捍卫比特币极简主义

2022 年 4 月 1 日查看所有帖子

多年来，我们一直听说未来是区块链，而不是比特币。世界的未来不会是一种主要的加密货币，甚至不是几种，而是许多加密货币——获胜者将在一个中央屋檐下拥有强大的领导力，以迅速适应用户对规模的需求。比特币是一种新兴的代 币，以太坊很快就会紧随其后；它将是更新、更有活力的资产，吸引新一波大众用户，他们不关心怪异的自由主义意识形态或“自我主权验证”，被毒性和反政府心态关闭，只想要区块链 Defi 和快速且有效的游戏。

但是，如果这种叙述完全错误，而比特币极简主义的思想、习惯和实践实际上非常接近正确呢？如果比特币不仅仅是与网络效应联系在一起的过时的宠物岩石怎么办？如果比特币极端主义者真的深刻理解他们是在一个充满敌意和不确定性的世界中运作的，他们需要为之奋斗，而他们的行为、个性和对协议设计的看法深刻地反映了这一事实呢？如果我们生活在一个诚实的加密货币（其中非常少）和骗子加密货币（其中非常多）的世界中，以及健康剂量的不容忍怎么办？实际上有必要防止前者滑入后者吗？这就是这篇文章将提出的论点。

我们生活在一个危险的世界，保护自由是严肃的事情

希望现在这一点比六周前更加明显，当时许多人仍然认真地认为弗拉基米尔普京是一个被误解的善良角色，他只是试图保护俄罗斯并将西方文明从同性恋世界中拯救出来。但这仍然值得重复。我们生活在一个危险的世界里，那里有许多不听同情和理性的不诚实的演员。

区块链的核心是一种安全技术——一种从根本上保护人们并帮助他们在如此不友好的世界中生存的技术。它就像盖拉德瑞尔的小瓶一样，“当所有其他灯都熄灭时，在黑暗的地方给你一盏灯”。它不是低成本的灯，也不是荧光嬉皮节能灯，也不是高性能灯。这是一盏牺牲所有这些维度的灯，只为一件事和一件事进行优化：当你面临生命中最艰难的挑战并且有一个可怕的二十英尺时，成为一盏需要做的灯蜘蛛盯着你的脸。

区块链每天都被没有银行账户和银行账户不足的人、活动家、性工作者、难民和许多其他群体使用他们被送达。许多人将它们用作主要的生命线来支付和储存储蓄。

为此，公共区块链为安全牺牲了很多：

• 区块链要求每笔交易都经过数千次独立验证才能被接受。
• 与在几百毫秒内确认交易的集中式系统不同，区块链要求用户等待 10 秒到 10 分钟的任何时间才能获得确认。
• 区块链要求用户完全负责验证自己：如果你丢失了密钥，你就会丢失你的硬币。
• 区块链牺牲了隐私，需要更疯狂、更昂贵的技术来恢复隐私。

这些牺牲是为了什么？创建一个可以在不友好的世界中生存的系统，并真正做到“当所有其他灯熄灭时，成为黑暗中的一盏灯”。

出色地完成这项任务需要两个关键要素：(i)强大且可防御的技术堆栈和 (ii)强大且可防御的文化。强大且可防御的技术堆栈的关键特性是关注简单性和深度数学纯度：1 MB 块大小、2100 万硬币限制和简单的 Nakamoto 共识工作机制证明，即使是高中生也可以理解。协议设计必须易于证明几十年和几个世纪以来的合理性；技术和参数的选择必须是一件艺术品。

第二个要素是不妥协、坚定的极简主义文化。这一定是一种文化，可以不屈不挠地保护自己免受试图从外部吸收生态系统的企业和政府行为者，以及试图利用它谋取个人利益的加密空间内的不良行为者，其中有很多。

现在，比特币和以太坊文化实际上是什么样的？好吧，让我们问凯文范：

不相信这是有代表性的吗？好吧，让我们再问问 Kevin Pham：

现在，你可能会说，这只是以太坊的人在玩，最终他们明白他们必须做什么以及他们正在处理什么。但是他们呢？让我们看看以太坊创始人 Vitalik Buterin 和哪些人一起玩：

而这只是一个很小的选择。任何看到这个的人都应该问的直接问题是：与所有这些人公开会面到底有什么意义？其中一些人是非常正派的企业家和政治家，但其他人则积极参与 Vitalik 肯定不支持的严重侵犯人权行为。Vitalik 是否没有意识到这些人中有多少在地缘政治上处于彼此的喉咙？

