Vitalik Posts Support for Bitcoin Maximalism (Full Text Attached)

On April 1, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin published an article on his personal blog titled "In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism" to support Bitcoin maximalism.

He said that we live in a dangerous world, protecting freedom is a serious matter, and the core of blockchain is a security technology - a technology that fundamentally protects people and helps them survive in such an unfriendly world. Bitcoin has two key elements that accomplish this task brilliantly: (i) a strong and defensible technology stack (1 MB block size, 21 million total token supply, and a simple Nakamoto PoW consensus mechanism) and (ii) a strong and defensible culture (an uncompromising, firmly maximalist culture). Crypto assets like Bitcoin have real cultural and structural advantages that make them powerful assets worth holding and using.

He believes that currency is not only the "first application" of blockchain, but also the most successful one so far. So far, the most successful uses of cryptocurrency are for storing wealth and making payments.

It is worth noting that although Vitalik published this article on April Fool's Day, April 1, it is very serious, full of self-reflection and insight, and is not a fool's work.

To reward readers, Golden Finance has compiled the full text as follows:

For years, we have heard the argument that “the future is blockchain, not Bitcoin”. The future of the world will not be one major cryptocurrency, or even a few, but many cryptocurrencies - the winners will have strong leadership under a central roof that can quickly adapt to user demand for scale. Bitcoin is a nascent cryptocurrency, and Ethereum will soon follow; it will be the newer, more dynamic asset that attracts a new wave of mass users who don’t care about weird libertarian ideologies or “self-sovereign verification”, don’t care about toxic side effects and anti-government mentality, just want blockchain DeFi and fast and effective games.

But what if this narrative is completely wrong, and the ideas, habits, and practices of Bitcoin maximalism are actually very close to being right? What if Bitcoin is more than just an outdated pet rock tied to a network effect? ​​What if Bitcoin maximalists actually deeply understand that they are operating in a hostile and uncertain world that they need to fight for, and their actions, personalities, and views on protocol design deeply reflect this fact? What if we live in a world of honest cryptocurrencies (few) and scammer cryptocurrencies (many), and what if we are too tolerant of the former? Is it actually necessary to prevent the former from sliding into the latter? This is the argument that this post will make.

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

Hopefully this is more obvious now than it was six weeks ago, when many still seriously believed that Vladimir Putin was a misunderstood, kind-hearted character who was simply trying to protect Russia and save Western civilization from the gay world. But it still bears repeating. We live in a dangerous world filled with bad actors who are incapable of empathy and reason .

At its core, blockchain is a security technology - one that fundamentally protects people and helps them survive in such an unfriendly world. It is like the Phial of Galadriel, "a light for you in dark places when all other lights are out". It is not a low-cost lamp, nor a fluorescent hippie energy-saving lamp, nor a high-performance lamp. It is a lamp that sacrifices all of these dimensions to optimize for one thing and one thing only: to be a light that shines when you are facing the toughest challenge of your life and there is a terrifying twenty-foot spider.

Blockchains are used every day by the unbanked and underbanked, activists, sex workers, refugees, and many other groups. Many use them as a primary lifeline to make payments and store savings.

To this end, public blockchains sacrifice a lot for security:

• Blockchain requires that every transaction be independently verified thousands of times before it can be accepted.

• Unlike centralized systems that confirm transactions within a few hundred milliseconds, blockchains require users to wait 10 seconds to 10 minutes for confirmation.

• Blockchains hold users fully responsible for verifying themselves: if you lose your keys, you lose your coins.

• Blockchain sacrifices privacy and requires crazier and more expensive technology to get it back.

What were these sacrifices for? To create a system that could survive in an unfriendly world and truly be “the one light in the darkness when all other lights are out.”

Doing this task well requires two key ingredients: (i) a strong and defensible technology stack and (ii) a strong and defensible culture . The key characteristics of a strong and defensible technology stack are a focus on simplicity and deep mathematical purity: 1MB block size, 21 million total token supply, and a simple Nakamoto PoW consensus mechanism that even a high school student can understand. The protocol design must be reasonable for decades and centuries; the technology and parameter choices must be a work of art.

