I’ve engaged with enough professional shitcoiners, or shitcoin-adjacent tradfi deliquents, to have noticed a hilarious pattern to their butthurt reaction to nobody really caring about ordinals, BRC20, or whatever they are migrating to of late.

keep in mind what a monster breakthrough shitcoining on bitcoin would be to their business models, btw (which I may or may not get around to writing up soon - this isn’t it, fyi). given shitcoinery at large is finally fading away, this spins up another 5+ years of complete and utter nonsense marketing and the FOMOing management fees that follow spouting this bullshit confidently enough.

what they’ve converged on to explain resistance - apathy, even, given I wouldn’t say I care one way or the other. yay fees! - is the idea that bitcoin development works in a top-down manner and has “priests” (they like this kind of religious vernacular, which I’ll come back to) who decree what projects will and won’t be worked on.

the level of projection here is astounding. it’s an open network. you can work on whatever you want. we are talking about ordinals NFTs in the first place because you already did it! you ran the scam! you got out with the money! and you’re upset that … you weren’t congratulated for it more?!?

it’s completely insane. contrast that to the alternative: they fucking despise lightning and there is no end of deliberate misrepresentations they won’t tell about it to aggrieve how hurt their butts are. obviously lightning isn’t perfect (nothing is perfect - it’s engineering, not art or, as they are more used to, performance art) but notice that isn’t their object level complaint because they don’t have the technical understanding to frame it that way. they describe their complaint as if it were anthropological, something like: the “priests” decreed all scaling efforts will focus on lightning, and lo, it was so.

again, it’s an open network (this time on top of another open network). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken to founders who are building on lightning because, unlike whatever crypto ecosystem they already spent 3 years toiling away in achieving nothing of practical value but doing free marketing to unscrupulous financiers, lightning actually works. they appreciate the design methodology. they *choose* to work on it. it is as bottom up a phenomenon as could be imagined and yet to the reactionary shitcoiner, it must be top down. how can it be explained any other way? what else could make people want to work on an ecosystem with no money printing if not central and ideological coordination? iT dOeSnT mAkE aNy SeNsE!

(fun fact: now they are learning what nostr is, they recycle all these same patterns of thought. "why would you work on decentralized social media? don’t you know we tried that in crypto? don’t you know you can issue tokens on bitcoin now?!?”)

so people aren’t using one free and open tool because they’ve been told not to by their church, but they are using another because they have been told to by their church. it couldn’t possibly be that they’ve decided to work on one and not the other because they *understand how they work and what potential value they will have long term, not to their unscrupulous financiers, but to their users and to the world.* nope, couldn’t possibly be that. must be the religious dogma.

now obviously we can expect object level discourse agitating for defi, DAOs, and all that kind of nonsensical bullshit. but, again, it’s frankly a more anthropological examination that fascinates me. what is it they are saying about the people involved? is there a social analysis rather than a (quick and boring) technical one?

self-congratulatory as this unavoidably is, what they hate is the raw meritocracy. money means nothing, reputation means *something*, but by and large ideas stand on their own. there is a fascinating subtlety here around the human (i.e. anthropological) response: because this stuff is technical and has to *actually work*; because it isn’t just aesthetic; because it serves a purpose and is validated in the real world; there is some objectivity to what is and is not a good idea. now, you can’t deduce it. it isn’t math. there will always be pros and cons. but it isn’t just taste either. some things *objectively* work better than others. there is nothing “open minded” about praising poor engineering.

honest, intelligent people attracted to the intellectual meritocracy will, therefore, on a long-enough time horizon to allow for battle testing the ideas, for teasing out pros and cons to a satisfactory degree, tend to agree on which are the best.

now, these people have bad ideas and get mad they can’t buy or shame or whatever else the meritocracy into getting onboard, so they project all this crap about “clergy”, “anointed”, and whatever other religious vernacular fits their cargo cultish misunderstanding of what it is they are looking at in the first place. heathens to this church are treated as brave, independent trailblazers, fighting back against an intolerant majority (by freely building one kind of free stuff over another 😕). that almost everybody independently concludes that these ideas are bad, because they proudly have rigorous standards for evaluating merit, BECAUSE THIS STUFF MATTERS AND IS BIGGER THAN YOU … they see as groupthink; as monotonicity; as the hierarchical broadcast of dogma.

and by the way, build to your heart’s content. as mentioned above, I don’t particularly care, and I think most people are the same. just don’t demand I like whatever bad idea you are working on. the problem is not “the builders” of reformist lore, it is their financial exploiters, of whom this is all downstream …

they all come from a world in which bullshitting hard enough will tend to yield a positive return in the end. obviously, in such an environment, everybody’s bullshit contradicts everybody else’s and yet everybody still wins. the idea of meticulously working to weed out bullshit and narrowing in on the actual truth is extremely uncomfortable if this is all you have ever known, and what you now expect to find.

as alluded to above, the funniest part is the projection. everything I’ve just sarcastically outlined is in fact its very own meme. it circulates in these cliques and infects any host susceptible to non-explanation for this culture shock. *it is not arrived at independently via rigorous reasoning*. it literally is the hierarchical broadcast of dogma.

and it’s ramping up for another 5+ year wave. enjoy! 😃🥳