Humanity has not learned how to scale.
Everywhere we go we can find examples of tribalism.
The context is irrelevant.
Tribalism is everywhere.
- Mean girls in high school are tribalist.
- My friends are better than your friends.
- Nationalists are tribalist.
- My country is better than your country.
- Sports fans are tribalist.
- My team is better than your team.
- Money itself is tribalist.
- Poor people are the worst.
Bitcoin maximalists are extra-special hypocrites.
People just can't help to try and create small elitist groups that lord over the less fortunate groups. The pyramid is the most resilient shape. We create our socioeconomic structures in the form of a pyramid for a very good reason. Should the system fail than those at the bottom will be sucked through the meat grinder, and not those at the top. This allows those in power to secure their positions of power and build dynasties that can last for hundreds if not thousands of years. It only makes sense that those in power would build a pyramid to ensure that if something goes wrong they'll still be on top.
The foundation of tribalism is rooted in scarcity. Back in the day there were simply not enough resources to go around for everyone to survive and thrive. Now we are trapped somewhat in the opposite situation, where resources are heavily abundant but we have to make them artificially scarce so that these medieval systems we've put into place don't break down at the seams.
It's somewhat comical that hive species like ants and bees had figured out this evolution long before humans even existed in their current form. We seem to be trapped in a constant cycle of building empires that are doomed to implode due to their inability to scale. At the core of this corruption lies greed itself and the inability to trust humans that ascend to power positions. Perhaps we need rules without rulers.
The Swarm governs itself.
But back to maximalist hypocrisy:
Bitcoin maximalists are the worst kind of tribalists, because they pretend to want to evolve while simultaneously backsliding into the same old habits of naivety and greed we've seen in the past. Anyone who believes in decentralization would know that thousands of new currencies popping up is a good thing. There is no competition here. There are no ______ killers. Calling everything a shitcoin that isn't Bitcoin makes one look like a complete toolbag.
It is a heinous double-standard to assume that Bitcoin is the only valid form of currency in the world and that all currency will eventually die and Bitcoin will reign supreme over all the other foolish peasants that dared oppose it. That is a ridiculous paradox of cognitive dissonance; a self-defining non-reality that cannot exist.
These kinds of situations always remind me of my gaming days back in the World of Warcraft era. These nerds in World of Warcraft, who were mercilessly bullied in high school and totally powerless suddenly found themselves inside a niche power position inside this social game (Guild Leaders). They then proceeded to immediately flip and turn into shittier people than their own bullies in high school. It was a mind-blowing transition to behold.
Such hypocrisy, much WOW.
And that was only 1 person holding power over the heads of 40 other people. Just think about how bad it gets when one person can lord over millions of others. The power goes to their heads instantly and they immediately become corrupted by the power that was bestowed to them. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, every time. You aint special. You're not going to magically be the one person immune to these happenstances. It is comical how many people just assume that things would be better if they were in charge.
But it doesn't actually matter what Maximalists think.
Now this is the truly funny part. It does not make a damn bit of difference what these toxic tribalist hypocrites have to say. They work for us, and there is not a damn thing they can do about it. I direct you now to the first blog post I ever wrote on this chain:
December 18th, 2017
The Cryptocurrency Bubble vs Dot Com
How glorious it is that this is my first post ever. Like wow, seriously though.
People are still comparing crypto to Dot Com like total toolbags, acting like they know what they are talking about. Comparing Bitcoin to Amazon is like saying that Amazon was the first Dot Com business ever invented and that all other Dot Com companies were just sad clones of Amazon. It's nonsensical.
Back to my first post ever.
Gonna reread it now and grab some quotes.
In my wildest dream I now think of Bitcoin as the great leader of an army. Every altcoin is a new soldier. Many of these new soldiers even have better armor and weapons than Bitcoin itself, but far less training. Some are simple farm boys marching into slaughter. The enemy? Greed. Bitcoin will lead the charge, breach the gates for all his loyal soldiers, and will die valiantly for his noble cause: to protect the weak and and expose our evil overlords for all to see. I expect to see a financial and industrial revolution of biblical proportion, where open source decentralization and transparency trump the glorified mobster society that we live in today.
