If you’re a true Bitcoin maximalist, spend $100 of your stash to study Bitcoin’s competition

Buy some Zcash, try shielded pools & spend it via NEAR Intents

Buy some Monero, mine sone with your CPU, learn how the subaddress system works & buy something on XMR Bazaar

Buy some Ethereum, try Uniswap & create your first contract

Buy some Litecoin, try MWEB and then spend it at a merchant

Buy some Decred, see why their implementation of Lightning is more stable

Buy some Bitcoin Cash, play with CashFusion, CashTokens & see what you can do with the covenants

If you’re a true maximalist, you must think in terms of maximizing: bringing all the popular use cases to the network in which you are emotionally and financially most invested

Learn from other projects, then try to figure out how it can work on Bitcoin

You don’t need to buy more than $10 of each coin, consider this your education budget

Once you learn more, you will become a more valuable community member in Bitcoin. Not a cheerleader, but someone who can compare and think for himself.

2017 marked a generational change in BTC

The older devs left Bitcoin (Gavin Andresen, Jeff Garzik, Mike Hearn)

A bunch of younger guys stepped up (Luke-jr, Greg Maxwell, Wladimir van der Laan, Matt Corallo)

An entirely new culture was formed, featuring optimism about layer 2 scaling, a rejection of bigger blocks, and a general philosophy that Bitcoin is savings tech that is primarily used for storing value

Unfortunately, too many sociopaths tagged along in order to take advantage of the Lord of the Flies scenario.

Professional influencers, government agents, midlife crisis challengers, nutrition experts, outcast artists, they all appropriated the language and culture in order to become part of the movement.

Of course, there are only so many slots on conference stages and only so many podcasts can succeed. So what followed was a ritual of purging anyone they didn’t like or simply didn’t want to succeed in this community

It wasn’t about purity tests per se: people from the inner circles always had a free pass to use “shitcoins” (non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies) without any accountability.

This is why Giacomo Zucco could do consultancy for Ethereum token projects without ever getting called out. This is why Idi Wertheimer could shill Tron while everyone else giggled. This is why nobody ever called out Rodolfo Novak for supporting Litecoin with his first version of the Coldcard. This is why Jameson Lopp could tweet “running Grin” without getting cancelled.

The purging wasn’t for them. It was for me, because I interviewed Roger Ver. It was for Andreas Antonopoulos, because he never studied the new maximalist jargon and he wrote “Mastering Ethereum”. It was for Zooko, because in his quest to improve Bitcoin’s privacy he created a compatible altcoin.

Just like accusations of sexual harassment were used during the metoo era to destroy the careers of businesses men and politicians, being a “shitcoiner” carried almost the same stigma and effect

Bitcoin maximalists are the first class citizens. The chosen people. The pure ones who are destined to become super rich by doing nothing.

Everyone else who tries to do something else, has the curiosity to explore beyond the limits of the dogma, or simply talks with certain people must be excommunicated.

Of course, this morality works only as long as the claims are backed by technical merits. In 2017, Bitcoin still retained a technical edge and most altcoins were basically lazy clones with some modifications.

But obviously, the free market was able to come up with innovations that weren’t cooked in the Bitcoin Core ivory tower. New use cases emerged. New users came with the expectation to access certain features.

Instead of adapting to consolidate its network effect, Bitcoin chose to stagnate… and became increasingly proud about it! If proposals aren’t cooked in the ivory tower laboratory, they are either shitcoiny (because they were tried on other networks) or else they’re “not ready” until the ivory tower people agree that they’re good.

Otherwise, the cheerleaders LARP that Bitcoin Core is a decentralized meritocracy where the best ideas always win.

This is how Bitcoin lost its market dominance and network effect. Because the price went up irrespective of technological progress, the Core dev team became scared of improving anything because the project is too valuable, the conferences became brainwashing distractions that propagate memes instead of trying to create consensus, and in the meantime the smart people left the room to build elsewhere.

Now we’re stuck with the bottom of the barrel in terms of community member IQ because only these guys can ignore all the signs and pretend with a straight face that Bitcoin is winning.

