 There used to be a time where you used to just say, I'm a Bitcoiner in 2011 or 2012. And it didn't matter who you met. If they also said I'm a Bitcoiner, you could go out for dinner until three in the morning and have an amazing day. Bitcoin maximalism, it sounds a little ominous, but really it's just a way to think about the original cryptocurrency and how it fits into the big picture of what's become known as the crypto sector. To some, it's said as an insult, while others build it into their identity, proudly proclaiming the belief. On today's episode, we're going to discuss the idea of Bitcoin maximalism and whether it's a cultural quirk that will fade with time or perhaps the way of the future. But before that, introductions. My name is Adami Levine, and this is Speaking of Bitcoin. Today as always, I'm joined by the other hosts of the show, Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Hello, Stephanie Murphy. Hi. And Jonathan Mohan. Hey, hey. So, folks, I think we all have a lot of thoughts about this. It's a very interesting topic, something we haven't talked about actually in a really long time. But before we get into that, Andreas, can you kind of help us define that a little bit better than I just did? How would you sort of characterize Bitcoin maximalism? I think it's useful to look at the history of this term, because it was actually coined by Vitalik Batern and used directly to criticize people who had that view. Vitalik, who is the founder of Ethereum? Yes. Which was at the time Bitcoin's main competitor, if you will. I think this was actually before, that quote from him is before Ethereum. So this was not necessarily about that divergence, right? This was Bitcoin sort of land talking about Bitcoin. Yeah, because at the time it was maximalism vis-à-vis the altcoins even before Ethereum existed. So it was meant as a criticism. It was meant to caricature an extreme position of fairly absolutist position and caricature it. What happened next is that some people decided to adopt that as a badge of honor and parade it about to the point of even taking the extreme version of that, which is to take the moniker of toxic maximalism and use the symbol of biohazard, of toxicity, as a logo printed on merchandise and hats and things like that. So you'll see, for example, in Bitcoin Twitter circles, you'll see some people still have that emoji in their bio. And what that means is toxic maximalist and proud of it. Wow, that's interesting. So it really depends on who you ask of whether it's a good or bad thing. Right. To take the almost extreme caricature version that some people have apparently missed the irony or adopted it nevertheless, to be a toxic maximalist is to beat back the hordes of altcoins as all of them are scams and to take a righteous role in protecting the innocent and the new from all of the people who are trying to steal their money, without exception, because all of them are scams by definition. But toxic is also something you could call someone to kind of shut down debate, like you're being toxic, right? Oh, yeah. But I think there's good points to be made that some of these ideologies when they're taken to the extreme are toxic and they're toxic in the way that they attack others. I've been viciously attacked by many people who are involved in Bitcoin Twitter. Regardless of what I've done in the past, you know, people will say to me, oh, you did some good things for Bitcoin up to 2015. But it's a pity that you've strayed since. Thanks for your opinion, bud. I mean, what I want to do is like think through the history of let's talk Bitcoin and make my own like heavily added hit piece against us. Because one of my favorite statements, it's like how open minded we are to ideas. And I don't think there's like very few toxic maximalists who themselves were open minded enough to understand and learn and get involved in Bitcoin, even just conceptually in 2010 or 2011. Because what makes them so close minded is what denied them the mental flexibility to even see it as a value to begin with. But I remember one of the first podcasts you guys did. And I think it was the first one I was ever on was when you guys were in New York and we even said, and this is many, many incarnations ago of what I'm about to say, but we said that if there was no Bitcoin, we might have called the show Let's Talk Ripple. We did. I didn't say that. We did. We most certainly did. It's one of those things where if the Ripple system had come up before Bitcoin, then we'd be having a very different conversation now. And now it'd probably be, you know, let's talk Ripple. You know, because I mean, again, compared to the banking system we have now, it's so much more efficient compared to cryptocurrencies. It's less compelling. Because it was back like many incarnations ago when Ripple was a peer to peer credit and debiting system. It's very tribal in a sports team kind of way, where it's like, you know, like these are the Yankees and the Yankees are the greatest. And there's no one who's ever liked the Yankees. How could you not like the Yankees? And oh, you said the rent socks had a good game. I thought you were a Yankees fan. It's very like no true Scotsmaning you. No true Scotsman. That's what I was just thinking of. Or from the English perspective, it's the definition of the hooligan. It's not just I love my team. It's I'm going to put razor blades in a potato and throw it at the other side of the stadium. Andreas, in December of 2013, I remember we went to a conference in Las Vegas and that was the first time that we had met, I believe Adam Back. Yeah. And you interviewed Adam Back for the show. And one of the comments that really surprised me, this was before he was involved with Bitcoin in any sort of development way. But he had this