The Cult of Bitcoin.
This is a classic tale of having too much of a good thing. Bitcoiners have gone through quite the transition over the years. From cypherpunk renegades who were going to upend the entire financial system to greedy bootlickers slathering over favorable regulation and institutional adoption. How did this happen?
I was into that before it was cool.
Welcome to mainstream adoption I guess! This is just how it goes, no matter what the subject matter happens to be. When more people get involved with any sort of movement it tends to go to absolute shit. I can't even count how many pretenders who tried to tell me that Scarface was their favorite movie. Nice. What was your favorite part? Was it the drugs, violence, or incest? These cultural touchstones trend to get idolized in the most toxic and strangest of ways. Bitcoin is no exception.
The idea behind Bitcoin maximalism is a self-defeating paradox.
These people think that Bitcoin, an inefficient and hopelessly redundant decentralized database, is going to fix all the world's problems while simultaneously capturing all the world's wealth.
- It's going to create a fair economy, but it's going to forge "generational wealth".
- It's going to centralize everything, but it's the ultimate decentralized asset.
- It's going to kill fiat, but we measure its value in USD.
- It has no financial incentives, but everyone is going to run infrastructure for free.
- It will create "wife changing money" because women will be poor & desperate.
- It's impossible to replicate; all other assets are guaranteed shitcoins.
- The hypocrisy goes on and on.
Politics
But these are all things I've already discussed in previous posts. The real motivation for writing this piece stems from the fact that every four years (during the election year) everyone and their mother seems to come out in droves to support the current thing. Yesterday it was something about a supreme court telling Texas to stop using razor wire at the Mexican border or some such other nonsense. "Those shitlibs are destroying America and letting those 'illegals' take our jerbs!" As if anyone wants to wash dishes at a restaurant, pick strawberries, or work the slaughterhouse line.
But see, that's how they get you boy howdy! In one breath I'm talking shit about taking a political stance, and in the very next sentence I make a remark that very much resembles a political stance. It's difficult to avoid getting sucked into the blackhole that is partisan politics.
Governance
The ultimate point here is why are we, as crypto users, engaging in the same tired behavior that always lacks any real results or solutions? Looping this into Bitcoin maximalism, the answer is pretty obvious. Bitcoin doesn't have a governance structure, nor can it ever have one. It does one thing, and it does that one thing pretty well, and that's it. It's a very niche asset that does a very particular thing. It can not upend the political system. End of story.
Hive is a lot more interesting in this regard because we very much do have a political system baked into the cake of DPOS. DPOS is a digital republic at heart that allows money to vote. Obviously there are a lot of problems with that, the biggest of which greed being the root of all evil, but it's actually a pretty impressive and elegant solution, especially when considering that any community whatsoever can fork the techstack and create their own thing.
The problem with DPOS is that it has no momentum. These communities are small and lack power; they will not be taken seriously until that changes. Another pitfall is that there are no cryptos in existence that represent a physical plot of land. Again, until a government can actually protect its citizens in the real world, it will be considered a bit of a joke. We can't move our consciousness to the internet... yet (cringe).
Jobs
Bitcoiners are not creating jobs or building any value whatsoever outside of the currency itself. The expectation is that we're supposed to what? Keep working traditional jobs for worse and worse pay and just buy Bitcoin and everything will be all good? Seems like a pretty terrible plan for world domination, and yet it is constantly implied by community action (or lack thereof).
Here at Hive we are at least attempting to create jobs and value outside of the currency, but this has proven quite difficult. Creating jobs is hard on its own. Creating decentralized online jobs with non-subjective wages has proven to be an extremely daunting and seemingly impossible task. I have faith that we'll figure something out, but it' won't be easy.
Infrastructure
How is Bitcoin going to pay for a road? What about running water, power, police & fire departments, parks and recreation, etc? How will Bitcoin pay for literally anything except for security and hashrate? Short answer: it's not going to. That's not what Bitcoin is for, nor should it be.
With this in mind we must realize just how narrow of a scope Bitcoin actually provides to the world and build upon the edges in which it lacks support. Ideally, everything in crypto would be working together to create something much more valuable than the sum of its parts. #synergy
Incentives
In the same vein as infrastructure, Bitcoin lacks the actual incentives to make real the things that maximalists are constantly promising. It's a delusional mindset in which seemingly all these cultists believe that everything is just going to work itself out and people are going to run infrastructure for free out of pocket. We've already seen how this ideology fails in the face of reality (Lightning Network, NOSTR, etc).
While altruism is a great and powerful thing in the short term, it will only ever be a way to bootstrap something that can sustain itself and scale up through proper incentives. A positive feedback loop is an absolute requirement in the long term. It is possible that a lot of functions will sustain themselves by employing WEB2 data selling models, but we all know that these models trend toward blatant centralization and rampant corruption as they grow larger and more powerful. This is not a long-term WEB3 solution that we can count on. Users own their data in WEB3, not a centralized agent. It is known.
This leads us to a very simple equation: if we want infrastructure, then we have to pay for infrastructure. It's that easy. However, the devil is in the details. Bitcoin has a hardcap on tokens for a reason. Emissions and inflation within the hands of an elite group can easily lead to corruption and systemic failure, as we all well know. Deciding how much money to spend on which projects is no trivial matter on the actual governance side of things. Still, it seems like we'll have to give it our best shot going forward if we actually want to give traditional forms of governance a run for their money, so to speak.
Scams
Shitcoinery abounds! It's very easy to see why Bitcoiners just assume that every other project is a scam. Why research 100 different networks on the off chance that one of them might be legit? There's a far greater chance of getting tricked and scammed then actually finding a platform with staying power. They already know Bitcoin is legit, so why waste time looking for another team? If I'm being honest I employ this mindset more and more as the years tick on. Why continue to look outward when the networks that I already trust clearly need so much work and attention?
That being said, maximalist dogma is next level and they literally believe that it is impossible to create another decentralized network, even if the exact same codebase is cloned. How do they come to this assumption? I assume delusion and greed. They want it to be true, so it is, and it then becomes a pillar of their own personality that can't be challenged internally.
Conclusion
Bitcoin can't do it all, nor was it designed or expected to shoulder the burdens of society at large. Rather, Bitcoin is the backbone to a much bigger movement. While we all quite enjoy having a backbone, it would be foolish to assume that a person is a backbone and nothing more; let alone blindly criticize those who disagree.
If we really want to create a new system and way of life we'll need to create entirely new models for governance, infrastructure, and the job market from the ground up. Bitcoin is only a tiny piece of the bigger puzzle. Underestimating the Bitcoin network is just as dangerous overestimation. It is what it is.