Trying to understand the Bitcoin Maximalist
I am not a bitcoin maximalist, but I think many smart people are.
The reason why I am not a Bitcoin maximalist is because it does not fit with my personal model of what I believe bitcoin is.
The thing is I may be wrong. So I'd like to understand what truth is behind this conviction.
Why Bitcoin Maximalist?
The prominent bitcoin maximalists that I know are folks like Tone Vays as well as many of his partners or friends that often join is podcast such as Willy Woo, Tyler, etc.
Most of these guys don't like ICOs, call them scams and believe bitcoin should reign supreme, things like ETH are a pure scam and useless.
I do believe that these folks see bitcoin as a new form of money with distinct attributes that make it supreme over other existing forms.
These are:
- unconfiscatable asset
- unconfiscatable transactions
- an asset that cannot be inflated (fixed money supply)
I do believe that these are very key features of bitcoin. I agree with those entirely and that was the first thing I understood about bitcoin and immediately made me see a huge potential for it.
However what I do not understand is why bitcoin must be the only one? I do not understand this, I don't quite comprehend the model that would make me think that all but bitcoin itself is bad. In fact, according to my thinking this sort of centralization is bad and goes against the security of bitcoin itself.
There must be a standard
What I also agree with it is that there needs to be a global standard for money and commerce. A global currency and I think that BTC could take that place. This will lead to a natural de facto monopoly of one kind of money and as a result. I do believe that if bitcoin succeeds it will kind of reign supreme in a way the maximalist envision.
I do however believe that such a standard will evolve via different currency in competition with each other and that this open competition is what bitcoin creates in combination with its copies and newly created cryptocurrencies.
Again here a maximalist view does not make sense to me.
So I don't quite get it
Can you explain the mondel of bitcoin that makes someone a bitcoin maximalist to me?
I also dont understand the bitcoin maximalists and thinking that we need ONE coins is just stupid. I think that in the future we will have many coins and users will not even know since every coin will be payable via interchain transactions to any other. People will choose which coin to hold according to the features the value the most.
While bitcoin maximalists are certainly strange, what I see much more are bitcoin minimalists, claiming that bitcoin is not useful anymore. But there I would disagree very much!
Bitcoin is ...
the most secure coin. It has PoW which is tested and well understood. It has massive hash power behind it. The code is permanently reviewed by hackers trying to brake it to make profit. Developers are very careful. Blocks are small so that it remains reasonably decentralised. Imagine a coin like 0x suddenly shoot up to the marketcap of bitcoin? Would anyone find a serious bug. I think that is rather likely.
it is leading innovation. Currently the smartest people are developing bitcoin. They move slow and are not trying new revolutionary ideas. But there is still a lot of innovation implemented in bitcoin. The big question is what happens to lightning network.
it has strong fundamentals and does not try to do everything. Open decentralised and secure money is a solid product. No need to add more.
What I see is bitcoin making a lot of development in a good direction. It may seem boring because of all the alternatives that make crazy claims and have revolutionary new ideas. But these are not properly tested at large stake and often nothing but empty promises. It is far to early to declare bitcoin dead. I have not seen a real alternative so far. Because just changing blocktimes/sizes is not revolutionary, neither is using PoS which currently should not be used for open money but rather for smart contracts.
When I see a great new idea, I am happy to look into it, but as of now bitcoin is still the leader because it is just as good but more mature than all of the alternatives. Right now the biggest question is lightning. If it works well and people can use it comfortably, bitcoin will certainly have a very good medium term outlook.
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For now bitcoin is a large-scale gamble scheme with elements of religion. When bitcoin or crypto projects somehow will generate cashflow (dividends, sustainable business etc), then yes you can be maximalist.
P.S. I love the idea and the movement, but I'm a realist.
I can't help you there. Although I think that Bitcoin has done a lot as the first mover in the space, I don't think it will be the crypto that is ultimately adopted as the primary mainstream crypto currency. The primary reason: it's too slow. Although it's possible to transfer large sums of money inexpensively, it takes too long to complete transactions. It's not feasible to use in everyday transactions for coffee, groceries, misc purchases.
I think that Bitcoin is the social media equivalent of Myspace. Another challenger will come along and be the Facebook of crypto. Heck, it could be Facebook's crypto. Just kidding. :)
I disagree on it's speed. Bitcoin is extremely fast if you are using it in a way that allows it to be transferred at high speeds. All you have to do is send along the UTXO set that you're wanting to transfer. There's a number of means to do that without relying on just the traditional network.
I view BTC transactions as forms of moving cash. If you want to move cash from person to person you can just transfer paper wallets or preferably OpenDime from person to person. If you want to do networked versions then lightning would be your replacement for credit cards. Finally if you want to wire transfer then you would just do a traditional BTC tx on the network and wait for your funds to be validated.
Dash/PIVX offers InstantSend which is as good as 6 confirmations and only takes about a second. EOS has 0.5 second block time. UTXO is absolutely not safe in a network where congestion is a regular thing. BTC is dial up internet. It doesn't have a future and it won't matter in the future. If the world has to move on, BTC has to go.