very specific concern about the viability of Bitcoin, which was what's to stop anyone else from just creating more. Sure, Bitcoin has a limit of 21 million. But what differentiates Bitcoin from anything else that somebody could create and will create that would expand the supply of not Bitcoin, but of digital tokens generally. That was like his big thing that was why he thought it wouldn't work. Do you remember that the same? Yeah, yeah, I do. I went through an evolution of thinking about this. I when I first really got deeply involved in understanding the Bitcoin limitations and trying to help move them forward sort of about six months ago, early this year. I thought that the proposals could be potentially integrated into Bitcoin. But over time, I realized that the Bitcoin core developers have this challenge we discussed earlier, that they can't accept high risk changes because they've got to be so careful about testing. And so then you start to think, well, maybe you could put this in one of the altcoins. But to do that presents a new risk to Bitcoin, which I think potentially the world can only really support one virtual scarce currency because, you know, if one of the altcoins were hypothetically to reach parity with Bitcoin, firstly, that is has no intrinsic value, which is a kind of dangerous position itself. But if psychologically people jumped onto it, I say no intrinsic value because there's no transaction load in there. If hypothetically people were to Bitcoin holders, the speculative component of Bitcoin's value were to jump into this altcoin, you might see some like a Bitcoin price collapse and the altcoin taking off. And then once and then maybe actual transactions moving to the network or transactions happening via Bitcoin, sort of currency conversion from the alt to Bitcoin to the merchant because Bitcoin also has all the infrastructure. But once you have this kind of unhealthy situation, you might see holders of this new altcoin looking nervously over their shoulder at the next altcoin, which was in a similar position, no intrinsic value, but it's gaining a value on it speculatively. And basically once people were to experience this kind of thing, it might say, well, wait a minute, what does virtual scarcity mean? If everybody can come along and propose some kind of parameter tweak or small functional change to get users' interest or even the name or affiliation with a celebrity or something, it's only like that. People might start to question the very core principle of virtual scarce commodity. So I think it's really best to focus on and stick with the one bootstrapped currency. And I don't think it's really a fair proposition to go into an altcoin because now that it's happened once, people are looking at it as something that is much more plausible. Stating my dislike for that, I mean, there's a financial risk there for the Bitcoin stability and long-term viability of digital scarcity, which I think is, and I think digital scarcity is a huge invention for society that basically Satoshi enabled with this new innovation of controlled supply. I think it'd be a very unfortunate end for Bitcoin if that were to collapse or be significantly weakened by a kind of speculative bubbles in altcoins that were to start to compete with Bitcoin for market cap. So having stated that reservation, what do I propose that people could do about that and what it proposes that they could put it in Bitcoin? So we know that's challenging, but I proposed a way to put new features into Bitcoin without risking Bitcoin value. And basically the way you do that is you start a new altcoin, we'll call it Bitcoin 2, so Bitcoin is currently on version 0.89 something. So as with operating systems and other software packages, it's quite common for there to be a beta version. It's not an alpha version. It's relatively stable. It's not going to eat your data, lose your files, corrupt your computer. So you put the features into the beta version and there's development in parallel. People are maintaining bug fixes as in Bitcoin on the current stable version and they're adding the missing features to the beta version. And you could view it as the way you see with Red Hat and Fedora. Red Hat is extremely well-tested and enterprises can rely on it for rocksteady service for important websites. Fedora is adding new features all the time. Periodically, there will be a new major release of Red Hat which pulls in the features from Fedora, stabilizes it and uses it. So what I would like to see for Bitcoin is for Bitcoin to adopt this development model. And so because it's a currency, there's a question of can you put value in the Fedora of Bitcoin and Bitcoin 2? And it turns out there is a way to do that while avoiding importing risk back into the main Bitcoin network. And what you can do is have a mathematical one-way peg between Bitcoin and Bitcoin 2, which is say you're allowed to move an existing Bitcoin into the Bitcoin 2 network. The Bitcoin 2 network has no native reward mining. It would probably be merge mined with Bitcoin. And by doing this, there would be a market price to move the coins back. And by doing it this way, you preserve the 21 million coin promise like that cap has maintained through the evolution of features and through the move between major new features. So you can imagine sort of a timeline of say one year or 18 months or whatever cycle makes sense for testing resources available to move between these things. And as it gets closer to the switch over time, people would move coins over and you could algorithmically move the remaining coins over and then start the process again and move forward in that way. So, and it's- So it's not just about how you implement the technology. It's also how you implement the currency infrastructure