It’s funny that the bitcoin puritans/formerly “toxic maxis” or previously just dominated the term “bitcoin maximalists” just don’t really feel like a thing here? Maybe it’s cause I don’t follow any of those idiots but i genuinely think their engagement hacking just doesn’t work with The Algorithm.
It’s nice that they’re finally basically almost dead (even on Twitter?), they drove so many good people away from bitcoin and bitcoin development.
Could also be because most of us if not all are bitcoiners and the maximalist term doesn’t really derive from bitcoiners , instead no coiners or shitcoiners 🤷🏻♂️. Just my 2 sats
Eh, i mean the toxic morons mostly dominated that term, with little to no pushback elsewhere. Lots of people have since claimed that “we’re all bitcoin maximalists, they don’t define it”, when meanwhile they were the only ones to use that term for years and anyone i spoke to outside of the bitcoin Twitter bubble thought that term referred to the toxic morons.
True but there’s also no targeting and being told we’re wrong or delusional. Just a different environment. Much more open and inclusive and rarely any extreme arguments (disagreeing respectfully is ok)
90% of us were the toxic maxis you’re referring to when we were using twitter, myself included. The difference is just that we there’s no need to be toxic here because there’s no anger algorithm and there’s no morons telling us bitcoin doesn’t matter
it’s sad to me that the self-described toxic maxis crowded out voices like nic carter or andreas antonopolous
it really dumbed down the discourse
Agreed! Took attention away from constructive educational content, perceiving it to be a negative field/asset. Def didn’t help the cause
Just meaning that as someone interested in learning and joining the community, could be turned off when those interactions occur
Not to mention for years any time I met anyone working on eth stuff they all had some story about how they started with bitcoin but the community was unlivable so they moved on. Sure, some just wanted to issue a token and get rich, but many (especially devs) genuinely just wanted to build cool things.
Why are they now moving to world coin?
My point in case it was not clear: most devs who moved for that reason are moving now to other things. They simply did not have good conviction to start with.
You’re confusing a handful of people moving onto other garbage for everyone in a group. I know talented devs who likely would have built solid conviction on bitcoin but never got the chance, who instead have solid conviction on eth (even though they hate most of the things being built in that world!)
I kinda like how they self selected, most of the scammers feel that way too.
Tons of great folks who would have happily worked on bitcoin got screwed into working on random shit that went nowhere. Problem is when you’re getting into a space and don’t know anything it’s not unreasonable to decide based on “wow, that community has no intellectual value, just mean people and bad memes”.
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That’s still ok, proof is in the pudim. Bitcoin is winning.
Winning in what sense? “Against eth” I couldn’t care less about, in general mindshare with average people globally we’re doing okay, but certainly have a lot more to do.
The outcome here sucks not only for those individuals, but also means we have way less people advocating for bitcoin than we otherwise would. That has held us back a lot. Worse, those people were sometimes advocating for things that made us look bad by association.
= Mike Hearn energy
Totally and completely different - “didn’t even get a chance to materially understand bitcoin” vs “ragequit after understanding bitcoin”
That’s their own laziness.
That’s just not how people work. People are busy, they don’t have time to understand or care about the things you do. If you expect everyone to not have a life outside of bitcoin without ever even having a chance to look into it we’re never gonna grow the Bitcoin community.
Yes, but equal opportunity.
You private and clean semicolons and they get to shut the hell up
Also, lots/enough ppl did take the time and dove into bitcoin. Again, bitcoin is winning.
Amem!
By this logic, we should all capitulate because Sen. Warren is on the attack. Toxicity is an equal opportunity advocate and one MUST stand for something or they'll fall for anything.
There’s a huge difference between people who understand what they’re doing and are attacking bitcoin and people who haven’t had a chance to even be exposed to any bitcoin is cool yet.
I’d think 100x more people got into bitcoin thanks to folks doing hard work to provide quality education resources than people who got exposed via Twitter nonsense :). *that’s* what made bitcoin win :)
I think that’s what the folks who do that like to think of themselves more than what they actually achieved. Bitcoin sell itself to the ppl who are ready to see it. Advocacy just accelerate the inevitable. I do think providing better incentives (like FOSS grants) help the journey be better, helps better ppl win. But still doesn’t change the inevitable.
I don’t know a single bitcoiner who got into bitcoin without any educational resources to understand what it is. You have to start somewhere and it isn’t “oh, these people are mean, let me see what they’re on about”.
I know many. Plenty did. When I started there was just the white paper.
Also I never said don’t produce good educational material. Dunno, feels like you are twisting the conversation
lol you’re the one who claimed education isn’t a big part of people getting into bitcoin.
Forcing your tone and preferences isn’t. Your claim is that mean maxis kept ppl away. Im saying ppl kept themselves away from not being ready. Education could interpreted as a tone-less paper defending Satoshis paper.
