Crypto aggregate 'price'This chart aims to show what the price of bitcoin would be if everyone sold their alts for bitcoin.
Maximalism
Shitcoin - Maximalism is a scam!Bitcoin maximalism (or religious fundamentalism, nationalism, supremacism or other extremist doctrines for that matter) contradicts overwhelming empirical evidence that the broad market values different things, both simultaneously and over time.
Bitcoin Maximalist
A low IQ, low energy Bitcoin-loving bigot who thinks that any coin that has not been approved by the maxis ("shorthand for Bitcoin Maximalist"), should be thought of and labeled as a shit-coin. They are considered to be narcissistic, heavily opinionated and ill-mannered. A bitcoin maximalist will come in hot in almost any discussion but will not answer coherently, especially when their views are debunked.
Some refer to bitcoin maximalists as crypto-thought police, as they often dictate crypto narratives that end up shrouded in misinformation. They speak from an authoritative standpoint about Bitcoin and/or crypto, regardless if their positions and beliefs are based on complete B.S. Bitcoin Maximalists are notorious for using straw man arguments and will often block anyone that calls them out in any public forum.
Bitcoin maximalism ranges from Bitcoin obsession ("sees no other coin but Bitcoin") to Bitcoin conservatism ("believes that other coins can exist, but that Bitcoin is superior and should never change"). It is quite common to see newcomers, especially those coming from other overlapping industries (such as law or economics) taking the position of Bitcoin maximalist to be seen as knowledgable or to fit, despite getting into the space after a few months to a year and with no skin in the game.
Bitcoin maximalism is a scam!
1/33 Bitcoin maximalism is a scam!
The current crypto bear market learned us many things, but it especially learned us that many prominent Bitcoiners have grown to become Bitcoin maximalists. I’m using that term to loosely moniker everybody that calls every other crypto coin...
2/33 ... besides Bitcoin a scam, calls Lightning Network the altcoin killer, and also those who claim that Bitcoin will be the only true crypto currency standard in the end.
What’s wrong with this maximalist thinking? A lot of things. I’ll focus on the most prominent points.
3/33 (1) “Network effect!” Maximalists want you to believe that some kind of magical network theory/network effect will suck everybody and their dog into Bitcoin. They call this “Bitcoin is a closed loop” or “the Bitcoin singularity will engulf everything”,
4/33 or they will say silly things like “not protected by segregation, Bitcoin will assimilate all altcoins on Lightning Network”. Wrong people, wrong!
Network theory only tries to describe and explain human and non-human interactions in a certain environment.
5/33 Network effect (as in, the positive effect described in economics that an additional user of a good or service has on the value of that product to others) and network theory by itself, do NOT imply that Bitcoin will be the only money left standing when the dust settles.
6/33 A more appropriate approach is to study how adoption works on a personal, a community and a technical level. If from these forces a strong positive effect can be created and maintained, and adoption grows, then we can start calling it (being part of) a network effect.
7/33 Now, having learned that Bitcoin maximalists have the wrong mindset about network theory/network effect, it has become easy to prove that Bitcoin will not assimilate everything, as adoption has many faces. For example, don’t underestimate the power of bartering.
8/33 (2) In finance, bartering is an often misunderstood and underestimated concept. Bitcoin maximalists, narrowminded as they are, deny the importance of bartering, and that’s typically where they go wrong in declaring altcoins Dead On Arrival.
9/33 Bartering, as in being able to use and accept multiple crypto currencies adopted by strong minority communities, is as libertarian as it gets, and has several important benefits for both customer and merchant. For example:
10/33 (2a) Sovereignty of choice. Being the most comfortable choice does not imply being the primary choice. Often times the emotional attachment to a brand, sometimes passed on from parents to children, also determine why a local community holds on to using a currency.
11/33 For the same reason, people have been multilingual for generations. For the same reason, we are not all driving a Toyota car, although Toyota cars are globally available on almost every corner of the street.
12/33 (2b) Acknowledgement of the sovereign local community. Being able to trade with a community opens up a lot of new business for a merchant. And atomic swaps will make bartering easy, it will certainly not kill it. Bitcoin maximalists have the wrong mindset on this one.
13/33 (2c) Profitability. Since barter sales generally represent add-on business for a merchant that would otherwise not be enjoyed, the gross profit from these sales generally drop straight to the bottom line.
14/33 Moreover, barter sales often represent situations where the incremental cost of sales is very low, and profit margins are correspondingly very high. Furthermore, using barter to maintain higher levels of production can increase margins on non-barter sales as well.
15/33 (2d) Asset protection. Bartering, as in being able to accept other currencies besides Bitcoin, offers a unique solution to the merchant, with respect to the problem of overstocked or stale inventory.
16/33 Selling this stale stock for altcoins, it can protect the merchants’ balance sheet from costly write offs due to deep discounting or liquidation sales.
17/33 (2e) In addition, bartering can also substantially improve a merchants cash flow. It allows to substitute trade for at least a portion of normal cash outlay, when purchasing needed goods and services.
18/33 (3) “Bitcoin is a closed loop!” Or is it? Yes, sometimes it is, but not by nature. It acts as a closed loop, and subsequently swallows an altcoin when the altcoin is everything between a scam or a copycat without too many distinctive features.
19/33 It can’t, and won’t, act as a closed loop when a community holds on to using the altcoin for a long list of reasons. Those reasons can be technically (*cough* engineering design decision matrix *cough*), culturally or socially, or otherwise determined.
20/33 (4) “Shitcoins are dying, most are down 90% or more!” This is also a popular narrative that Bitcoin maximalists currently like to throw to their audience. But it’s a bullshit reasoning, and in the back of their heads they know it.