现在，也许他只是一个相信与人交谈以帮助实现世界和平的理想主义者，以及弗雷德里克道格拉斯“与任何人一起做对的人，没有人做错的事”的格言的追随者。但还有一个更简单的假设：Vitalik 是一个嬉皮士般的环球旅行快感和追求地位的人，他非常喜欢与重要人物见面并感到受到尊重。不仅是 Vitalik；像 Consensys 这样的公司非常乐意与沙特阿拉伯合作，整个生态系统一直在努力寻找主流数据进行验证。

现在问自己一个问题：当时机成熟时，区块链上正在发生真正重要的事情——实际上是冒犯有权有势的人的重要事情——哪个生态系统更愿意放下脚来拒绝审查它们，无论多么压力是施加在他们身上的吗？拥有真正关心成为每个人的朋友的环球游牧民族的生态系统，还是拥有 AR15 和斧头作为业余爱好的人的生态系统？

货币不仅仅是“第一个应用程序”。这是迄今为止最成功的一个。

许多“区块链，不是比特币”的人认为，加密货币是区块链的第一个应用，但它是一个非常无聊的应用，而区块链的真正潜力在于更大、更令人兴奋的事情。让我们浏览一下以太坊白皮书中的应用程序列表：

• 发行代币
• 金融衍生品
• 稳定币
• 身份和声誉系统
• 去中心化文件存储
• 去中心化自治组织 (DAO)
• 点对点赌博
• 预测市场

其中许多类别的应用程序已经启动并且至少有一些用户。也就是说，加密货币人士真的很重视赋予“全球南方”银行资金不足的人权力。这些应用程序中的哪些实际上在全球南方拥有大量用户？

事实证明，到目前为止，最成功的是存储财富和支付。3% 的阿根廷人拥有加密货币，6% 的尼日利亚人和12% 的乌克兰人拥有加密货币。到目前为止，政府使用区块链来完成今天有用的事情的最大例子是向乌克兰政府捐赠的加密货币，如果包括对与乌克兰相关的非政府组织的捐赠，它已经筹集了超过 1 亿美元。

有什么其他应用程序在任何地方接近今天的实际采用水平？也许最接近的是ENS。DAO 是真实存在且不断增长的，但如今，它们中的太多吸引了富裕的富国人民，他们的主要兴趣是享受乐趣和使用卡通人物形象来满足他们第一世界对自我表达的需求，而不是建立学校和医院和解决其他现实世界的问题。

因此，我们可以很清楚地看到两个方面：“区块链”团队，富裕国家的特权人士，他们热爱美德——“超越金钱和资本主义”，不禁为“去中心化治理实验”而兴奋不已。业余爱好和团队“比特币”，包括全球南方在内的世界许多国家的富人和穷人的高度多样化群体，他们实际上正在使用资本主义工具自由自主主权货币为今天的人类提供真正的价值.

专注于赚钱可以赚到更好的钱

关于为什么比特币不支持“富状态”智能合约的一个常见误解如下。比特币真的很重视简单，特别是技术复杂性低，以减少出现问题的机会。因此，它不想添加能够支持以太坊中更复杂的智能合约所必需的更复杂的功能和操作码。

这种误解当然是错误的。事实上，有很多方法可以为比特币添加丰富的状态。在比特币聊天档案中搜索“契约”一词，可以看到许多正在讨论的提案。其中许多建议都非常简单。没有添加约定的原因并不是比特币开发人员看到了丰富的状态性的价值，而是发现协议的复杂性甚至更高一点是不能容忍的。相反，这是因为比特币开发人员担心丰富的状态可能会给生态系统带来系统复杂性的风险！

以太坊与矿工可提取价值（MEV）的斗争就是这个问题在实践中出现的一个很好的例子。在以太坊中很容易构建应用程序，让下一个与某些合约交互的人获得可观的奖励，导致交易者和矿工争夺它，并大大增加了网络中心化风险并需要复杂的解决方法。在比特币中，构建这种具有系统风险的应用程序很困难，这在很大程度上是因为比特币缺乏丰富的状态性，并且专注于简单（且无 MEV）的用例，即货币。