The second element is an uncompromising, staunchly minimalist culture. This must be a culture that unyieldingly defends itself against both the bad actors who seek to co-opt companies and government actors outside the crypto industry into the ecosystem, as well as those within the crypto industry who seek to exploit it for their own personal gain, of which there are many.

Now, what does 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 the Ethereum people playing around, and eventually they will understand what they have to do and what they are dealing with. But do they? Let’s see who Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin hangs out with:

Vitalik met with technology CEOs in Beijing, China, met with Putin in Russia, met with Jerusalem Mayor Nir Bakrat, shook hands with the former President of Argentina, greeted former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and met with Taiwan's Digital Minister Audrey Tang

Now, maybe he’s just an idealist who believes in talking to people to help achieve world peace, and a follower of Frederick Douglass’s dictum to “unite with whoever is right, and whoever is wrong.” But there’s a simpler hypothesis: Vitalik is a hippie-like globetrotting thrill seeker and status seeker who thoroughly enjoys meeting important people and feeling respected. And it’s not just Vitalik; companies like Consensys are more than happy to work with Saudi Arabia, and the entire ecosystem has struggled to find mainstream data for validation. And that’s just a small selection. The immediate question anyone seeing this should ask is: what exactly is the point of meeting publicly with all these people? Some of these people are very decent entrepreneurs and politicians, but others may not be. Does Vitalik not realize how many of these people are at each other’s throats geopolitically?

Now ask yourself this question: when the time comes and there are really important things happening on the blockchain — things that are actually important enough to offend powerful people — which ecosystem is more willing to put its foot down and refuse to censor them, no matter how much pressure is put on them? The ecosystem with the globetrotting nomads who genuinely want to be everyone’s friend, or the ecosystem with people who own AR15s and axes as hobbies?

Currency isn’t just the “first app.” It’s the most successful one to date.

Many people who believe in “Blockchain, not Bitcoin” believe that cryptocurrency is the first application of blockchain, but it is a very boring application, and the real potential of blockchain lies in bigger and more exciting things. Let’s go through the list of applications in the Ethereum white paper:

• Issuing Tokens

• Financial Derivatives

• Stablecoins

• Identity and reputation systems

• Decentralized file storage

• Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)

• Peer-to-peer gambling

• Prediction Market

Many of these categories of apps have already launched and have at least some users. That said, crypto people are really serious about empowering unbanked people in developing countries in the Global South. Which of these apps actually have a significant number of users in the Global South?

The most successful so far have proven to be storing wealth and payments. 3% of Argentines, 6% of Nigerians, and 12% of Ukrainians own cryptocurrencies. So far, the biggest example of a government using blockchain for something is the cryptocurrency donation to the Ukrainian government, which has raised over $100 million if donations to Ukraine-related NGOs are included.

What other applications today come close to this level of actual, real adoption? Perhaps the closest is ENS. DAOs are real and growing, but today, too many of them appeal to wealthy people in rich countries whose main interest is in having fun and using cartoon characters to satisfy their first-world need for self-expression, rather than building schools and hospitals and solving other real-world problems.

So we can see two sides very clearly: the “blockchain” teams, mostly privileged people in wealthy countries, who love to flaunt virtues like “beyond money and capitalism” and can’t help but get excited about the “decentralized governance experiment”. The “bitcoin” hobbyists and teams are a highly diverse group, including rich and poor people in many countries including the global South, who are actually using the capitalist tool of free self-sovereign currency to provide real value for humanity today.

Focusing on being a currency can make a better currency

A common misunderstanding about why Bitcoin doesn't support "rich state" smart contracts is the following. Bitcoin really values ​​simplicity, especially low technical complexity, to reduce the chances of problems. Therefore, it doesn't want to add more complex functions and opcodes that would be necessary to support more complex smart contracts in Ethereum.