21/33 It’s bullshit because their precious Bitcoin went from $0.17 down to $0.01 in 2010, and Bitcoin went from $32 down to $2 in 2011. That’s no less than two times almost 95% down in the early years of Bitcoin. And look who’s still around, alive and kicking.
22/33 (5) Maximalism, is extremism, is a disgusting scam. FACT. It’s violent extremism to want Bitcoin to kill all altcoins, meanwhile seeing their users getting financially wrecked. It’s religious extremism to worship Bitcoin as the only crypto currency god.
23/33 Bitcoin maximalism as expressed by more modest Bitcoin community members, is political extremism. And since extremism only benefits a personal power agenda, it’s a scam. And it should be treated, and be opposed to, as a scam.
24/33 (6) Bitcoin, in my opinion, is only the “one ring to rule them all”. Because in the end, for most people a currency is nothing but a product like a car, a table, or a smartphone. It’s a number on a screen with a ticker.
25/33 We use a currency because we have learned and experienced that saving and transacting value from A to B works most efficient with a currency. But the question which currency is primarily used on a personal level is not solely a technical debate.
26/33 It’s a human debate, a human decision process, a human choice which ticker next to that digital number is going to be adopted, and used. Humans look for comfort, but it’s not up to Bitcoin and its maximalist army to decide what is individual comfort.
27/33 As a result, new currencies, coins and tokens will keep on appearing around the clock, as the Bitcoin code is open source, mind you! Some of these currencies might try to dethrone Bitcoin, some might want to fill larger or smaller niches based on local needs and habits.
28/33 Thousands of altcoins and tokens already prove this point, mind you once more! And many of them attract a loyal dev team, a fanbase, and develop use cases. And that’s exactly why the Bitcoin devs are working on atomic swaps, submarine swaps, and side chains.
29/33 Not because these Bitcoin devs want altcoins to die, but because they know there are already crypto currencies that will not go away anytime soon. And they know there will be new crypto currency classes that are here to stay also, temporarily or permanently.
30/33 These new crypto currency classes include securities, derivatives, stablecoins, utility -, disposable - and other private tokens. Not all of these classes are necessarily ruled by Bitcoin. Some are even inherently not ruled by Bitcoin!
31/33 (7) What Bitcoin maximalists need to realize: the value denominated market is pretty large. Security tokens will most likely not be a Bitcoin only market (ref: @brucefenton quality work on this subject).
32/33 Other markets like Real Estate and Derivatives are even larger. If for any reason Bitcoin doesn’t fit there (alone), the market cap of Bitcoin might be notably lower as the ruling altcoin that does fit in these markets.
33/33 To summarize, a single coin universe is a fool’s dream. Wake up, maximalists. Stop scamming your false narrative, I beg you. And embrace a bustling financial future with Bitcoin and altcoins.
One coin to rule them all
Being a Bitcoin maximalist is pretty easy, all you have to do is believe, with complete unwavering conviction, that Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency worth caring about. To the Bitcoin maximalist, all other cryptocurrencies are just “shitcoins.”
While there is of course an ideological component to believing Bitcoin is the one true cryptocurrency, Bitcoin maximalists also base their beliefs on something called “Metcalfe’s law,” it’s more casually known as the network effect.
The more connections the better
Metcalfe’s law claims that the effectiveness of a network – such as telecommunications internet, or even social networking – is proportionally related to the square of the number of users connected to that network.
The law expresses the number of unique possible connections in a network. Mathematically speaking, if ‘n’ is the number of nodes in a network, it can be written as n(n – 1)/2.
Despite being primarily theoretical, research has gone some way to validating the concept with real world data.
Still following?
Imagine an internet with only two computers, that network can only make one valuable connection between the two computers. But a network with five nodes can make 10 unique connections, and a network with 10 nodes can make 45 connections. See where this is going?
Simply put, means that the more unique individuals or devices that join a given network, the more valuable each of those devices becomes. More devices means more connections, and therefore more value to the network.
With that in mind, you might start to understand why Bitcoin maximalists detest all other coins. After all, those hoards of altcoins are just serving to take valuable nodes users away from the Bitcoin network.
When the security and integrity of the network increases as more people join, it makes sense that Bitcoin maximalists would want more to join.
But, isn’t competition good for innovation?
In some cases, it is. In others, competition doesn’t really bring anything to the table.
Harvard academics found that firms which compete at a similar technological level invest more in research and development (and thus innovate to overcome the competition) than firms that don’t have direct competition.
However, for smaller and less competitive firms that are lagging behind the market leaders, it actually encourages less investment in R&D and is not as nurturing of innovation.
The outcome is that smaller firms tend to become more specialized and focus on their niche. When a market is highly competitive it tends to encourage diversification, thus reducing the instances where firms compete on equally level terms. In the world of cryptocurrencies, this means that we end up having a market saturated with coins that all claim to do things a little differently. Sound familiar?
With that in mind, Bitcoin maximalists might have a point – to a certain degree. There are hundreds upon thousands of altcoins on the market at the moment, and most of them are probably worth ignoring. But for the overall cryptocurrency market, it’s good for Bitcoin to have viable competition from a handful of combatants to ensure that the coins keep progressing.
It is a free market after all. Give the people a choice, and let them decide.
So, there you have it. Next time someone starts talking with an unwavering belief about how Bitcoin is the one true cryptocurrency, they’re probably a maximalist. And if they also rattle on about how the more people use the cryptocurrency, the better and safer it becomes? Well, then you know for sure they’re a maximalist.
#Bitcoin global reserve currency, majority of payments
#altcoins used as securities, utility tokens, private blockchains, other local use cases, etc
Atomic & submarine swaps support this bustling financial future.
Prove me wrong, $BTC maximalists.