The biggest irony is that many new devs today will admit that conservatively increasing the block size is a good approach, without unknown tradeoffs. 10 years too late…

The block size wars meant that, in 2017 lots of smart devs & business owners left Bitcoin maximalism for BCH, Ethereum & other cryptos

Some of the biggest names were gone: Gavin Andresen, Mike Hearn, Roger Ver

This power vacuum created an opportunity for some young guys to build a new Bitcoin culture, structure it as a top-down feudal structure (OG-pleb), and profit from it

Unfortunately, many of them were not the brightest, most competent, or most successful. But they were sociopathic enough to want to climb their way to the top and keep others down

NVK is a prime example: a nerd who wasn’t necessarily the best at anything, whose ideas couldn’t succeed on their own merit without politics and virtue signaling, but whose histrionic behavior was mistaken for confidence and competence

Similar examples are Jimmy Song (not a great dev, but somehow on every conference stage), Pierre Rochard (more of a priest than economist), Francis Pouliot (idealistic LARPer who built his business on virtue signaling), Giacomo Zucco (the jester who never practiced what he preached, but always got away with it), Peter McCormack (king of midwits, but with a charming British accent) and I can go on all day

The point is that under the previous Bitcoin environment, there was no room for these guys to shine. So in order to build their status and keep themselves at the top of the hierarchy, they created the church of Bitcoin maximalism and appointed themselves as high priests

This worked so well that even shameless shitcoiners like Max Keiser (look up Maxcoin, Startcoin & the numerous DASH endorsements) took notice and wanted to join the club

But to survive, churches need perpetual miracles and vindication. The biggest miracle is the price that goes up according to a mystical cycle. The vindication came when the lessons about self custody (learned during the Mt. Gox era) were also useful in 2021-2022 (Celsius, FTX, BlockFi)

2022 was the peak, though. Because these guys got greedy and felt jealous that the big blockers are making more money with the multi-coin diversification strategies. They missed out on DeFi summer. They missed out on the NFT mania. Virtue signaling doesn’t pay the bills.

So they started shilling the Coldcard more aggressively: because it followed the rules of the church and it made them money. They didn’t allow anyone to criticize it. Instead, they turned the Coldcard into the status symbol: the object that screams “I’m part of the toxic maximalist club. I don’t hold any other coins”.

Every church breaks when the miracles are gone, the vindications are hard to find, and the reality contradicts the dogma. That’s when the smart people read the room and start taking action to protect themselves from a disastrous outcome.

But the consequence is that only the dumbest people stick around. Because to them, loyalty to the cult is everything and reason must be stopped if it contradicts the teachings.

The biggest problem here is that markets are fast to reveal useful information. They aren’t always an oracle of truth: but they bring up patterns, trends, and expose lies.

As soon as it became inexpensive to verify security code, the Coldcard went belly up. The cash cow of every hollier than thou influencer ran dry, leaving behind the kind of pain and resentment that hurts much more than exchange rug pulls and bad trades.

I think that this incident will wipe out an entire class of influencers and businessmen. But if the church has enough leverage, it will try to save the reputations of the high priests and carry on.

The only problem? The average IQ of the toxic maximalist church follower will go even lower. Only the dumbest guys will stick around. Everyone else will figure out ways to move on.

In early 2022 after Coldcard decided to ditch the open sourcd GPL license for Commons Clause, I called out NVK.

Francis Pouliot defended came to his friend’s defense by arguing that I’m “gaslighting” with “esoteric nerd talk”.

That’s when I lost all respect for Francis and I blocked him. I don’t care what else he does in the space, this man is not intellectually honest and chooses loyalty over truth.

The reason I am posting this is simple: if more people called out Rodolfo (NVK) for his reckless decision to change licenses, the Coldcard firmware would have had more scrutiny from white hat hackers.

Today’s incident could have been avoided if the people close to NVK had the balls to call him out on his bullshit.

I just want to thank @Peter Todd for opening my eyes about Coldcard in late 2019

with something that he described the “tiger rock”: a solution for a problem that you don’t have, but is marketed to you

He also taught me that the best security is in the most tested solution (for hardware wallets, Trezor) and it’s better to use something limited in scope that you understand than something so complex that you won’t be able to replicate the same setup ceremony

Peter also told me point blank that Bitcoin Core on a clean Linux computer is more secure than Coldcard or any other hardware wallet

So yeah, I owe a lot of my understanding of security and threat models to him and the fact that he took the time to explain to me some basic concepts

Once again: Bitcoin Takeover podcast listeners can sleep well these days

Will interview @Cory 🦢 Swan in about 10 hours

12:30 PM CET / 6:30 AM EST

Join the livestream chat if you have any questions!

https://www.youtube.com/live/Y8vFTR1L8Lg?si=kaB86u46ATzQKM0y

Where will the BIP110 supporters go after they find themselves on a minority fork?

