V God's short essay: Defending Bitcoin maximalism

On April Fool’s Day, April 1, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, also known as “V God”, published a short essay on his blog titled “In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism”[1], which attracted a lot of attention.

Unlike the purely photoshopped picture of Satoshi Nakamoto's unexpected return and Peter Schiff's teasing joke that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, although this article by Vitalik was also published on April Fool's Day, looking at the whole text, there is actually no teasing, joking or ironic meaning in the text.

Let us take a quick look at his text to see what he really wants to say.

In the first two paragraphs, he talked about his reflection on the argument that the blockchain industry has long claimed: "Bitcoin is not the future, blockchain is."

In the more than ten years since the birth of Bitcoin, countless people have been trying to promote a theory, that is, Bitcoin is just the first blockchain application, just like Yinghaiwei is the earliest Internet company in China, but the development of the industry has always been a case of the back wave pushing the old wave out and the old wave dying on the beach. Today's leading Internet companies are no longer the earliest batch. So for the blockchain industry, it should also follow a similar development law. Bitcoin pioneered the industry, but will soon be eliminated. Emerging encrypted public chains, cryptocurrencies and encryption projects will surely emerge in endlessly, flourish and surpass each other. Bitcoin will soon only have historical and archaeological value, but no longer have market value. It will quickly be surpassed by newer and better altcoins and exit the stage of history.

The narrative of Bitcoin Maximalism is the exact opposite of the above argument.

Bitcoin maximalists firmly believe that there has only been Bitcoin, and there is no so-called blockchain industry. Even the word blockchain was fabricated by later generations. In Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper, emails, blogs, and forum posts, the word "blockchain" has never been said or used. The purpose of concocting this word is nothing more than to create countless garbage, specious copycat chains and copycat coins. No matter how great the lofty ideals that people who create copycat chains and copycat coins are verbally proclaimed, deep down in their hearts, they are all for three words - cutting leeks. Bitcoin maximalism is to have zero tolerance for these copycats and resolutely fight against them.

Vitalik Buterin’s article begins with a rhetorical question: What if Bitcoin maximalism is right? What if we are indeed in an environment of honest cryptocurrencies (few) and scam cryptocurrencies (many), and zero tolerance is the medicine to prevent us from sliding from the former to the latter?

Then he began to explain the chapters.

The reason he wrote in the first section is: We live in a dangerous world, and defending freedom is a very important matter.

Why are public blockchains like Bitcoin often criticized for being slow? Because this is a deliberate sacrifice. What are all these sacrifices for? To create a system that can survive in this unfriendly world and "when all other lights go out, it is the only one that still lights up in the dark."

This task requires two things: first, a robust and defensible technology stack; second, a robust and defensible culture.

For the first point, we need to focus on "simplicity" and "high mathematical purity". With a block size of 1MB, a total of 21 million, and a simple and powerful Nakamoto PoW consensus mechanism, the selection of technology and parameters must be an art.

For the second point, we need to insist on never compromising and resolutely minimizing in culture. We need to resist collusion and bribery from companies and governments externally, and we need to resolutely fight against bad elements who try to exploit the crypto world for personal gain internally.

At this point, Vitalik posed a few photos and quoted Kevin Pham’s comparison and satire of the Bitcoin community and the Ethereum community.

The first set of comparison photos: Bitcoin community members holding up a big axe with both hands; Ethereum community members performing a kawaii dance on the stage.

The second set of comparison photos: A member of the Bitcoin community, shooting with a gun in a dangerous forest; a member of the Ethereum community (V God’s photo, haha), hugging a cat head pillow at the beach.

Then Vitalik Buterin released photos of himself taking photos with Internet elites, entrepreneurs, and global politicians from all over the world, and asked in return: What the hell am I doing?

The question is: Blockchain is an important thing, and it is an important thing that will offend powerful people. If you get so close to them, won’t they eat you up when necessary?

The first section is over.

In the second section, Vitalik Buterin wrote that currency is not just the “first application”. It is the most successful application to date.

He listed various applicable scenarios given by Ethereum, but none of them were truly valuable scenarios.

The word "blockchain" - Vitalik reflected - is for people in wealthy areas to do something ethereal like "beyond money and capitalism", and to get excited about the fetish of "decentralized governance experiments". Bitcoin, on the other hand, covers very dispersed people, both rich and poor, all over the world and in the global south, who are really using the tool of capitalism - self-sovereign currency - to provide real value to people today.

End of second quarter.

In the third section, Vitalik wrote: Just focusing on becoming a currency will create a better currency.

Ethereum has Turing-complete smart contracts. Bitcoin does not. Bitcoin insists on supporting only simple scripts and stateless execution, just for the sake of simplicity and to avoid errors.

Bitcoin is focused solely on currency, which prevents developers from printing free money for themselves, the reason being to stay competitive and develop new features.

At the end of this section, Vitalik also complained about the new public chain. He said that after Ethereum adds the second-layer technology, Ethereum can keep a distance from the upper-layer ecosystem, which will give the first layer a certain degree of protection. In comparison, the so-called high-performance first-layer public chains now have no chance.

The third quarter is over.

Section 4 states: Generally speaking, the earliest projects in an industry are often the most "genius".

V God said that there is a wide range between "selfless idealists" and "swindlers." He showed a graph showing the time when the public chain was born and the proportion of tokens allocated to insiders.

- The earliest bitcoin, insider allocation ratio: 0%.

- Ethereum in 2015, insider allocation ratio: less than 25%.

- EOS, Tezos, Cardano, etc. that were launched around 2018: less than 25%.

- After 2018, Cosmos reached more than 25%, and Tron reached more than 50%.

- As for the new public chains launched after 2020, BSC, Flow, etc. are all controlled by more than 50%, while ICP, Celo, etc. are controlled by insiders at more than 75%.

Overall, it shows a parabolic upward trend.

Vitalik Buterin believes: A picture is worth a thousand words.

End of fourth quarter.

Section 5: Zero tolerance is goodness.

In Section 6, he gave an example of how the Bitcoin community demonstrated the essence of the traditional media group's ideological and hypocritical tendencies through the seed oil struggle, to illustrate that the Bitcoin community is very good at such revelations and struggles.

In the last section, Vitalik wrote: Become a maximalist.

Here are the last few paragraphs of his article:

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 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 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.

It’s better to have your protocol be too simple to serve ten low-value, short-term attention-grabbing applications than to have it be too complex to serve the core 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.

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.

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