Bitcoin Is Here To Stay And Bitcoiners Aren’t Going Anywhere

By Bitcoin News On Oct 29, 2022

This is a transcribed excerpt of “Bitcoin Audible” Guy’s Take #59 – “We’re Not Going Anywhere” by Guy Swann, adapted into article form for Bitcoin Magazine.

We’re gonna do a “Guy’s Take” today and we’re going to do it on Bitcoin Maximalism.

I think there is a difference between Bitcoin Maximalism and Bitcoin Maximalists. There is a subset of “Bitcoin Maximalists” who have been in Bitcoin for like a year and they have embraced the culture of anti-crypto without even being able to argue why; they’re Bitcoiners because they came into Bitcoin. My view of Bitcoin Maximalism is different from these types of people. I have a really strong idea of what Bitcoin Maximalism is — and it did not change in the last two years with all of these new people who are jumping on the bandwagon and using it as a bludgeon on Twitter.

I want to use Pete Rizzo’s “How To Be A Bitcoin Maximalist” and Nic Carter’s “Setting The Record Straight” as a foundation to start. One of the things that Rizzo did in his piece was to separate “Maximalist” from “Maximalism.” I want to argue the “what” and the “why” of Bitcoin Maximalism as I see it, the reason that I am only focused on Bitcoin and why I think it’s both a logical and morally sound position to hold.

Some general points I want to cover:

Where did Bitcoin Maximalism come from, and why did the anti-crypto culture of animosity arise?
Where did crypto go wrong?
What is Bitcoin Maximalism?
What is the goal and the fundamental reason for Bitcoin Maximalism?
What is the risk of Bitcoin failing?

Where Did The Toxicity Come From? Where Did Crypto Go Wrong?

Let’s start with where all the animosity came from. It came from multiple cycles of watching an entire market of nonsense: scams, Ponzi schemes, the massive initial coin offering (ICO) bubble, thousands and thousands of tokens, obvious copy-pastas of other projects, brazen attempts at constant seigniorage, etc. People who got into this space were getting obliterated. They were getting robbed, and they were looking at crypto and saying, “Man, I hate Bitcoin,” when it had always been Bitcoiners that specifically were trying to call out and stop that sort of behavior.

Going all the way back to the beginning, there were ethics built within the Bitcoin space because of the example of Bitcoin not being pre-mined and the project being made public from the very start. Satoshi Nakamoto kept the project running for two years when it was worth $0, while he was making absolutely nothing. It was an experiment; it was a completely fair launch. There were no investors and he didn’t seek a company to buy it out. It was just an open-source project. Nakamoto was trying to see if people could come on board to support this thing and to test it out to see if it actually worked.

As we got into 2012-2013 and the space changed, people started thinking about how you could use this technology for something else. Then these attempts of using the same structure to create an entirely different network for an entirely different purpose. All of those early projects tried incredibly hard to be very ethical; they were actually honest attempts at creating a new project and at fairly releasing another one of these cryptocurrencies. They didn’t start with pre-mines; that was part of the presumed ethics. There were a lot of those unspecified rules.

Crypto just threw it out the window when a mass of people showed up and said, “Screw it, we’re gonna ICO, we’re gonna issue everybody our new tokens.” It was easy in the flood of fresh users with no understanding, so they dismissed Bitcoiners’ denouncements by saying, “Oh, all the old Bitcoiners are just curmudgeons.” But many of us were saying, “No! You’re paying for something that somebody else made for free!” This is the whole problem that Bitcoin is trying to solve, and all they did was copy and paste the Bitcoin code so that they could recreate the fiat system where they are the masters, where they’re the ones at the top of the ladder. That is what 99.9% of those projects are still doing.

I dealt with the personal dilemma myself. I could have easily made a copycat coin and tried to sell it. I could have made millions of dollars. Anybody could have. In 2011-2014, you could have made any dumb coin for any dumb excuse. In fact, all the way into 2017, you barely had to have any competence. There were websites where you could just punch in characteristics and settings and it would spit out a client that had a fork of Bitcoin with a different mining algorithm, or a different block time, or a different block size. You could start mining it yourself from the beginning. You could pay $20 on Fiverr for a website, and then you could make millions, some even billions of dollars.

So, if you’re wondering where the “toxicity” and animosity comes from, it is not due to a lack of knowledge; it is due to too much. I am not going to suddenly forget how scammy these projects have been and how this all started. How they bastardized the ethics of the space. In cryptographic communities, there were always rules that you never roll your own crypto, you never design your own system; you always design it out in the open or it’s never going to be properly tested and you’ll never know if it’s secure. These were basic rules and anyone who came in and created their own algorithm was thought of as a crank.