Have you used lightning network? I think you'll realize that tools like lightning have enabled instant transfers using Bitcoin and it will certainly have a future as the main protocol for wealth transfers.
Why bother with off chain complicated solution when there are many projects with serious on chain scaling that require no effort from the user. No need to bother with SMS when you can just use Telegram or WhatsApp. Plus LN doesn't scale well when thousands of nodes get involved. LN is a technologically infeasible theatrical solution that has not been stress tested.
I know of no completely decentralized solution that can scale on chain. Both solutions from Dash/Privex are handled with second layer solutions. As for lightning scaling it would seem to improve with more nodes compared to less as there would be more route availability. What am I missing there?
Absolutely not at all. They are all on chain with transactions being instantly locked by the masternodes rejecting any conflicting transactions with the already locked transactions. This is not a second layer solution.
Check out EOS or Hashgraph.
There is a little bit of bias in the following subreddit+video but many of them are valid points. Plus we have better solutions than LN which is actually make the network less anti-fragile.
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/8n4209/why_the_lightning_network_doesnt_scale/
I don't know about all the off-chain solutions for Bitcoin. I was mainly speaking to the 10 minute block time of the network. They won't speed it up, and someone isn't going to wait 10 minutes in line just to check out. That's mainly what I'm saying. You could still use it to hold large sums of money, but I don't think it would make sense for day to day transactions.
Just my $0.02 worth. Wait, the markets dropped. It's only my $0.01 worth. ;)
I've actually written that Bitcoin is like dial up internet an deserves to be in a museum than in use: https://steemit.com/technology/@vimukthi/the-internet-didn-t-change-the-world-and-your-children-will-feel-sorry-for-you-for-having-to-use-bitcoin-analyzing-a-1995
I have been really impressed with what I've heard from Hashgraph. The fact they're able to do transactions so quickly is crazy as compared to Bitcoin. While Bitcoin purposely slows down transactions to make sure they are legitimate, Hashgraph passes them at lightspeed. From what I understand there are already a number of banking institutions that are using Hashgraph. I think at this point, that's probably one of our frontrunners in terms of what will actually be used in checkout lines.
Hashgraph is my #1 crypto project. But thanks to US Regulation only accredited investors could get in. The project is valued at $6 Billion USD and there are many projects that are built on Hashraph and it's awesome to just read the news or the Medium blog.
Even Dash/PIVX are good for checkout lines. Hashgraph can be used to build the exchanges of the future.
most altcoins paired with btc in trades. Make sense btc would be most valued. There has yet to be another crypto as highly paired trade than btc. To me it seems like altcoins were created to divide btc amount those who were late in amassing btc but are cryptographers and programmers.
Bright
@knircky Much of what you say is completely true I agree with you in your opinion, meanwhile the Biycoin is one of the best known, when you converse with someone about crypto coins and these are not very familiar, the first thing they mention is the Bitcoin , use it as a reference, so much so, that when the Bitcoin experienta a low in price, all other currencies follow it as a domino effect, then, it is simple to observe how the leader in this type of coins, and how people treat this kind of informs As Anteriromente explains, the Bitcoin will continue to be the first to mention when it comes to Crptomonedas.
I am sure it is not the only crpto viable currency, but it is the one that has kept up to significant values, for longer, and, the facts speak for themselves, there may be many opinions found, but ultimately the bitcoin will continue to maintain its Resistance between certain significant and attractive values, it will remain safe and stable in its cryptography, and its trajectory supports it, I am sure that it prevailed.
i still hold my btc . i am not expert in crypto but i just believe btc will come back with more power.
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It's just basic tribalism. They first pick a doctrine/ideology and try to make the facts fit the theory. Bitcoin Maximalist are the banker equivalent of crypto-sphere. What reasons do bankers bring up against cryptocurrency - you can find an equivalent among Bitcoin Maximalists against any crypto that is not named Bitcoin.
There is absolutely zero technical achievements/moat that is exclusive to Bitcoin and most coins including Ethereum can do anything Bitcoin does better with more features.
To me Bitcoin Maximalists and Bankers are basically Republicans and Democrats. They are against each other. But a person with good sensibilities should avoid both of them.
Bitcoin Maximalists stick their heads in the sand when it comes to InstantSend that give roughly 1.3 second confirmations. hey refuse to accept on-chain governance. Any project that is linked to Bitcoin with the exception of Komodo is a failure while many projects on http://www.blocktivity.info are rocking it. The maximalists are also oblivious to the decentralization created by DPoS as opposed to few mining pools. PoW is nowhere as decentralized as DPoS: https://steemit.com/statistics/@vimukthi/forget-51-attacks-coingeek-now-control-67-hash-power-and-they-are-loosing-usd370-000-usd-per-day
Three Things Makes A Bitcoin Maximalist
Don't bother with reasons. They will use any logic/excuse/theory to fit their delusional agenda.