系统性传染也可能以非技术方式发生。比特币只是金钱意味着比特币需要相对较少的开发人员，这有助于降低开发人员开始要求自己打印免费资金以构建新协议功能的风险。比特币只是货币，减轻了核心开发人员不断添加功能以“跟上竞争”和“满足开发人员需求”的压力。

在很多方面，系统性影响是真实存在的，货币不可能“启用”高度复杂和风险分散的应用程序的生态系统，而这种复杂性不会以某种方式对其进行反击。比特币是安全的选择。如果以太坊继续其以第 2 层为中心的方法，ETH-the-currency可能会与它所启用的应用程序生态系统保持一定距离，从而获得一些保护。另一方面，所谓的高性能第 1 层平台则没有机会。

一般来说，一个行业最早的项目是最“正宗”的

许多行业和领域都遵循类似的模式。首先，一些新的令人兴奋的技术要么被发明出来，要么得到很大的改进，以至于它实际上可以用于某些事情。刚开始时，这项技术还很笨拙，几乎任何人都无法将其作为一项投资来接触，风险太大，而且没有“社会证据”表明人们可以利用它取得成功。因此，第一批参与的人将是理想主义者、技术极客和其他对技术及其改善社会的潜力真正感到兴奋的人。

然而，一旦技术充分证明了自己，规范就会出现——在互联网文化中，这一事件通常被称为永恒的九月。这些不仅仅是普通的善良规范，他们想要感受一些令人兴奋的事情的一部分，而且是商业规范，穿着西装，他们开始在生态系统中搜寻赚钱的方法 - 与风险投资家的军队一样渴望创造自己的资金在场外支持他们。在极端情况下，彻头彻尾的骗子进来，创建没有赎回社会或技术价值的区块链，这基本上是边缘骗局。但现实是，“利他主义理想主义者”和“骗子”的界限确实是一个光谱。而且，生态系统持续运行的时间越长，任何利他方面的新项目就越难启动。

区块链行业缓慢地用短期追求利润的价值观取代哲学和理想主义价值观的一个嘈杂的代理是越来越大的预挖规模：加密货币开发人员给自己的分配。

哪些区块链社区非常重视自我主权、隐私和去中心化，并且正在做出巨大的牺牲来获得它？哪些区块链社区只是试图提高他们的市值并为创始人和投资者赚钱？上面的图表应该很清楚。

不容忍是好的

以上说明了为什么比特币作为第一个加密货币的地位赋予了它独特的优势，这是过去五年内创建的任何加密货币都难以复制的。但是现在我们遇到了对比特币极简主义文化的最大反对意见：为什么它如此有毒？

比特币毒性的案例源于Conquest 的第二定律。在罗伯特·康奎斯特最初的表述中，法律规定“任何组织在宪法上没有明确地右翼，迟早会变成左翼”。但实际上，这只是更普遍模式的一个特例，在无情地同质化和墨守成规的社交媒体的现代时代，它比以往任何时候都更加重要：

如果你想保持与主流不同的身份，那么你需要一种真正强大的文化，在每次试图维护其霸权时积极抵制和同化主流。

正如我上面提到的，区块链是一种非常根本和明确的反文化运动，它试图创造和保存与主流不同的东西。在世界分裂为积极压制它们之间的社会和经济互动的大国集团的时候，区块链是为数不多的可以保持全球性的事物之一。在越来越多的人寻求审查以击败他们的短期敌人时，区块链坚定地继续不审查任何内容。

区块链社区还必须与内部的不良行为者作斗争。不良行为者包括：

• 诈骗者，他们制造和销售最终毫无价值（或更糟的是，有害）但为了合法性而坚持“加密”和“去中心化”品牌（以及高度抽象的人文主义和友谊观念）的项目。
• 合作主义者，他们公开和大声地表明与政府合作的美德信号，并积极试图说服政府对其竞争对手使用强制性武力。
• 社团主义者，他们试图利用他们的资源来接管区块链的开发，并经常推动实现集中化的协议更改。

人们可以面带微笑地反对所有这些演员，礼貌地告诉世界他们为什么“不同意他们的优先事项”。但这是不现实的：坏演员会努力融入你的社区，到那时，用他们真正需要的足够的轻蔑来批评他们在心理上变得很困难：你批评的人是你的朋友朋友们。因此，任何重视和蔼可亲的文化都会在挑战面前轻易放弃，让诈骗者在无辜新手的钱包中自由游荡。

