Opinions expressed are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect those of his BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.