I don’t think they will return to BTC and admit that they were wrong

They’ve been radicalized by hatred against Core, Blocksteam, Andy Back

I think they’ll go to Paul’s eCash and build their own network

Why? Because they need a safe space that is as close to Bitcoin’s purity as possible and ECX has no gatekeepers except for the SHA256 miners

Call me crazy, but I envision a merge between the two August forks. Just like SegWit2X moved to BCH in 2017

Coin Market Cap top 50:

1. Bitcoin
2. Bitcoin colored coins with a virtual machine
3. Bitcoin’s CBDC pilot
4. Bitcoin finance exchange token
5. Bitcoin’s other CBDC pilot
6. Bitcoin for bankers
7. Bitcoin colored coins with a virtual machine, but purple
8. Bitcoin colored coins with a virtual machine, but Chinese
9. Bitcoin finance for degen traders
10. Bitcoin’s dog pet that Elon likes
11. Bitcoin’s replacement for rugged Bitfinex users
12. Bitcoin with Zerocash privacy, as it should have been
13. Bitcoin rewrite with built in fungibility, probably made in Russia
14. Bitcoin oracle token
15. Bitcoin for Jeb fans
16. Bitcoin according to the guy who doesn’t want to contact Metamask support
17. Bitcoin with smart contracts and some privacy for tokens
18. Bitcoin for math nerds who like getting pegged with US dollars
19. Bitcoin’s long-lost brother
20. Bitcoin printer for the Trump family
21. Bitcoin for the Telegram users
22. Bitcoin for math nerds who like getting pegged with synthetic US dollars
23. Bitcoin’s faster cousin
24. Bitcoin for globalists who like getting pegged by Uncle Sam
25. Bitcoin for super compliant corporate nerds
26. Bitcoin for the guy who told you to sell your bitcoin in November 2013
27. Bitcoin meme dog that looks a lot like the one that Elon likes, except that it’s not
28. Bitcoin for web3 applications, whatever the fuxk that means
29. Bitcoin for people who love PayPal
30. Bitcoin for AI applications, apparently
31. Bitcoin for goldbugs, that Peter Schiff can shill
32. Bitcoin payments across lots of Bitcoin forks
33. Bitcoin decentralized exchange
34. Bitcoin for machine learning models
35. Bitcoin for democratized institutional-grade finance, whatever that means
36. Bitcoin for goldbugs, but peaceful
37. Bitcoin investment fund, to help the Trump family load up on Bitcoin
38. Bitcoin for OKx exchange users
39. Bitcoin for decentralized exchanges
40. Bitcoin Core, but with a meme in the middle
41. Bitcoin printer for guys who love banks
42. Bitcoin dollar with double D t*ts
43. Bitcoin lending protocol, but not centralized like BlockFi and therefore unable to buy Peter McCormack an Aston Martin
44. Bitcoin colored coins with a virtual machine, but with dots
45. Bitcoin for bringing tradfi, whatever that means
46. Bitcoin governance token for something that could have been built on Bitcoin
47. Bitcoin Sam Altman’s Vision, with eyeball scanning instead of mining
48. Bitcoin for buzzwords
49. Bitcoin for the Morph blockchain, whatever that is
50. Bitcoin for moments when it feels good man

A decade from now, I’m sure Netflix will produce a documentary about the agents who destroyed Bitcoin

The guys who were principled sat stackers and never shitcoiners will laugh at all the batshit crazy narratives they created over the years to prevent BTC from becoming money

“We had to protect the supremacy of the dollar, so we told them to HODL indefinitely because this is a store of value. Never sell your bitcoin! Meanwhile, our friends from BlackRock captured the price discovery to turn this thing into an institutional asset that nobody transacts for goods and services.”

You’ll recognize the faces. They liked your memes. You had lunch with them after a conference. Maybe you shared a drink together.

Now they’re on the TV screen in your living room. Not on some pleb podcast, but on a Netflix special. Not there to make you feel more bullish, but to laugh in your face and remind you how dumb you really were.

Some will laugh, some will cry, some will be in denial. But it is what’s happening and you’re asleep at the helm because you think it’s “bullish” and one day your 1000 sats will buy you a yacht. That’s exactly what they want you to believe.

“Self custody is too hard and most people don’t want to manage their own keys. This is why we need banks and centralized services”

Biggest psyop ever, orchestrated by the usual suspects

Millions of people use Tether every day, have no problem backing up 12 words & using non-custodial wallets

If anything, it’s even harder to use USDT because you need the gas token to pay transaction fees

So how come they figure it out and it’s very simple for Tether, but in the case of Bitcoin the same people are considered unready for adoption?

“Oh it’s because Bitcoin is savings tech and Tether is for quick payments”

Oh fuck you, spook. Read the whitepaper

Some guys claim that crypto markets won’t pump hard until the AI bubble bursts

I disagree: AI payments is the next big narrative, with agents making decisions with a given budget or else automating some transactions

So instead of waiting for AI to crash, it’s wiser to build products and services that create this symbiosis