I stopped being a bitcoin maxi in 2013
Happy New Year! I don’t know about all of you reading this, but I take my New Year’s Resolutions extremely seriously. I’ve contemplating sharing them publicly…you know, the power of public accountability and all, but…
I’ll share one Resolution for 2024 with you: it’s publishing at least 24 posts on this blog. So hold me accountable!
As with many people celebrating New Year’s this last weekend, I found myself at a barbecue with friends. Many of my friends happen to be in crypto…surprise, surprise!
One of the celebrants at said BBQ introduced herself and quickly asked if I was also “in crypto.” Indeed, I am. Of course I asked about her background and found out that she used to work for one of the big crypto funds and her husband works for Bitcoin Magazine. Somewhere in the intro was an embedded statement about “sorta being a bitcoin maxi.”
My immediate response was “so was I! Until 2013…”
I wasn’t trying to be SNARKy, it just rolled off my tongue and happens to be true. When bitcoin was the only game in town, I was a pretty hardcore maxi. I loved the early bitcoin community and thought our little band of outcasts could change the world if we only stuck together. I was sympathetic to the early arguments against…well, anything else…on the grounds that there weren’t many of us and we should unite!
But then real differentiators and possibilities opened up with the technology and the social systems that caught my attention. They should have caught any reasonable person’s attention.
You maxis might be rolling your eyes and asking (sarcastically, as your blood pressure boils), “like what?” Here’s a quick step back in time:
Privacy ended up not being all that great in bitcoin
Governance was anything but certain or agreed upon
The purpose of bitcoin was heavily debated (store of value or electronic payment system?), and hence key parameters, like the block size, were fiercely fought over
Can’t we do something else with the blockchain, like issue tokens? Welcome world to colored coins
Oh sh*t we can do a lot more with blockchain! Welcome virtual machines (Ethereum)
The idea that all innovation for public database technology — which is what blockchains, and hence bitcoin really are — should stop with bitcoin is just nuts. It used to be quaint. It used to be charming in trying to keep a community united around a single purpose instead of divergent goals.
But now it’s just toxic. I don’t say this in anger or blanket insult to all the maxis in our world, but as a point of principle for why I decided to support bitcoin in the first place (and one of the key arguments for bitcoin’s existence back then): the world could use a bunch more innovation and experimentation to solve many different problems in many different ways.
Bitcoin just can’t handle a virtual machine today and it probably never will. Bitcoin doesn’t do privacy very well. Bitcoin hasn’t benefited from any of the advances in many of the key technologies of our industry, such as DAOs for governance, ZKPs for data compression, privacy, and interoperability; VMs for programmability, rollups for scaling, and many other aspects of Web3. That’s OK! Bitcoin was never meant to do everything, nor should it.
Divisiveness and tribalism are big problems in human society, and as an American who can’t help but cringe at our politics today, it’s annoying seeing similar behavior in crypto. We’re too nascent of an industry to fight each other and should instead be thinking about which important problems we can solve together.