Bitcoin Is A Moral Imperative, Not Socially Motivated

What you believe is moral or ethical should not change based on social acceptance. That’s exactly why I’m still a Bitcoin Maximalist: because my ethics didn’t change. The leaders of these projects — Ethereum being a prime example — used their position to explicitly break the rules of the system for their own benefit. I can’t just pretend that all of that didn’t happen or that somehow it doesn’t matter anymore because there’s so many new people that nobody even knows about it! That doesn’t change anything for me. I don’t throw away my principles just because abandoning them has been normalized and no one else cares anymore. If I had done that, I never would have been a Bitcoiner in the first place.

This is one of the appeals in the idea that “Bitcoin Maximalism is dead.” People frame it like, “The numbers are dwindling, you should get out while you still can.” I find that funny, because it is the exact appeal to social acceptance, to the norm. I actually believe in what I believe for a reason and the fact that someone else thinks people are walking away from it doesn’t change my mind. If it did, then I didn’t believe anything in the first place — I was just following the crowd. I have not engaged in the exploration that I have for tens of thousands of hours to reach the conclusion of Bitcoin Maximalism so that I could get approval from people! I actually think it matters.

I don’t know of a better way to help Bitcoin succeed. If I get ostracized by “Bitcoin Maximalists,” it will not change my perspective on Bitcoin Maximalism — on being bitcoin-only. And if it does, I should rightfully be called out for it. I was never a Bitcoin Maximalist because I thought they were the “in-group.” I believed in Bitcoin for years while I saw a system of property rights, a system of money where the state was not involved and their political control was made obsolete. I gladly held my position and I gladly took on my exploration while everybody thought I was stupid. I am not confused about why I am here.

Now, that’s not to say that I don’t respect the opinions or perspectives of the people who offer legitimate arguments, who have a completely different perspective and different belief about what crypto is. There are plenty of “crypto” people who have solid opinions and whose thoughts I value. I’ve read articles and pieces by a lot of these people on “Bitcoin Audible.” I actually appreciate the pushback, the challenges, against those who call themselves Bitcoin Maximalists. I think a useful Bitcoin Maximalist will take legitimate concerns and recognize where there are trade-offs, limitations and places for improvement. If Bitcoiners aren’t the ones trying to figure out where Bitcoin is subpar or needs to be improved, we are a vulnerability and we are lowering its defenses. Bitcoin is an anti-fragile thing; it thrives under attack and under adversarial thinking. Where we have lost that, we owe it to ourselves to do better. There are a lot of “Bitcoiners” who just don’t want to talk about uncomfortable things.

What Is Bitcoin Maximalism?

The idea that Bitcoin Maximalists are some homogeneous group that all cultishly believe the exact same thing is laughable. I know Maximalists who are carnivores; I know some who are vegan. I know some who are politically liberal and some who are full-on MAGA Trump lovers; some who are libertarian and others who are die-hard anarchists. I know some who are policy makers and think we need to change the state and I know some who think talking to politicians is the most profound waste of time. I know some who are environmentalists and I know some who would literally buy a poster that says, “Fossil fuels are the greatest thing that have ever existed on this planet.” I know some Bitcoiners who are devout Christians, Muslims or subscribe to numerous other religions that are historically in conflict with one another, but will sit across the table laughing and joking.

I log in to Twitter and I see these people argue with each other all the time. I go to conferences and listen to them argue. And yet, the crazy thing about it is that they all agree on one thing: Bitcoin. They can argue about all of these other issues, but know that they don’t matter because something that matters more keeps them together as a community. Bitcoin Maximalists are not some homogeneous group who believe or behave or think all the same things. I actually think of them as people who don’t agree on anything, except for the fact that Bitcoin is the most important thing to focus on. That’s the only thing that I think they generally agree with!

What is Bitcoin Maximalism? This is where Matt Corallo surprised me with his thread about maximalists on Twitter. He posted a poll giving people two options to define Bitcoin Maximalism:

I’m disinterested in non-Bitcoin cryptocurrency systems because I’m only interested in payment tech and not other uses of cryptocurrency systems.
Cryptocurrency systems outside of Bitcoin need to be fought because they’re scams and hurt Bitcoin.

If people think that either of these options is the definition of Bitcoin Maximalism, then we have done a horrible job at communicating it. There are so many attempts at trying to define it and trying to narrow down exactly what it is, but I’ll be completely honest, this really did surprise me. I answered as best as I could:

Read More: Bitcoin Is Here To Stay And Bitcoiners Aren’t Going Anywhere

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