In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism
We've been hearing for years that the future is blockchain, not Bitcoin. The future of the world won't be one major cryptocurrency, or even a few, but many cryptocurrencies - and the winning ones will have strong leadership under one central roof to adapt rapidly to users' needs for scale. Bitcoin is a boomer coin, and Ethereum is soon to follow; it will be newer and more energetic assets that attract the new waves of mass users who don't care about weird libertarian ideology or "self-sovereign verification", are turned off by toxicity and anti-government mentality, and just want blockchain defi and games that are fast and work.
But what if this narrative is all wrong, and the ideas, habits and practices of Bitcoin maximalism are in fact pretty close to correct? What if Bitcoin is far more than an outdated pet rock tied to a network effect? What if Bitcoin maximalists actually deeply understand that they are operating in a very hostile and uncertain world where there are things that need to be fought for, and their actions, personalities and opinions on protocol design deeply reflect that fact? What if we live in a world of honest cryptocurrencies (of which there are very few) and grifter cryptocurrencies (of which there are very many), and a healthy dose of intolerance is in fact necessary to prevent the former from sliding into the latter? That is the argument that this post will make.
We live in a dangerous world, and protecting freedom is serious business
Hopefully, this is much more obvious now than it was six weeks ago, when many people still seriously thought that Vladimir Putin is a misunderstood and kindly character who is merely trying to protect Russia and save Western Civilization from the gaypocalypse. But it's still worth repeating. We live in a dangerous world, where there are plenty of bad-faith actors who do not listen to compassion and reason.
A blockchain is at its core a security technology - a technology that is fundamentally all about protecting people and helping them survive in such an unfriendly world. It is, like the Phial of Galadriel, "a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out". It is not a low-cost light, or a fluorescent hippie energy-efficient light, or a high-performance light. It is a light that sacrifices on all of those dimensions to optimize for one thing and one thing only: to be a light that does when it needs to do when you're facing the toughest challenge of your life and there is a friggin twenty foot spider staring at you in the face.