Bitcoin maximalists are pretty ridiculous.
I mean it's easy to see how we got here. Humanity has a way of adopting toxic tribalist behaviors that lead to imperialism and domination over weaker tribes. It's hard to reverse millions of years of evolution to the contrary. Humanity needs to upgrade itself into a huge scalable hive rather than continue on with the small-tribes competing for resources model.
Bitcoin has a comically small niche.
Bitcoin's only purpose is basically to keep crypto running on bare-bones life support. The Bitcoin network is unchanging by design. It doesn't evolve by design. It's very inefficient by design. It sacrifices all efficiency for maximum security, and that's great. It makes an excellent backbone within the organism that is crypto. But it is only a backbone.
Imagine a doctor saying that the backbone is the only thing you need and that soon all life on the planet will be backbones. That's what maximalists sound like to me: a crazy scientist that has no idea what they are talking about.
But again it's easy to see how it came to this. Imagine becoming wealthy beyond your wildest dreams and then all these other projects start popping up. You'd already put your 5000 hours worth of research into Bitcoin and you're already rich. There's really no point in putting any effort into the other 'garbage' (especially when more than half of them are scams and 90% will likely not even exist in ten years). It's easy to see how the tribalist culture created by Bitcoiners turned into, "Anything that isn't Bitcoin is a shitcoin," blah blah blah. This was a very predictable outcome that aligns perfectly with other known forms of tribalist/imperialist evolutions.
Silly things that Maximalists say:
Bitcoin is Gold 2.0
So it's everything that gold is, only better? Bitcoin is a fabulous conductor used in electronics? It's cheaper than gold? No wait it's more expensive than gold. No wait it gains value faster than gold. No wait... the comparison is asinine. Bitcoin and Gold are not only comparable or even in competition, but they also synergize together and make each other stronger.
1 BTC = 1 BTC
As if anyone cares. Everyone buys Bitcoin because they are hoping that the value will go up. Saying 1 BTC = 1 BTC is irrelevant because everyone is using USD as the unit of account to measure the value of everything. No products or services are priced in BTC, and they never will be because deflationary currencies will always be eliminated from circulation by way of Gresham's Law. This is simply something people say to themselves as a substitute for HODL when the price is going down. Notice how no one says it when the price is going up. There's a problem with that logic.
POW is the only viable consensus algorithm.
Again it all comes down to the fact that maximalists are lazy or tired. They've already done the research, so everything else must be a scam. The Hive community was attacked in the exact way that a maximalist would tell us we would be destroyed. Are we destroyed? Nope, still here, and the price of the token is still x4 higher than it was back then, even after a 90% drop from the peak in November.
BTC is the only decentralized network.
This is one that particularly enrages me. EVERY SINGLE NETWORK starts out heinously centralized. Satoshi Nakamoto premined 1M Bitcoin for god's sake. To make the claim that a network needs to start out decentralized is rooted in delusion. Decentralization is a painstaking process that happens slowly over time with a lot of grinding. Also, decentralization is a spectrum, so everything is simultaneously decentralized and centralized. It's just a matter of how much in either direction. Trying to turn the issue into a black/white pass/fail issue is childish and ignorant.
BTC is going to take over everything.
This is inherently the most hypocritical one by definition. The Bitcoin network will control everything... so it's going centralize the entire world and everything revolve around Bitcoin? I can't. I just can't even fathom how someone who's researched crypto in any capacity could come to that conclusion. Oh wait, yes I can, it happens because of greedy tribalist imperialism, ironically the exact kind of attitude and governance structure the inventor of Bitcoin was trying to avoid. Such irony, much wow.
Bitcoin is a store of value. (21M 21M 21 MILLION!!!1)
This notion that Bitcoin stores value but other cryptos do not is a foolish one. Most of the time this concept is derived from the hard capped supply of 21M coins. It's so obvious to me that Bitcoin is a niche store of security, but maximalists just don't get it. They choose instead to live in their little echo chamber where nothing else could possibly be a store of value (especially if it doesn't have a hard cap).
This is one of those maximalist saying and ideologies that has infiltrated the entire cryptosphere. So many coins out there are wrongfully imposing low inflation rates when inflation is the killer dapp. Bitcoin doesn't have inflation so that other projects can experiment with inflation and find those secret-sauce templates that work even better than the backbone chain. Inflation is a risk, but with higher risk comes higher reward; especially true in crypto land.
If you can't explain the yield, you are the yield
This is a much more recent one that's been circulating around. Notice how it specifically celebrates ignorance and not doing the research. It's not hard to explain the yield if you actually put the time in to figure it out. Again, this whole mantra stems from the idea that inflation (even when in the hands of the community itself) is a terrible thing that leeches value from the users. Hm, yeah, it's not. Grow up.
Conclusion
On a certain level it seems like Bitcoin maximalists willfully miss the point on purpose, instead opting to live in their little bubble where Bitcoin will ironically control every institution on the planet. This is just more of the same. This is the kind of mindset that crypto was trying to get away from. Toxic tribalism and rule by force are no longer valid ways to scale up and build value. Society has reached peak centralization, and we are about the witness the results of that corruption firsthand.
Bitcoin is an extremely valuable backbone asset that protects the entire space. When crypto comes under attack, Bitcoin will always be there running in the background no matter what. Its dependability is a thing of legend. That being said it is only a tiny piece of the entire puzzle. Bitcoin provides the security so that other networks can thrive and build out (not up). Flat architecture and decentralization demand it.
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