This misconception is of course wrong. In fact, there are many ways to add rich state to Bitcoin; searching the Bitcoin chat archives for the word “covenants” shows many proposals being discussed. Many of these proposals are very simple. The reason covenants were not added is not that Bitcoin developers did not see the value of rich statefulness, but found even a little more complexity to the protocol intolerable . Because Bitcoin developers were concerned that rich state might introduce risks of systemic complexity to the ecosystem!

A recent paper by Bitcoin researchers describes some ways to introduce covenants, adding a level of rich state to Bitcoin.

Ethereum’s struggle with Miner Extractable Value (MEV) is a great example of this problem playing out in practice. It’s easy to build applications in Ethereum that give the next person to interact with some contract a sizable reward, leading to a fight between traders and miners over it and greatly increasing the risk of network centralization and requiring complex workarounds. Building such systemically risky applications is difficult in Bitcoin, in large part because Bitcoin lacks rich statefulness and is focused on a simple (and MEV-free) use case, namely currency.

Systemic corruption can also occur in non-technical ways. Bitcoin being just money means that Bitcoin requires relatively few developers, which helps reduce the risk that developers will start asking for air coins to build new protocol features. Bitcoin being just money reduces the pressure on core developers to constantly add features to "keep up with the competition" and "meet developer demand."

In many ways, the systemic impacts are real, and there is no way a currency can “enable” an ecosystem of highly complex and risky decentralized applications without that complexity fighting back against it in some way. Bitcoin is the safe bet. If Ethereum continues with its layer 2-centric approach, ETH-the-currency may gain some protection by being kept at arm’s length from the ecosystem of applications it enables. So-called high-performance layer 1 platforms, on the other hand, don’t stand a chance.

Generally speaking, the earliest projects in an industry are the most "authentic"

Many industries and fields follow a similar pattern. First, some new and exciting technology is either invented or improved so much that it can actually be used for something. At first, the technology is too clunky for almost anyone to touch as an investment, the risk is too great, and there is no "social proof" that people can succeed with it. So the first people to get involved will be idealists, tech geeks, and others who are genuinely excited about the technology and its potential to improve society.

However, once the technology has sufficiently proven itself, norms emerge — an event often referred to in Internet culture as Eternal September. These aren’t just run-of-the-mill well-meaning norms who want to feel part of something exciting, but business norms, dressed in suits, who begin scouting the ecosystem for ways to make money, with armies of venture capitalists on the sidelines eager to back them with their own money. At the extreme, outright scammers come in and create blockchains with no social or technical value, which are basically scams without boundaries. But the reality is that the line between “altruistic idealists” and “scammers” is really a spectrum. The longer the ecosystem keeps going, the harder it will be to get new projects off the altruistic side of things.

One proxy indicator of the blockchain industry’s replacement of philosophical and idealistic values ​​with those of short-term profit is the increasing size of premines: the share that cryptocurrency developers allocate to themselves .

Internal allocation source: Messari.

Which blockchain communities value self-sovereignty, privacy, and decentralization, and are making huge sacrifices to get it? Which blockchain communities are just trying to increase their market cap and make money for founders and investors? The chart above should be pretty clear.

Intolerance is good

The above illustrates why Bitcoin’s status as the first cryptocurrency gives it a unique advantage that will be hard to replicate for any cryptocurrency created in the past five years. But now we come to the biggest objection to Bitcoin’s maximalist culture: Why is it so toxic?

The case for Bitcoin being toxic stems from Conquest’s Second Law. In Robert Conquest’s original formulation, the law states that “any organization that is not constitutionally clearly right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.” But in reality, it’s just a special case of a more general pattern, and in the modern era of ruthlessly homogenized and conformist social media, it’s more relevant than ever:

If you want to maintain an identity distinct from the mainstream, then you need a really strong culture that actively resists and assimilates the mainstream every time it tries to assert its superiority.