什么样的文化不会被淘汰？一种愿意并渴望告诉内部骗子和外部强大对手走俄罗斯军舰之路的文化。

针对种子油的奇怪十字军东征是好的

帮助社区围绕其独特价值观保持内部凝聚力并避免陷入主流泥潭的一种强大的联系工具是具有相似精神的怪异信仰和十字军东征，即使与核心使命没有直接关系。理想情况下，这些十字军东征应该至少部分正确，戳中真正的盲点或主流价值观的不一致。

比特币社区擅长这一点。他们最近的一次十字军东征是一场反对种子油的战争，从植物种子中提取的油富含omega-6脂肪酸，对人体健康有害。

媒体对这场比特币运动的讨论持怀疑态度，但当“受人尊敬的”科技公司处理这个话题时，媒体对这个话题的态度要好得多。这场十字军东征有助于提醒比特币人，主流媒体从根本上是部落和虚伪的，因此媒体尖锐地诽谤加密货币主要用于洗钱和恐怖主义的企图应该受到同等程度的蔑视。

做一个极简主义者

极简主义经常被媒体嘲笑为一种危险的有毒右翼邪教，以及一旦其他一些加密货币进入并接管比特币的至高无上的网络效应就会消失的纸老虎。但现实情况是，我上面描述的极简主义的论据都完全不依赖于网络效应。网络效应确实是对数的，而不是二次的：一旦加密货币“足够大”，它就有足够的流动性来运作，多加密货币支付处理器很容易将其添加到他们的收藏中。但是，声称比特币是一种过时的宠物石，其价值完全来自步行僵尸网络效应，只需稍加推动即可崩溃，这同样是完全错误的。

像比特币这样的加密资产具有真正的文化和结构优势，使其成为值得持有和使用的强大资产。比特币是该类别的一个很好的例子，尽管它肯定不是唯一的。其他值得尊敬的加密货币确实存在，并且极简主义者愿意支持和使用它们。极简主义不仅仅是为了比特币而比特币；相反，这是一个非常真实的认识，大多数其他加密资产都是骗局，不容忍的文化是不可避免的，也是保护新手并确保该空间的至少一个角落仍然是值得居住的角落所必需的。

与其让一个新手被骗子破产，不如误导十个新手来避免一项结果很好的投资。

最好让你的协议过于简单而无法为十个低价值的短期注意力跨度赌博应用程序提供服务，而不是让它过于复杂而无法为支撑其他一切的核心稳健货币用例提供服务。

为你所信仰的东西积极地站出来冒犯数百万人，总比试图让每个人都开心而最终一无所获要好。

勇敢起来。为你的价值观而战。做一个极简主义者。

In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

2022 Apr 01See all posts

We've been hearing for years that the future is blockchain, not Bitcoin. The future of the world won't be one major cryptocurrency, or even a few, but many cryptocurrencies - and the winning ones will have strong leadership under one central roof to adapt rapidly to users' needs for scale. Bitcoin is a boomer coin, and Ethereum is soon to follow; it will be newer and more energetic assets that attract the new waves of mass users who don't care about weird libertarian ideology or "self-sovereign verification", are turned off by toxicity and anti-government mentality, and just want blockchain defi and games that are fast and work.

But what if this narrative is all wrong, and the ideas, habits and practices of Bitcoin maximalism are in fact pretty close to correct? What if Bitcoin is far more than an outdated pet rock tied to a network effect? What if Bitcoin maximalists actually deeply understand that they are operating in a very hostile and uncertain world where there are things that need to be fought for, and their actions, personalities and opinions on protocol design deeply reflect that fact? What if we live in a world of honest cryptocurrencies (of which there are very few) and grifter cryptocurrencies (of which there are very many), and a healthy dose of intolerance is in fact necessary to prevent the former from sliding into the latter? That is the argument that this post will make.

We live in a dangerous world, and protecting freedom is serious business

Hopefully, this is much more obvious now than it was six weeks ago, when many people still seriously thought that Vladimir Putin is a misunderstood and kindly character who is merely trying to protect Russia and save Western Civilization from the gaypocalypse. But it's still worth repeating. We live in a dangerous world, where there are plenty of bad-faith actors who do not listen to compassion and reason.