and the balance between main coin, alt coin, or in this case, main coin and dev coin, essentially that's happened, the development coin or beta coin that's happening to promote these new features. I mean, basically it's a rejection of the idea that you should push innovation into alt coins because I view that as an existential risk to the very concept of digital scarcity, as well as being, I don't know, pure speculation. And I mean, it also detracts from the Bitcoin mind share and the basic model. And the interesting thing about having a one way peg is you can't introduce a two way peg because while you're being very careful on the Bitcoin too, you are adding new features. If something bad happens, despite the best efforts, you don't want that risk being imported into Bitcoin. So because there's a valve or one way peg, if you want to go back into Bitcoin, you have to buy a market. And if a vulnerability is discovered, until that's fixed, that market will freeze up. So there'll be no risk to Bitcoin. So basically the whole conceptual stake in the ground about side chains was this idea that Ethereum said, here's this garden of anyone can make their own token without the sophistication of knowing that it instance a protocol. And then like three months after that, a bunch of Bitcoin Core saying, this is even before the word Bitcoin Core came around, people even forget the Orwellia nature of calling themselves the Core Developers. Bitcoin contributors just said, let's put out a press release that says, we can't announce that we're even doing a company, but there's this concept called a side chain. And it will be everything that Ethereum is in concept, but in Bitcoin. That was that whole movement. Well, that was what it eventually became. Yeah, that was sort of what that perspective developed into, because it was obvious even then that he could see that actually there was really something here. And sure there were problems around that, but you could solve that, which then would lead to thinking along kind of those side chains line. But I bring it up because that was probably the first instance that I ran into of somebody who I don't think would consider themselves a Bitcoin maximalist at the time, but who had concerns that were directly tied to what I think Bitcoin maximalism has become. I feel like in every movement, I'm not talking about Bitcoin, I'm talking about everything. Like in every movement, there are certain people who have strong ideas. They really believe in something and they really believe that something is the truth with a capital T and they wanna talk about it and they wanna debate about it and they wanna let people know. And sometimes they really don't care about pissing people off or making people upset and they're just speaking their truth and they don't care who it upsets and they actually look at upsetting people as a badge of honor because that means that they're ruffling feathers by saying uncomfortable truths. They're probably like these people in other kinds of movements that are just like, don't really care about social niceties and they have something that they really believe strongly is the truth and they wanna talk about it. And those people often butt heads with others in the movement who are more moderate and who do care more about social skills and engaging the community and stuff. And if I stick up for them a little bit, it's that. I wonder if there are just certain people who don't have the greatest social skills or don't care and they're speaking what they believe is really the truth and they're just doing it. And I guess I can't really like say too much negative about them because like we need those people, we need all kinds of people but we need those people too because sometimes the people that are speaking the truth and pissing people off, sometimes they're right. I'm not saying Bitcoin maximalists are right but sometimes those people are right and they often just get completely persecuted and scapegoated, you know? I 100% agree with you if what it was was speaking truth. However, there's a difference between speaking truth and responding to anyone who says, well, I think the truth can be a bit more nuanced or I see something different or I have a slightly different opinion on this with you lie, you're a scammer. That is not speaking truth. That is calling somebody else a liar and a scammer simply because they disagree with what you see as the truth. And to me, that's not a matter of social skills, especially if you then go and embrace the label. So yeah, there are plenty of maximalists that I have good relationships with where we have honest debates, where we have honest conversations and those conversations are based on reason and without ad hominem. They're not toxic maximalists. They're non-toxic maximalists. Exactly, exactly. And that's fine. That's simply an opinion. That's a position. And if it's an investment thesis, even more valid if that's what you see it at. And I think often the line falls between the difference between a finance focus and a tech focus. I find the very few of the people who are very technical and much more interested in development tend to fall on these lines and people who are much more into the finance side of things. Obviously, they see the monetary aspects will tend to have an investment thesis around maximalism. And that's fine. That's not what we're talking about here. Or at least that's not what I consider toxic maximalism. And I think that at some point, even those people got crowded out by the toxic ones. Yes. And as you said, Stephanie, every movement has the people who speak truth and who aren't bothered by social niceties and are purists. But every movement also has the people who set up the circular firing squad and do an intellectual purge within