Wow I wrote that in 2017 and I'm way more educated now.
It is even more obvious now that Bitcoin is a living breathing entity; it is nothing like a zombie corporation that can live forever as long as it eats enough flesh. I believe Bitcoin (and every other crypto) will act as such:
- They will be born.
- They will live.
- They will be children.
- They will be teen-agers.
- They will live out their 20's, 30's, mid life crisis, etc.
- They will grow old.
- They will die.
And I'm starting to think that crypto will live similar lives as the humans themselves that utilize them. Bitcoin is not immortal, and that is a feature, not a bug. Cryptocurrencies are going to have life expectancies and primes just as a person would. Of course we are on the brink of war combined with the fact that the genetics of crypto are still in the infant stages, so there will be far more fatalities during these opening phases of metaverse seeding.
In fact we can see this playing out right now.
Bitcoin is maturing.
It will be a teenager is less than one month.
The market already feels different than it was before.
And it will continue to mature.
So when I say Bitcoin is the meat-shield...
Bitcoin has already broken through the gates of the walled garden. Look around. How many centralized projects exist today that absolutely could not have existed before Bitcoin? There were actually multiple digital currencies that died instantly during the dot com era because they were centralized. Now those same exact projects can pop up and Bitcoin defends them simply by existing. How crazy is that?
So it actually doesn't matter how toxic and ridiculous these self-centered tribalist hypocrites are. Bitcoin is not a store of value; it is a store of security at the infant stages of a digital war. If you were about to join an army in a war against multiple Goliaths you'd probably going to want some security. Right?
Another analogy.
Think about the legacy economy as a herd of dinosaurs that would trample any competition underfoot before they can grow up to compete. This is exactly how regulation works. Once a business becomes "too big to fail" they capture the regulators themselves and bend the rules to squash the competition.
Bitcoin is like an annoying gopher building tunnels underground. The dinosaurs can't squish it. And now other animals are also using those same tunnels to avoid getting crushed by the dinosaurs overhead. The infrastructure being built here is cooperative and synergistic. It is a constantly expanding network, not a pyramid reaching toward the sky. This is the nature of flat architecture. These dinosaurs are about to fall into tarpits and quicksand as the ground gives way. But don't worry, we'll use their corpses to feed the emergent economy being built underground. We'll make it to the surface eventually, once all those annoying dinos are gone.
Conclusion
Are maximalists cringe? Yeah, of course they are. Have you seen Michael Saylor in any interview ever? The manic ramblings of a hypocrite leveraging a "rocket science" background into paradoxical economic prophecy. More like paratoxic, amirite? Still, we see that he is on our team, and no matter how cringe and ridiculous his politics are, this becomes largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of emergent anarcho-capitalism. Individual politics become meaningless in an environment of actual freedom.
Bad puns aside, it is important to reiterate that it doesn't matter what the Bitcoin community thinks. Satoshi Nakamoto was not a maximalist, and they created a system that is fully neutral. This neutral playground doesn't care about who thinks what. All that matters is that the environment can't be regulated or shut down by an outside entity. Bitcoin is here to stay for at least another 50 years.
While all this tribalism points to the idea that everything is in competition with one another, the exact opposite is true. All of these open source systems are building on top of each other and enhancing each other's ability. Just look at Ripple and XRP. How is it even possible that they are not only still in a legal battle with the SEC, but they also might win? The answer is that Bitcoin has made the project exponentially stronger than it would have been without it. Without Bitcoin, XRP would have collapsed into nothing immediately. The same is true for most if not all networks out there. Bitcoin was the seed of revolution, and it would be foolish to discount it one way or the other.
So when the regulators come knocking at everyone's door and pulling on all the low hanging fruit: the response should be obvious. Climb up the security tree and hang onto Bitcoin, because at this point is essentially unassailable and even defended by several billionaires and corporations themselves. Certainly, this is not an ideal situation, but crypto was never meant to be ideal in the first place. These were always "good enough" solutions, not great ones. Hide behind the meat-shield. Bitcoin is going to absorb a lot of these arrows without even flinching.
Return from Maximalists don't realize they are the meat shield. to edicted's Web3 Blog