A blockchain is at its core a security technology - a technology that is fundamentally all about protecting people and helping them survive in such an unfriendly world. It is, like the Phial of Galadriel, "a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out". It is not a low-cost light, or a fluorescent hippie energy-efficient light, or a high-performance light. It is a light that sacrifices on all of those dimensions to optimize for one thing and one thing only: to be a light that does when it needs to do when you're facing the toughest challenge of your life and there is a friggin twenty foot spider staring at you in the face.

Blockchains are being used every day by unbanked and underbanked people, by activists, by sex workers, by refugees, and by many other groups either who are uninteresting for profit-seeking centralized financial institutions to serve, or who have enemies that don't want them to be served. They are used as a primary lifeline by many people to make their payments and store their savings.

And to that end, public blockchains sacrifice a lot for security:

• Blockchains require each transaction to be independently verified thousands of times to be accepted.
• Unlike centralized systems that confirm transactions in a few hundred milliseconds, blockchains require users to wait anywhere from 10 seconds to 10 minutes to get a confirmation.
• Blockchains require users to be fully in charge of authenticating themselves: if you lose your key, you lose your coins.
• Blockchains sacrifice privacy, requiring even crazier and more expensive technology to get that privacy back.

What are all of these sacrifices for? To create a system that can survive in an unfriendly world, and actually do the job of being "a light in dark places, when all other lights go out".

Excellent at that task requires two key ingredients: (i) a robust and defensible technology stack and (ii) a robust and defensible culture. The key property to have in a robust and defensible technology stack is a focus on simplicity and deep mathematical purity: a 1 MB block size, a 21 million coin limit, and a simple Nakamoto consensus proof of work mechanism that even a high school student can understand. The protocol design must be easy to justify decades and centuries down the line; the technology and parameter choices must be a work of art.

The second ingredient is the culture of uncompromising, steadfast minimalism. This must be a culture that can stand unyieldingly in defending itself against corporate and government actors trying to co-opt the ecosystem from outside, as well as bad actors inside the crypto space trying to exploit it for personal profit, of which there are many.

Now, what do Bitcoin and Ethereum culture actually look like? Well, let's ask Kevin Pham:

Don't believe this is representative? Well, let's ask Kevin Pham again:

Now, you might say, this is just Ethereum people having fun, and at the end of the day they understand what they have to do and what they are dealing with. But do they? Let's look at the kinds of people that Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, hangs out with:

And this is only a small selection. The immediate question that anyone looking at this should ask is: what the hell is the point of publicly meeting with all these people? Some of these people are very decent entrepreneurs and politicians, but others are actively involved in serious human rights abuses that Vitalik certainly does not support. Does Vitalik not realize just how much some of these people are geopolitically at each other's throats?

Now, maybe he is just an idealistic person who believes in talking to people to help bring about world peace, and a follower of Frederick Douglass's dictum to "unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong". But there's also a simpler hypothesis: Vitalik is a hippy-happy globetrotting pleasure and status-seeker, and he deeply enjoys meeting and feeling respected by people who are important. And it's not just Vitalik; companies like Consensys are totally happy to partner with Saudi Arabia, and the ecosystem as a whole keeps trying to look to mainstream figures for validation.

Now ask yourself the question: when the time comes, actually important things are happening on the blockchain - actually important things that offend people who are powerful - which ecosystem would be more willing to put its foot down and refuse to censor them no matter how much pressure is applied on them to do so? The ecosystem with globe-trotting nomads who really really care about being everyone's friend, or the ecosystem with people who take pictures of themslves with an AR15 and an axe as a side hobby?

Currency is not "just the first app". It's by far the most successful one.

Many people of the "blockchain, not Bitcoin" persuasion argue that cryptocurrency is the first application of blockchains, but it's a very boring one, and the true potential of blockchains lies in bigger and more exciting things. Let's go through the list of applications in the Ethereum whitepaper:

• Issuing tokens
• Financial derivatives
• Stablecoins
• Identity and reputation systems
• Decentralized file storage
• Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)
• Peer-to-peer gambling
• Prediction markets

Many of these categories have applications that have launched and that have at least some users. That said, cryptocurrency people really value empowering under-banked people in the "Global South". Which of these applications actually have lots of users in the Global South?

As it turns out, by far the most successful one is storing wealth and payments. 3% of Argentinians own cryptocurrency, as do 6% of Nigerians and 12% of people in Ukraine. By far the biggest instance of a government using blockchains to accomplish something useful today is cryptocurrency donations to the government of Ukraine, which have raised more than $100 million if you include donations to non-governmental Ukraine-related efforts.