As I mentioned above, blockchain is a very fundamental and explicit counter-culture movement that seeks to create and preserve something different from the mainstream. At a time when the world is fragmented into large blocs of nations that actively suppress social and economic interactions between them, blockchain is one of the few things that can remain global. At a time when more and more people are looking to censor to defeat their short-term enemies, blockchain steadfastly continues to censor nothing.

"Rational adults" try to tell you to "become mainstream", but in reality they are asking you to compromise on your "extreme" values. The only correct response is as shown above: refuse to compromise, because once you compromise once, you can't stop.

The blockchain community must also battle bad actors within the community. Bad actors include:

• Scammers , who create and sell projects that are ultimately worthless (or worse harmful) but cling to the “crypto” and “decentralized” brands (and highly abstract notions of humanism and friendship) for the sake of legitimacy.

• Cooperationists , who publicly and loudly argue that cooperation with the government is moral and actively try to persuade the government to use coercive violence against its rivals.

• Corporatists , who seek to use their resources to take over blockchain development and often push for protocol changes that centralize the system.

One can object to all these actors with a smile on their face, politely telling the world why they "disagree with their priorities". But this is unrealistic: the bad guys will work to integrate into your community, and by then it becomes psychologically difficult to criticize them with enough disdain: the people you criticize are friends of your friends. Therefore, any culture that values ​​agreeableness will easily give up in the face of a challenge, allowing scammers to roam freely in the wallets of innocent newbies.

What kind of culture will not be eliminated? A culture that is willing and eager to tell internal liars and external powerful adversaries to go the way of Russian warships.

The weird crusade against seed oils is a good one

A powerful bonding tool to help communities maintain internal cohesion around their unique values ​​and avoid being mired in the mainstream is eccentric beliefs and crusades of a similar spirit, even if not directly related to the core mission. Ideally, these crusades should be at least partially correct, poking at real blind spots or inconsistencies in mainstream values.

The Bitcoin community is good at this. Their latest crusade is a war against plant seed oils, which are high in omega-6 fatty acids and harmful to human health.

The media has been skeptical of discussion of this Bitcoin movement, but has been much more lenient with the topic when it’s handled by “respectable” tech companies. This crusade has helped remind Bitcoiners that the mainstream media is fundamentally ignorant and hypocritical , and that the media’s pointed vilification of cryptocurrencies as primarily used for money laundering and terrorism should be treated with equal contempt.

Be a Bitcoin maximalist

Bitcoin maximalism is often derided in the media as a dangerous, toxic right-wing cult, and a paper tiger that will vanish once some other cryptocurrency comes in and replaces Bitcoin’s supremacy with network effects. But the reality is that none of the arguments for maximalism I described above rely on network effects at all. Network effects are indeed logarithmic, not quadratic: once a cryptocurrency is “big enough,” it has enough liquidity to operate, and it’s easy for multi-crypto payment processors to add it to their collections. But it’s equally wrong to claim that Bitcoin is an outdated pet rock whose value comes entirely from the network effects of a walking zombie that will collapse with just the slightest push.

Crypto assets like Bitcoin have real cultural and structural advantages that make them strong assets worth holding and using. Bitcoin is a great example of this category, though it is certainly not the only one. Other respectable cryptocurrencies do exist, and maximalists are willing to support and use them. Bitcoin maximalism is not just Bitcoin for Bitcoin’s sake; rather, it is a very real recognition that most other crypto assets are scams and that a culture of intolerance is inevitable and necessary to protect newcomers and ensure that at least one corner of the industry remains a corner worth living in.

It is better to mislead ten newbies to avoid an investment that could have turned out well than to let one newbie go bankrupt by a scammer.

It’s better to make your protocol too simple to serve ten low-value, short-term attention-gambling applications than to make it too complex to serve the core sound money use case that underpins everything else.

It’s better to actively stand up for something you believe in and offend millions of people than to try to make everyone happy and end up accomplishing nothing.

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