the movement in order to extract the true purity, right? And that's also characteristic of movements. And what happens is the circle of purity gets narrower and narrower and narrower until the only people who are in it are the abject hypocrites who can lie strongly enough to maintain this mythical purity that is unachievable. I mean, really what it is, as far as I can tell, again, is it's just a form of cryptocurrency fundamentalism, right? Not like in a religious sense, but in the dictionary definition, strict adherence to the basic principles of whatever the subject or discipline is, right? And it's not without merit either, right? Like for as many projects as people have created, I mean, what? Like 85% at the absolute minimum have been utter disasters. I'm looking back at a historical snapshot of coin market cap from the 26th of June in 2013, which was about a month and a half after we started the show. Bitcoin had a market cap of just above $1 billion. And then as you go down the list and you look at the coins that were around at the time, almost nothing is anything anymore. And looking at number 10 jumps out in particular to me, the symbol is YAC. And the coin is called YaCoin, which is short for yet another coin. Oh, I forgot about that one. Yeah, you know, I remember one of the first articles that I wrote was actually about gold coin, which is number 18 in this list here, GLC. And when I went to try and figure out what was the differentiating factor between it and Bitcoin, I was told, well, it has the word gold in the name and people like the word gold. And that was its differentiating factors that it was a Bitcoin clone that had gold in the name. So I mean, like there's been a lot of this stuff, right? And you look around the kind of projects that are out there today and you still see a ton of it. And it's worth noting this too. There's a large degree, I think, of cultural pressure around this particular point. And I don't think it's just people who have been in the space for a long time. I think that this space is so sort of replete with just like people who are eager to take your money, right? For whatever the project it is that they're working on, whether it be, you know, NFTs or it be, you know, like cloud mining or really whatever kind of investment that you kind of want to look at. Like there's lots and lots and lots of noise out there for every little tiny bit of signal that you find. And so it's almost a defensive posture to go into this and say, well, I'm just going to make the assumption. And honestly, we took this posture too. I remember in the very early days of the show, we used to talk to anybody about any project because there were so few projects they were all really interesting. And then over the course of pretty much our first two years, we almost entirely stopped doing interviews or really talking with anybody about any project because we couldn't vet them anymore. Adam, do you remember how for three years we had a policy that we refused to advertise for Bitcoin miners because they were way too many Bitcoin mining scams? Oh, you mean the cloud miners? I mean, yeah, like we carried that policy forward and we still do it today. I think it's also just kind of funny that like people who weren't around in the early days of Bitcoin, forget how completely scammy most of Bitcoin was. Yeah, lots of gambling. From within. The joke is that like, if you never want to clean a day in your life, just find a roommate who's slightly tidier than you. It's like maybe we just became so desensitized to all the scamminess that was in the very early days of Bitcoin in Bitcoin, that we just still have that like level of resistance to seeing it elsewhere. And people who weren't around in Bitcoin because it was too fringe and too scammy are now in Bitcoin, now that it's hyper mature and stabilized and are just like retroactively applying this standard to everything else. I think that that's reasonable, but I want to provide an example that I've been thinking about while we've been having this discussion. Not going to talk about names because I don't want to out anybody. So outside of of course this show and the other things that I do, I've been building a project that is mostly about creating imagery with AI and stuff like that. But as part of what it's doing allows you to take some of those images and to turn them into NFTs on Ethereum and a variety of other blockchains eventually. So I brought someone into the project who's been in the crypto space specifically working on Bitcoin projects for a very long time, super interested in the technology. And as we got further into it, they just got incredibly nervous that the community that they were a part of which is very much a community that's focused on Bitcoin because as a community that brings in new users and tries to educate them about this stuff. If you encourage people or even say it's kind of okay to go out and look at other projects you're basically giving people advice that they should go and potentially take on risks in these projects that they don't understand and which they may have a bad result with. Whereas if you just tell them, well, just buy some Bitcoin or dollar cost average into Bitcoin, what history has shown us so far is that there's never really been a bad time to buy Bitcoin, assuming that you're willing to hold it long enough. To add to what you were saying, before these were called NFTs, when we called them colored coins and they were inside Bitcoin, they were cool. And everybody in Bitcoin in 2013 and 2014 was very interested and excited about the possibilities of using colored coins to tokenize a whole bunch of different things. People were interested in colored coins in 2012 and 2013. And then the moment people started building colored coin systems, they