What other application has anywhere close to that level of actual, real adoption today? Perhaps the closest is ENS. DAOs are real and growing, but today far too many of them are appealing to wealthy rich-country people whose main interest is having fun and using cartoon-character profiles to satisfy their first-world need for self-expression, and not build schools and hospitals and solve other real world problems.

Thus, we can see the two sides pretty clearly: team "blockchain", privileged people in wealthy countries who love to virtue-signal about "moving beyond money and capitalism" and can't help being excited about "decentralized governance experimentation" as a hobby, and team "Bitcoin", a highly diverse group of both rich and poor people in many countries around the world including the Global South, who are actually using the capitalist tool of free self-sovereign money to provide real value to human beings today.

Focusing exclusively on being money makes for better money

A common misconception about why Bitcoin does not support "richly stateful" smart contracts goes as follows. Bitcoin really really values being simple, and particularly having low technical complexity, to reduce the chance that something will go wrong. As a result, it doesn't want to add the more complicated features and opcodes that are necessary to be able to support more complicated smart contracts in Ethereum.

This misconception is, of course, wrong. In fact, there are plenty of ways to add rich statefulness into Bitcoin; search for the word "covenants" in Bitcoin chat archives to see many proposals being discussed. And many of these proposals are surprisingly simple. The reason why covenants have not been added is not that Bitcoin developers see the value in rich statefulness but find even a little bit more protocol complexity intolerable. Rather, it's because Bitcoin developers are worried about the risks of the systemic complexity that rich statefulness being possible would introduce into the ecosystem!

Ethereum's battle with miner-extractable value (MEV) is an excellent example of this problem appearing in practice. It's very easy in Ethereum to build applications where the next person to interact with some contract gets a substantial reward, causing transactors and miners to fight over it, and contributing greatly to network centralization risk and requiring complicated workarounds. In Bitcoin, building such systemically risky applications is hard, in large part because Bitcoin lacks rich statefulness and focuses on the simple (and MEV-free) use case of just being money.

Systemic contagion can happen in non-technical ways too. Bitcoin just being money means that Bitcoin requires relatively few developers, helping to reduce the risk that developers will start demanding to print themselves free money to build new protocol features. Bitcoin just being money reduces pressure for core developers to keep adding features to "keep up with the competition" and "serve developers' needs".

In so many ways, systemic effects are real, and it's just not possible for a currency to "enable" an ecosystem of highly complex and risky decentralized applications without that complexity biting it back somehow. Bitcoin makes the safe choice. If Ethereum continues its layer-2-centric approach, ETH-the-currency may gain some distance from the application ecosystem that it's enabling and thereby get some protection. So-called high-performance layer-1 platforms, on the other hand, stand no chance.

In general, the earliest projects in an industry are the most "genuine"

Many industries and fields follow a similar pattern. First, some new exciting technology either gets invented, or gets a big leap of improvement to the point where it's actually usable for something. At the beginning, the technology is still clunky, it is too risky for almost anyone to touch as an investment, and there is no "social proof" that people can use it to become successful. As a result, the first people involved are going to be the idealists, tech geeks and others who are genuinely excited about the technology and its potential to improve society.

Once the technology proves itself enough, however, the normies come in - an event that in internet culture is often called Eternal September. And these are not just regular kindly normies who want to feel part of something exciting, but business normies, wearing suits, who start scouring the ecosystem wolf-eyed for ways to make money - with armies of venture capitalists just as eager to make their own money supporting them from the sidelines. In the extreme cases, outright grifters come in, creating blockchains with no redeeming social or technical value which are basically borderline scams. But the reality is that the line from "altruistic idealist" and "grifter" is really a spectrum. And the longer an ecosystem keeps going, the harder it is for any new project on the altruistic side of the spectrum to get going.

One noisy proxy for the blockchain industry's slow replacement of philosophical and idealistic values with short-term profit-seeking values is the larger and larger size of premines: the allocations that developers of a cryptocurrency give to themselves.

Which blockchain communities deeply value self-sovereignty, privacy and decentralization, and are making to get big sacrifices to get it? And which blockchain communities are just trying to pump up their market caps and make money for founders and investors? The above chart should make it pretty clear.

Intolerance is good

The above makes it clear why Bitcoin's status as the first cryptocurrency gives it unique advantages that are extremely difficult for any cryptocurrency created within the last five years to replicate. But now we get to the biggest objection against Bitcoin maximalist culture: why is it so toxic?