I don’t get the “not ready” thing - people have one life and can choose to spend it how they see fit. If they work on bitcoin for years then move on because the benefit of bitcoin to then personally isn’t worth their mental health that seems…perfectly reasonable? And also absolutely means bitcoin is smaller, a less powerful political and general force that it would have been.
I genuinely don’t understand how anyone could argue that bitcoin being smaller is good for bitcoin, unless you think bitcoin is just a novelty collectible and not actually something that can expand human freedom.
I’m not even talking about people who think bitcoin is dumb, but people who saw it, thought it was awesome, then just moved on cause it was a waste of their mental health and time.
This doesn’t even consider the bitcoin core contributors who did the same over the years, folks who worked on non-core projects, and the folks who stuck with it but feel unmotivated to even bother proposing important bug-fix soft forks because of drama.
Even if you don’t buy broader community arguments I can absolutely guarantee you that both the bitcoin consensus system and the state of general bitcoin software and usability is 2+x less developed than it would be without obnoxious Twitter morons.
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No one is arguing any of that. Ppl just are who they are. The type of tech bitcoin is attracts ppl with similar preferences, like freedom money, like fuck the fed, like leave me alone, like I don’t need permission. Woke with commie tendencies will have a harder time being ready to accept a money system they can’t assert their preferences onto others. And the earlier ppl will keep being rude to them. It’s just ppl after all. The scammers (like politicians) love the inclusive/woke stuff because divide and conquer gives them more power/control. The no scam/freedom ppl create a “mean” shield that self selects.
No one is arguing bitcoin should remain small that’s your projection. What many/most “Maxies” advocate is simply fuck the commies/scammers. And due to the above dynamic many get caught in the middle.
If bitcoin is what we hope it is, none of this will mater.
There is no dollar community, there won’t be a bitcoin community.
There are just voluntary tribes in bitcoin. If some “mean” ppl keep you from taking advantage of bitcoin than it’s on you, you are not ready to see this difference.
And that’s ignoring the fact that most ppl will never be interested in bitcoin self sovereignty. Most I will likely be ok with custodians. That’s just human nature. Bitcoin and dollar only difference is that with bitcoin we now have a choice for self responsibility where we didn’t before.
I think maybe our disagreement here is whether the “Bitcoin puritans” were just “fuck your scams” or more. As loop argued in his recent piece, they seem to be way way more - spending time attacking people who contribute to core for perceived slights, seeking out targets to attack who didn’t do anything related to bitcoin, etc etc. sure, there are reasonable folks who didn’t, but they also accepted plenty of trash under the same banner without batting an eye.
ppl be ppl, with all the good and all the bad ✌️
Communities have norms and accepting that “this is just the bitcoin community” drove lots of normal people away from bitcoin, devs away from building on bitcoin, and devs away from contributing to core or moving bitcoin forward.
I’ve been screaming from the top of the mountains for over 10 years “Bitcoin doesn’t have a community” that’s to say it has many voluntary tribes. Bitcoin is amoral monetary system.
We project all of our bullshit on it.
Bitcoin is neutral, the people around it who interact with each other is a community (even if only a small part of the bitcoin user base). That community has norms, and like it or not that community led to lots of destruction of Bitcoin’s potential over the years.
Single community implies eveyone has to adhere to the same presences. Bitcoin provides the means for the opposite of that.
Start your own tribe/community with your preferences.
Trying to force everyone to adhere to the same things is where most of the friction comes from.
Nah, I’m not naive enough to think I can force anything. I’m just suggesting (a) it would have been nice had there been more responses of “nah lol” to garbage takes that drove good people away and (b) happy that many of the garbage takes and “bitcoin puritans” seem to be slowly going away, at least in part because the platform doesn’t as much encourage such nonsense.
Suggestions won’t change anything. Build the community you want to see, ignore the other the one you don’t like. Bitcoin is the first system that allows both to trade with each-other peacefully.
That’s great in theory, and honestly I’m only here because of that, but, again, lots of people don’t, and when there’s things like soft forks being proposed you can’t - the bitcoin user base has to agree. That drove good people away, just telling them “ignore Twitter” isn’t helpful when they’re getting harassed everywhere.
Thank you for the discussion 🫂
At this point, everyone involved in Bitcoin is or has been accused of "destroying Bitcoin's potential". It's basically a meme.
Also, "we don't have to convince anyone because Bitcoin is just going to automatically inherit the earth because fiat is going to collapse and bitcoin will be the only alternative" is a pretty pseudo-religious/Book of Revelations like attitude. It's the sort of thing for which I think the rude awakening will be ... severe.
It’s true, we really don’t.
NgU convinces ppl.
Loss of economic freedoms convinces ppl.
Debasement convinces ppl.
Capital control convinces ppl.
The fiat ppl are doing all the work for free.
The ppl you think we need to convince are nor ready or need it yet.
I don't think anything about the future is this certain. I prefer to advocate and work towards the future. Never believe you can assume you've already won. I think that's always naive. Not just with bitcoin. But with everything.
Disregarding ppl as “twitter morons” is no different than them saying something that ofenda your preferences.
