Bitcoin Maximalism is a Dead Meme

Come home, cypherpunk

(Some thoughts to follow one of the best speeches I’ve given imo, at Monerotopia.)

Before I even begin, let me ward off the ghosts and ghoules that will attack me from both sides on this.

No I don’t think shitcoins are somehow going to make a comeback so major that anything will flip Bitcoin.

Yes I still believe Bitcoin is king for good fundamental reasons and that won’t change for a long time.

No I don’t believe Bitcoin’s reign is inevitable, I think it can fail if we somehow manage to yank defeat from the jaws of victory.

Yes I believe that some altcoins have significant technological improvements. Technologies and advancements that had Satoshi known about, he probably would have included them in Bitcoin.

No, I don’t think there’s anything that has as good of a risk to reward investment ratio than Bitcoin.

All that said, we need to talk about Maximalism. Because it’s gotten silly.

Not unlike the woke masses of the far left and right. Bitcoin maximalists have tangled them selves up in a mess of categorical contradictions.

A solid cohort of them believe that jpegs being added to prunable block space is somehow an existential threat to Bitcoin. Becoming fairly militant in their toothless efforts to curve the issue.

While others praise and use USDT actively, despite their lazer eyes.

I fit some of these categories and not others. I’ve been around early adopter vives since I was fresh out of high school, having lived through multiple ideological groups, and seen them harden into pretzels. I have no interest in fitting in to any vague group category anymore. I’m bored by purity tests and have found their promises of special rewards for purity, quite empty.

To put it simply, after being a rather hard maximalist for years, since the bcash war, over which I have few regrets. I found my self inside somewhat of a lose group of other maxi influencers with subtle and vague implied promises of treasure if I stayed in line.

Memes like ‘Bitcoin maximalists will inherit the earth’ and, ‘We only hire Bitcoin maximalists’ or ‘Bitcoin only, rather than Bitcoin first’. Etc, etc etc.

I believed it.

I thought, hey, I’d love to work with like minded, rational folk.

What I found however, is that there’s no money in Bitcoin maximalism, lol. Literally none. It’s no coincidence that many of the twitter maxis today are MSTR bulls. Clinging to a 2x leveraged Bitcoin bet as a marvel of engineering, as if you couldn’t take a 2x bet on most exchanges for a decade. But I guess MSTR is safer and hands off? Sure w,e. Boring.

From a media perspective. All Bitcoin podcasts are broke. They are expensive hobbies that maybe pay the bills and cover lunch. But no one is getting rich of off them. On the other hand, unless you are already Bitcoin rich, your odds of having a successful podcast are low. The grind is real. The media market for serious, high quality Bitcoin content is small and not growing particularly fast, and the competition is fierce.

Everyone has a podcast, haven’t you heard?

The only way to make money as a Bitcoin maximalist is as a developer and that requires significant skills. Skills which would probably pay better in other areas of the tech world. Now, I’m not trying to discourage devs from working on Bitcoin. I think bitcoin is a cause on it’s own and have contributed a great portion of my life and career to advancing it. As a dev, if you get paid in BTC and save enough of it, your contribution will pay you dividends in time, beyond any grants you get from the organizations paying them out today.

Nevertheless, the economic opportunities in this industry are thin, beyond hodling and finding ways to maximise those profits.

I’m not gonna complain about 30 to 40% average price growth per year on Bitcoin either. That’s a super power. Very happy to have been playing that game for a while. Despite being totally broke when I entered this industry, I have managed to keep up and exceed my peers in quality of life and financial freedom. Not rich by any real measure, but certainly comfortable.

And yet, the reality of this maxi track remains. To enter today into this industry and make any active, real money. To become a professional in any sense, or to have a company or start up that succeeds, there’s very few paths.

Path One: The Exchange

This industry is a casino. Many maxis fail to acknowledge or wrestle with this reality, but it’s a fact. Our industry is a casino, with some bets having more risk than others. And the exchanges are the house.

The house always wins.

Want to make money? Build an exchange and become an enforcement arm of the feds. Since they will squash you if you don’t enforce KYC laws.

Path Two: Trade Shitcoins

The second reliable way to make money … sometimes. Is trading shitcoins. Some are worse than others, most are ponzi schemes, few have real fundamentals, and of those few that have fundamentals, fewer yet have solid pumpamentals. If you catch one of those rare coins with the right recipe, you can make big money. But most people are gonna get rekt trying. They won’t even know what to look for.

Further more, trading is highly complex and risky and no one teaches you to manage that risk. Most also never seem to learn, even the hard way. So trading is the process of freeing fools from their money, and providing liquidity to normal market participants while you are at it. Not a particularly heroic role, but an essencial one, if you want liquid markets.

Speculators will buy or sell you Bitcoin at any time, for reasons that you need not care about. That’s the emergent benefit of the trader’s zero sum game.

Path Three: Launch a Shitcoin

Last but not least, you can use your social media influence to scam your followers. Many have done it, many will do it. It’s a lowly way to make money. And many lawsuits have been issued as a result. In this there’s no honor. This is blatant scamming of noobs by noobs.

That all sounds very maxi, Juan

Yes, you see, my analysis has not shifted much. What has been vindicated is my future outlook.

We have a shitcoin president about to take power of the United States. Sure Trump promised to create a Bitcoin strategic reserve or something along those lines. That’s gonna pump our bags of corn for sure.

But so did he launch an ETH defi shitcoin. A big chunk of which was bought by Justin Sun lol.

Trump is a shitcoin president and his rejection of Gensler as the SEC head is a boon for crypto. Alt season is cooking. The Warren anti crypto gang is getting curve stumped and we should make sure there’s little left while we can deliver some retribution.

This means the next two years are gonna be an altcoin boom. Everything is gonna pump. And the Bitcoin Maximalist argument will drown in shitcoin gainz.

Perhaps during the next bear market it will return.

So is that it? Same old same old til the end of time?

Well it doesn’t have to be.

Come Home Cypherpunk

I think there’s a third way. Far more interesting than being a crypto partisan. It’s called, returning to our roots.

Despite the color of the coin, the crypto boom has resulted in the largest distribution of private - public key cryptography in history. That’s fertile ground for a cryptographically secured world.

I care less about which coin ‘wins’ and more about what freedoms are secured by cryptography. What rights are enshrined in cyber space, and which boundaries are risen to never be knocked down, despite how many bullets you throw at them.

In the words of the cypherpunks. There’s not enough bullets in the world to break sha256.

Come home, cypherpunk.

(And watch my Bitcoin maximalish speech at Monerotopia!)

https://x.com/JuanSGalt/status/1861919564746862795