The case for Bitcoin toxicity stems from Conquest's second law. In Robert Conquest's original formulation, the law says that "any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing". But really, this is just a special case of a much more general pattern, and one that in the modern age of relentlessly homogenizing and conformist social media is more relevant than ever:

If you want to retain an identity that is different from the mainstream, then you need a really strong culture that actively resists and fights assimilation into the mainstream every time it tries to assert its hegemony.

Blockchains are, as I mentioned above, very fundamentally and explicitly a counterculture movement that is trying to create and preserve something different from the mainstream. At a time when the world is splitting up into great power blocs that actively suppress social and economic interaction between them, blockchains are one of the very few things that can remain global. At a time when more and more people are reaching for censorship to defeat their short-term enemies, blockchains steadfastly continue to censor nothing.

Blockchain communities also have to fight bad actors on the inside. Bad actors include:

• Scammers, who make and sell projects that are ultimately valueless (or worse, actively harmful) but cling to the "crypto" and "decentralization" brand (as well as highly abstract ideas of humanism and friendship) for legitimacy.
• Collaborationists, who publicly and loudly virtue-signal about working together with governments and actively try to convince governments to use coercive force against their competitors.
• Corporatists, who try to use their resources to take over the development of blockchains, and often push for protocol changes that enable centralization.

One could stand against all of these actors with a smiling face, politely telling the world why they "disagree with their priorities". But this is unrealistic: the bad actors will try hard to embed themselves into your community, and at that point it becomes psychologically hard to criticize them with the sufficient level of scorn that they truly require: the people you're criticizing are friends of your friends. And so any culture that values agreeableness will simply fold before the challenge, and let scammers roam freely through the wallets of innocent newbies.

What kind of culture won't fold? A culture that is willing and eager to tell both scammers on the inside and powerful opponents on the outside to go the way of the Russian warship.

Weird crusades against seed oils are good

One powerful bonding tool to help a community maintain internal cohesion around its distinctive values, and avoid falling into the morass that is the mainstream, is weird beliefs and crusades that are in a similar spirit, even if not directly related, to the core mission. Ideally, these crusades should be at least partially correct, poking at a genuine blind spot or inconsistency of mainstream values.

The Bitcoin community is good at this. Their most recent crusade is a war against seed oils, oils derived from vegetable seeds high in omega-6 fatty acids that are harmful to human health.

This Bitcoiner crusade gets treated skeptically when reviewed in the media, but the media treats the topic much more favorably when "respectable" tech firms are tackling it. The crusade helps to remind Bitcoiners that the mainstream media is fundamentally tribal and hypocritical, and so the media's shrill attempts to slander cryptocurrency as being primarily for money laundering and terrorism should be treated with the same level of scorn.

Be a maximalist

Maximalism is often derided in the media as both a dangerous toxic right-wing cult, and as a paper tiger that will disappear as soon as some other cryptocurrency comes in and takes over Bitcoin's supreme network effect. But the reality is that none of the arguments for maximalism that I describe above depend at all on network effects. Network effects really are logarithmic, not quadratic: once a cryptocurrency is "big enough", it has enough liquidity to function and multi-cryptocurrency payment processors will easily add it to their collection. But the claim that Bitcoin is an outdated pet rock and its value derives entirely from a walking-zombie network effect that just needs a little push to collapse is similarly completely wrong.

Crypto-assets like Bitcoin have real cultural and structural advantages that make them powerful assets worth holding and using. Bitcoin is an excellent example of the category, though it's certainly not the only one; other honorable cryptocurrencies do exist, and maximalists have been willing to support and use them. Maximalism is not just Bitcoin-for-the-sake-of-Bitcoin; rather, it's a very genuine realization that most other cryptoassets are scams, and a culture of intolerance is unavoidable and necessary to protect newbies and make sure at least one corner of that space continues to be a corner worth living in.

It's better to mislead ten newbies into avoiding an investment that turns out good than it is to allow a single newbie to get bankrupted by a grifter.

It's better to make your protocol too simple and fail to serve ten low-value short-attention-span gambling applications than it is to make it too complex and fail to serve the central sound money use case that underpins everything else.

And it's better to offend millions by standing aggressively for what you believe in than it is to try to keep everyone happy and end up standing for nothing.

Be brave. Fight for your values. Be a maximalist.