I've found my preferred "cryptocurrency ideology" has been slowly shifting from Multicoinism towards Bitcoin Maximalism over the past year. Debating the nuance on Twitter, writing the rhetoric for BitcoinMaximalism.com , and postulating in between those two activities has once again transfigured my opinions on the cryptocurrency space. My opinions on such have always been constantly evolving, as I have often participated in debates since I first started participating in the Bitcoin community in 2012, and I try to keep an open mind while doing so. The latter is what I consider to be one of my biggest assets because once people become invested in certain cryptocurrencies they have a tendency to become tribalistic and succumb to groupthink.
Without further ado, I'd like to go over some of the reasons for my shift towards Bitcoin Maximalism!
I have always been highly skeptical of the "one coin to rule them all" hypothesis, but over the year or two I have realized that it may not only be a possibility, but it may in actuality be likely. After seeing extra layers and sidechains come into existence on top of Bitcoin, such as the Lightning Network, Liquid, and Rootstock, it made me realize that Bitcoin could very well become a decentralized stack in due time. It is hard to tell what the future may hold, but after seeing such developments come to fruition, I now expect even more layers and sidechains to continue to improve upon Bitcoin's utility. It is possible that a Bitcoin stack can perform any function of each and every alternative cryptocurrency, making ALT coin's values in general trend towards being valueless in the long run.
Don't get me wrong, "Crypto Twitter" and other forms of social media are a great way to stay abreast of recent events and to further your cryptocurrency knowledge through spirited debate. However, as briefly mentioned above, people tend to become tribalistic once investing in any certain cryptocurrency. The tribalistic tendencies include attacking competing projects, propagating libelous rumors and speculation, and succumbing to groupthink after boxing oneself into an echo chamber. It is easy for a Tweet thread to become quite nasty very fast (if it didn't start that way, to begin with!) If a Bitcoin tech stack can perform all functions of every alternative cryptocurrency, then I see such tribalism as being an unnecessary detriment to the cause of creating and popularizing a decentralized tech stack. I see Bitcoin as being one of the only projects that has a realistic shot at getting everyone to come together on to work on fulfilling that goal.
Now that another market cycle has come and gone, a new set of cryptocurrencies that were hyped to no ends during the 2017 "hype cycle" have now been laid to rest after losing 98%+ of their value over the course of about a year. Like previous market cycles, I am quite certain that a large majority of these over-hyped cryptocurrencies will never "pump" again, and become what's known in cryptocurrency circles as "zombie coins" (or cryptocurrencies that technically still exist, but have no to little value, trading volume, and users.) With each new hype wave, the newcomers always seem so certain that their chosen alternative cryptocurrency portfolio will make them rich. They tend to fall for the same scams and schemes that have already been done hundreds to thousands of times in the history of cryptocurrencies. First, it was IPOs, then they renamed them to ICOs, and now I understand they are coming up with ICOs v2 with more investor protections, but sadly I expect those too to end in similar fashion after the next hype wave. Another example was "ASIC-Resistant" alternative PoW algorithms, and with each tweak or innovation to the algorithm its proponents always championed them, saying "this time we've solved it" but ASIC-resistance has effectively been proven to be a pipedream. We should have seen this coming considering it is in the name of the acronym... Application-Specific Integrated Circuits are custom-designed to do one thing and one thing only. It turns out no amount of tweaks can make an algorithm ASIC-resistant, and certainly not ASIC proof. Last hype wave we saw ICOs and forks become the preferred way of scamming greater fools, and for purely curious and intellectual purposes it will be interesting to see what type of scams arise during the next hype wave.
The last part of my reasoning is that now I have a better understanding of the power of Network Effects and Brand recognition. Bitcoin has always had these factors going for it, but in my first few years in cryptocurrencies I vastly underestimated such killer features. After seeing many ALT coins come and go, one thing has remained constant... Bitcoin at the top of the leaderboard. Such a solid decade-long performance cannot be ignored. It is Bitcoin that is in the news all the time, that comes up in conversations at work/school/churches/bars, that people recognize exponentially more-so than any ALT coin, and that in my opinion is an unreproducible feature of Bitcoin that will help it attract more capital to invest in it and users to use it. People often bring up companies that have garnered huge network effects in the past only to eventually fail... companies like Myspace, Pets.com, Sears, or any other of the hundreds of retail chains that have failed to compete in The Internet era. However, such comparisons are comparing apples to oranges. Their users were not invested in those companies like Bitcoin stakeholders are, nor did those companies empower such ideological movements that a decentralized, rent-seeking eliminating, permanent and unchangeable monetary policy, censorship-resistant transactions, and programmable currency does (all things Bitcoin has the potential to provide). People don't religiously get behind and support corporations (usually its the opposite), but Bitcoin is no such rent-seeking oppressor... it is here to liberate us and make every free person even more free than they were before. As a result, I theorize that such a network effect built upon a civil rights movement is much more unlikely to fizzle out, and I'd even go so far to speculate that it can not and will not fail.
I hope you enjoyed this. I recently decided that I'm going to start blogging much more often, so be on the lookout for more of these blogs!
Originally posted on my website decentralized.tech