were the devil. And so counterparty and master coin were colored coin protocols built on top of Bitcoin. And I think that's when it was like, well, screw these people even if they're on top of Bitcoin. That's how I remember it as well. I distinctly remember the arguments with Luke Das Jr. about how it was okay for him to put scripture into the Bitcoin blockchain, but tokenization or anything like that on Bitcoin blockchain was spam, right? And then the intentional sabotaging of those use cases which then indirectly led to the creation of the Ethereum protocol because it didn't have to be constrained by what people who were developing Bitcoin were interested in. Anyways, the thing that I wanted to say just is that this person I'm talking about actually wound up backing out of the project not because of the project, but because of concerns that their community would view them as a hypocrite for being involved with building something that would use anything other than Bitcoin. So it's just to say that that whether you're talking about original, really like early users who just have kind of pattern set at that time and are still very much thinking about the spaces that space was back then, or you're talking about new users who are getting in and being guided by people who have been around for a while and who are advising them to avoid projects which in many cases will be good advice. There's just this kind of cultural pressure that I think winds up getting applied to people regardless of what culture you're in, right? If you're a ripple person in the XRP army, it's probably true over there too. So Bitcoin maximalism is just sort of the most developed of these types of phenomenons, but it's not unique in the space. It's actually something that I think is getting increasingly common as you look at these larger kind of secondary projects. Oh, there's Ethereum maximalism now too. And one of the hilarious experiences for me is that at the very same time that maximalists attack me for being insufficiently maximalist in Bitcoin, everybody else from every other currency coin and chain was simultaneously attacking me for being a Bitcoin maximalist. And I was like, what? I can't be both. So, but no, the stones are coming from both sides. But it's exactly as you said, many of these systems that have followed Bitcoin are repeating the very same patterns just 18 months later, whether it's fee problems and capacity constraints or it's a descent into maximalism once things get a bit rocky. So we're coming to the end of this episode. I mean, like, I do think that there is an argument for it. I think that the argument for it is that ideological diversity, while it's something that I value a lot, and it's a reason why I've never considered myself a Bitcoiner. I consider myself someone who's very interested in these technologies. But I think that the way I describe it is that to the extent that you start to identify as being this thing or that thing or part of thisism or thatism or whatever, is to the extent that you, as Jonathan said earlier, put on a jersey and then you bind yourself kind of intellectually in terms of how you can modify your worldview. And my worldview has always been very much in flux. It kind of needs to be in order for me to stay sane as I incorporate new pieces of information. So something like that, irrespective of what the topic is that we're talking about has never really been in the cards for me. But for a lot of people, they're more interested in building the model that they have, and then putting that in place and then just kind of keeping it there so they don't have to think about it again. They can just respond based on kind of the programming that they've given to themselves in that way. So I think that again, just as I like diversity of opinion, I'm okay with other people not liking diversity of opinion so long as that is restricted to what they believe as opposed to trying to impose it on other people. Like if we have Bitcoin maximalism dictatorship, like I'm not happy about that, but I have no problem with people believing whatever the hell they wanna believe. I think it's more useful instead of giving people the answer and claiming that it's the only possible answer to instead accept that people can figure this out for themselves if you give them the right questions to ask and focus on the questions. What questions do I ask? How do I know if something is worth looking at? And I go back to, how do I know Bitcoin is worth looking at? And what are the questions that I ask? Is it decentralized? Is it innovative? Is it public? Is it open? Is it collaborative? Is it resistant to censorship? Is it fluid? Is it innovative? Is it extensible? All of these kinds of things that I ask myself to see if it has value. Those questions are valuable regardless of what answers you arrive at. And those are the questions I ask that tell me that Bitcoin is special, but they don't exclude the possibility that other things may also be special if they also answer many of those questions in the affirmative. I think it's a less patronizing and condescending way and it recognizes that, first of all, other people may come up with different answers. And secondly, that you give a lot more value to other people if instead of giving them the answer, you help them figure out how you got to that answer yourself. Okay folks, so that's all the time we have for this episode of Speaking of Bitcoin. Today's episode was edited by Jonas and features Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan, and myself, Adam B. Levine. Music for this episode is provided by Jared Rubins and Gertie Beetz. And if you have any questions or comments, you can send me an email at adam at speakingofbitcoin.show. And we'll see you next week with a full episode.