Fine, “bitcoin puritans”. Not sure what you want to call that group to distinguish them from people who just think bitcoin is cool and everything else is boring or a scam.
But when the machine is a reflection of man, man will always have the power to alter his mind.
Welcome to a rabbit hole leading to the basements of these operations.
It’s stupid to fight a machine, but the men operating it.
🤌🏻
“If you truly believe in something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.”
Ignore the noise and pick up the OG materials. If you don’t have any friends in real-life that love this stuff, then you’re forced to only talk about it with people over the internet — that’s where exhausted devs go wrong.
Toxic maximalists are great when they’re defending truth with logic rather than emotional hazing, but they can’t be your only friends! Of course you’d quit if so lol. We can’t just live our whole lives behind computers and expect to feel good.
Your “bitcoin community” should be more than people on Twitter. Each person has their own small quorum. Balance is required, like in any industry, so you aren’t drowning in the bickering of strangers or only working with people who don’t really care about you.
Bitcoin is a phenomenal product. But most people don’t have the time, energy, or required knowledge to understand the intricacies of how it works. For people who are not familiar with code, Bitcoin can be very intimidating. The core value of Bitcoin (correct me if I’m wrong) seems to be freedom. And for anyone who wants freedom, we should make Bitcoin as easy to use and as simple to understand as possible.
Most ppl that were taught and given bitcoin in the early days ignored it and lost it.
Bitcoin won’t be learned and retained by ppl who are not ready.
I actually found the “mean” people made way more sense and there’s a certain heuristic where you actively listen more attentively to the people being framed as “mean” because they’re often correct.
I find that is heuristic to be valuable and helped me get into a ton of things early.
So no, I don’t think it’s safe to say that for everyone “mean”people mean I’ll ignore that whole idea. Some are just the opposite: we look for where the a-holes are.
I got into Bitcoin without any educational resources. I read the white paper. That was enough to convince me it was a good idea.
Of course, I had tried to invent Bitcoin as a teenager...
Same
Heh, alright, 1 in a million with lots of context. Still kinda beside the point - folks being super negative to other bitcoiners drove many away, and welcomed in very, very few, if really any.
I understand your sentiment. My struggle is that it seems most techies think about bitcoin as just another technology. They want to build and innovate, which means adding new features.
But bitcoin isn’t a technology… it’s a monetary network. The task (and challenge) is to guide it to ossification.
Maybe the few techies who understood that stayed, while the rest went and created a monster in Ethereum. When tech debt piles up in Ethereum, they’ll go and innovate on the next blockchain.
I want bitcoin to grow to provide the maximum value for all potential users, not just bumble along with people who are bored enough to dig into bitcoin.
Bitcoin is as big as it needs to be for every epoch. Ppl will come to it when they are ready, regardless of how few/many tribes within bitcoin behave.
If some ppl you don’t like are preventing you from seeing the most important human technology of many lifetimes, you are not ready…
Matt, that sounds like an argument made by people who are coming to a realization of what Bitcoin is and has the potential to be, and looking for someone to blame for not being more involved earlier. Zero ownership.
Cool things like what?
Wasting human effort making a dumber more complicated mouse trap, telling everyone it was better than what we already have (when it clearly was not), and eventually dumping it on them when you get bored or realize it actually shucks, doesn't sound cool to me.
I don’t think hatin on other people because you think they’re “toxic” is very nice either. I prefer to let people be how ever they want.
Bitcoin used to be used to buy drugs on the dark web, and those drug users were Bitcoiners. Then it was used by people that wanted to be “toxic” online without worrying that their bank balances would be seized, and those people are Bitcoiners too.
It’s up to each person to chose their path in the moral landscape (acting correctly just because other people want you to is not morality, just slavery). The only moral thing to do is to literally be yourself 🐝 🐸 . Bitcoin’s gift is to empower each of us to do just that. Whether we like being toxic, buying drugs, or whatever.
Truth is toxic to lies
Love is toxic to hate
Light is toxic to darkness
Bitcoin is toxic to 💩 coins
i always get confused by posts like this... is Matt Odell a toxic maximalist? Is Safiedean a toxic maximalist? Is there a list somewhere?
To me, there was a ton of shitcoinery and there were people taking a stand against that. I have a list of bicoin people I follow for insight and information. I know a lot of Bitcoiners in various stages of maximalism.
Fair, I think lopp does a good job of describing it, he calls them “bitcoin puritans” https://blog.lopp.net/history-of-bitcoin-maximalism/
The people who eschew any development of cryptocurrencies outside of whet bitcoin can presently do are the worst toxic sort. Basically crypto-muslims. Rejecting anything new under the sun even if it’s brilliant and groundbreaking. That is the stupid sort.
Just thinking bitcoin is great and valuable, but being open to new ideas, is not toxic maximalism but being normal and intelligent.
Yep, scams bring out the toxic. When we’re all toxic maxis, it’s a pleasant place.
