The (Other) Bitcoin Standard
Bitcoin maximalism came to life when Vitalik Buterin theorized the concept with his usual flaming eloquence. At this very moment, in 2014, the first big wave of shitcoins was rolling in, all of them claiming to be “the next Bitcoin”. If in 2018 you could create an ERC20 token and launch your ICO with the associated website and white paper by clicking a button (and paying the price), in 2014 the same tools already existed: choose a name, fork bitcoin code, change monetary policy, block time, difficulty adjustment algorithm randomly, generate the [ANN] post on the Bitcointalk forum and you were basically done. This was the lowest effort level of shitcoinery. Others put more work into their shitcoin, adding useless layers of complexity to solve problems nobody had.
The very existence of Bitcoin Maximalism took roots in the crypto-cambrian explosion of shitcoins. That being said, the term itself can be applied to different people with different opinions about Bitcoin. It is also largely used as an insult from people promoting/owning other coins, to designate narrow-minded bitcoiners rejecting every token other than Bitcoin. I became one of those narrow-minded people after being a shitcoiner myself back in the days. That was a slow process that I completed near the beginning of 2016, helped by a better understanding of the tech and its general intrications first, and then by witnessing many shitcoins scams and/or fallacies.
As I was one of them for almost 2 years, I understand shitcoiners very well. Shitcoinery is completely logical from a newcomer point of view. After all, these coins are working better, faster than Bitcoin and they have marketing teams! They have partnerships! What could possibly go wrong? To the moon !
I don’t want to judge anyone, but some bitcoin maximalists are just maximalists because of their bitcoin holdings. That’s not my case anymore, and even if agree with the possibility of Bitcoin one day becoming the world reserve currency, I think we will face some serious fights before this possibility becomes a reality. Nation states will not bend the knee so easily. I’m definitely not against the “Number goes up” state of mind but I really think it’s much more profound than that.
Today I chose to talk about my own Bitcoin Maximalism which is quite different from the one exposed in the famous “Bitcoin Standard” by Saifedean Ammous. My maximalism is not based on economics, nor politics, although I acknowledge how important these two are for Bitcoiners. My maximalism, is mainly technical.
Concrete foundations are better than quick sands to build on
In IT, protocols are everywhere. Protocols help communication between applications or devices, in order for them to speak the same language and create interoperability. As long as you implement a protocol, you can speak with others. Protocols need stability in order to simply have a chance to find their way to adoption. You don’t want to start from scratch every other day because the protocol you have chosen to build on changes. If you choose a protocol to build on, you are assuming it won’t change, at least for several years. Take the Internet Protocol (IP) for instance. It barely changed in 30 years, and my guess is that it greatly helped innovation to strive. That means that using a protocol, and knowing that it will break and/or change often (if only we knew when) is pure IT nonsense.
The term of Bitcoin Ossification appeared recently. It represents the factual stability of the protocol. It applies to software and hardware, to conventions adopted by the whole ecosystem and the shared belief that it won’t change too often. This is very important for builders, as they can project themselves into the future.
Altcoins Original Sin
Bitcoiners sometimes refers to the creation of Bitcoin as the “Immaculate conception” as opposed to the “original sin” of altcoins regarding their price since inception and sometimes even before a single coin hit any market. I like these religious references as there are clearly some similarities between coins wars and religious wars. Bitcoin did not have any value for months and its first actual value was 2 pizzas = 10 000 bitcoins. Value came afterwards, after the project was mature enough for people for a market to develop. On the contrary, the immense majority of altcoins made initial offerings, asking people for money to fund projects. Funding is completely normal for private companies, but when it comes to a public good like a global protocol, I don’t think it applies very well. As a result, numerous ICO projects or even altcoins from the pre-ICO era have raised tons of money (and more precisely tons of bitcoins) without delivering anything of value. Many deceptions came out of this situation, but this could have been anticipated. Why would anyone build anything when sitting on top of an enormous amount of coins growing in price day after day? We, at Woleet chose not to take the ICO train in 2017 for many reasons, and as a result we had to continue to work and deliver value to our clients. I’m not sure I would have worked that much if the company had raised 10 000 bitcoins!
Layers, layers, layers
Having this one-base-protocol-only vision does not mean that I am against innovation. Many altcoins delivered many interesting things but failed because they did not manage to preserve the incentives of their base protocols. The main explanation for creating a new coin or a new protocol was : Bitcoin is limited and cannot do what I want. Is Bitcoin limited ? Yes it is. But Bitcoin is limited for reasons. Security is crucial for Bitcoin to deliver its real innovation. Censorship resistance is also crucial in order to keep protocol’s neutrality. Decentralization is an absolute must if you don’t want to have powerful actors controlling everything. Newer blockchain protocols introduced more complexity and with it, new vulnerabilities or compromises; they have companies, foundations and people in charge creating single points of failure. We need to really think about the real innovation Bitcoin brought to the world. Bitcoin is freedom, for everyone the same rules. The most important feature is the freedom of making transactions and the same chance for everyone to have them included in a block. If you want to build more sophisticated things on top of this innovation, use layers for God’s sake! Layers are the smartest way to isolate roles and create secured architectures. Upper layers allows to add complexity without sacrificing lower layers properties. You can have scalability with layers, you can have complex smart contracts with layers, you can build tokens with layers. Layers are the way to go and it should be obvious to anyone.
Conclusion : Reinventing the wheel is a bad idea
After ten years of existence, Bitcoin still represent 65% of the whole crypto market capitalization despite the existence of thousands of altcoins. I don’t think there will be any flippening, it’s simply too late. Bitcoin is a very secure technology, working as intended and 10 years after its genesis block, it became far more than just a technical protocol, it became a language, a common social construction strengthening its resilience day after day, block after block. Even if some altcoins seem to have genuine intentions — other than their founders buying lambos — I consider their mere existence as a fantastic loss of time and money.
Hopefully, many of us took the right path: building on top of this common, universal protocol.
