Jan3 CEO Samson Mow has said that comparing Bitcoin to crypto is like comparing “an aircraft to a paper airplane.” Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said,
Jan3 CEO Samson Mow has said that comparing Bitcoin to crypto is like comparing “an aircraft to a paper airplane.” Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said, “It will be a multichain world.”
These opposing statements are the latest front in the longest-running feud in cryptocurrency — the battle between Bitcoin (BTC) and everything else that followed.
For the crypto masses, those individuals who hold only to a single blockchain are often referred to as the maximalists.
Bitcoin maximalism is almost as old as Bitcoin itself, with the phenomenon emerging not long after its creation.
According to Bitcoin educator and self-confessed Bitcoin maximalist Giacomo Zucco, maximalists hold four truths dearly:
- Everything that is not Bitcoin is a scam.
- Every attempt at changing Bitcoin is a scam.
- Every attempt at pushing people to spend Bitcoin is a scam.
- We shouldn’t be nice to scammers.
Even in the earliest days of blockchain, altcoins began proliferating. Most of them were low-effort forks of Bitcoin that offered little new. By 2010, the term shitcoin was born.
In 2011, Litecoin (LTC) launched, a cryptocurrency that was similar to Bitcoin, save for a few minor tweaks to its codebase. At least, that’s certainly how it began. Litecoin remains a top-20 cryptocurrency by market capitalization to this day.
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Over the next few years, Bitcoin developers and community members started to wonder what else might be achieved with blockchain and cryptocurrency.
In 2014, Bitcoin developers, including Adam Back, produced the “Sidechains white paper,” touted in some quarters as the “altcoin killer.” The Sidechains white paper was an ambitious document, touching on diverse topics such as contracts and zero-knowledge proofs. Today, these ideas are mostly discussed outside of Bitcoin circles, not within.
That’s a small indication that whatever Bitcoin maximalism is, it can change and evolve.
Sidechains eventually led to the Lightning Network and Liquid. But whatever sidechains accomplished for Bitcoin, they failed to kill altcoins. In reality, altcoins were just about ready to take off, like a rocket ship to the moon.
A very Vitalik problem
In 2014, Vitalik Buterin outlined the concept of Bitcoin exceptionalism in a lengthy essay, defining maximalism as “the idea that an environment of multiple competing cryptocurrencies is undesirable, that it is wrong to launch ‘yet another coin,’ and that it is both righteous and inevitable that the Bitcoin currency comes to take a monopoly position in the cryptocurrency scene.”
Buterin called this “Bitcoin dominance maximalism” or “Bitcoin maximalism” for short, and the label stuck. Buterin also explained his skepticism regarding sidechains and their potential, citing a number of issues, including the process of moving Bitcoin onto sidechains.
Buterin declared that Bitcoin maximalism as an ideology was already “dead in the water.” Naturally, Bitcoin maximalists disagreed.
A year later, Buterin launched Ethereum, the layer-1 blockchain he’d been working on since at least 2013.
Buterin’s Ethereum cleared the path for almost every altcoin nightmare that would plague Bitcoiners’ dreams in the years to follow. Ethereum-fueled initial coin offering mania, decentralized finance, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), and a thousand altcoins, food tokens, shitcoins and dog tokens.
None of these features (or were they bugs?) won over Bitcoin maximalists.
In the Bitcoin corner
One of the foremost proponents of Bitcoin is Jan3 CEO Samson Mow. Through Jan3, Mow promotes hyper-Bitcoinization. For those unfamiliar with the term, hyper-Bitcoinization refers to nation-state Bitcoin adoption.
Mow travels around the world as part of this work, acting as an ambassador for Bitcoin on the world stage. Cointelegraph caught up with Mow during his travels to ask what makes Bitcoin special and learn why so many Bitcoiners go on to reject the rest of the industry.
“The better question people should ask themselves is, ‘What is the ‘crypto’ industry?’” said Mow. “It’s largely centralized groups and companies selling tokens pretending to be decentralized. It’s constant hacks and funds being stolen from insecure, unviable technology. It’s the pretense that centralized blockchains are immutable. It’s dog tokens, baby dog tokens, JPEGs and other random things.”
“Bitcoin has nothing to do with these things. Bitcoin is actually decentralized and immutable. Bitcoin is the restoration of money and the base of a new financial system. The gap between Bitcoin and the rest of ‘crypto’ is so massive that it’s like comparing an aircraft to a paper airplane. That is why Bitcoiners reject the rest of the ‘industry.’”
Mow’s views reflect a longstanding tradition of Bitcoin exceptionalism. It is not uncommon for Bitcoiners to hold every blockchain project launched after 2009 with little respect or regard.
Those on the…
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