Topic: Say no to maximalism - page 8. (Read 2450 times)

The problem is that people tend to use "maximalism" as an argument instead of relevant facts.  People will say, "X is a maximalist" as if that is an argument against a point.  I personally don't know anyone who is myopic and dogmatic involved in bitcoin, but that doesn't mean they aren't out there of course

I'm absolutely with you.  I will have to say "growing up" in bitcoin I did learn a lot from maximalist, many here right from the forum took me under their wing and schooled me quite well.  In a way, if not for the "Maxi's" , I would not be as well versed on cryptocurrency as I am today, and I probably would have lost a good chunk of change ( though it's always been pretty easy for me to decipher a shitcoin from a decent legit project).

But I agree with you.  I like to consider myself a progressive independent with an open mind and I feel that's an important way to live life just period.  Being closed minded brings limitations, and that derails long term progress and possibilities.

some people support other payment systems and networks and they want people to stop caring about bitcoin and move away from bitcoin to move over to their favoured network as their favoured network is not getting any material relevance/recognition although bitcoin devs have had hundreds of millions in sponsoring deals to try making these other sub-quality networks

even when their other networks have been stagnant, flawed and buggy, they have been loyal and obedient to try recruiting people over to it. not realising the failures of the other network.. yet they want people that are loyal to bitcoin that has stood the tests of time to stop being loyal, all so that the centralists that adore other networks can claim more centralist control of bitcoin development so they can twist it into something that has more congestion more fee more headaches, all to then force more people away from using bitcoin..

the trojan army walked upto the gates in 2014 and entered their trojan horse in 2017 and have since caused infighting and battles that have not improved bitcoin since.. its all done to try to displace people and move people out of using bitcoin. and is a disgrace

I really don't understand how someone who receives money p2p weekly in this forum for years, from anonymous people in other continents, can say that bitcoin is not fit for p2p.

You are saying the opposite to what you experienced here... not only you, I see some people here saying that too.

Try to receiving money via Swift or paypal or some other international transfer method. Much worse.

You will only find similar experiences in bitcoin copies, and they are worse so people don't use them for different reasons

+1

I advice newbies to invest in bitcoin because it is a more secure investment than altcoins. But that doesn’t mean Bitcoin does not have its own issues. The scalability of Bitcoin has been a problem that has been with Bitcoin since its inception. There are altcoins that do not have such problems with slow transaction and high fees. Now that is all the challenges directly affecting the Bitcoin network. In all the pros of Bitcoin outweigh the cons.

The problem I find with Bitcoiners is that many of us are not very enthusiastic about spending our bitcoins on goods and services.

Yet bitcoin is the king of all the cryptocurrencies in the ecosystem. And any other cryptocurrency follow the rise and falling of bitcoin and that is why many people who are bitcoin enthusiast uses the word "maximalism". In fact they have the in build mindset of bitcoin so they support bitcoin to the core so any other crypto as for them is a shot.
And if other cryptocurrencies were rising up when bitcoin is falling then that use of  maximalism by those bitcoin fans would have been reduced but whenever bitcoin is falling those other coins also fall and when the price rise they also rise and the gap is very big. So they believed bitcoin to the core.

I generally agree with the OP. While I have a "maximalist" in my personal text, this doesn't refer to a particular protocol or currency but to the decentralization concept in general. Bitcoin is, in the current situation, the cryptocurrency that best embraces that paradigm.

I think however a mild form of Bitcoin maximalism has its virtues, too. Above all since Ethereum's creation, there is a popular narrative in the "crypto space" that Bitcoin is "outdated", or also "dogmatic". This narrative was mainly used to justify semi-centralist approaches: big premines, ICOs, "foundations" of dubious goals, "airdrops" where the data you provide may be of more value than the coins you receive, and other practices which have becoming very common now in the altcoin space.

Thus, maximalists can have my sympathies if they counter this kind of narrative, pointing out Bitcoin's true virtues like censorship resistance and decentralization and contrasting them with the "semi-centralized" nature of most altcoins, without being too dogmatic themselves.

Personally I support cryptocurrencies like Monero or LTC, which embrace a decentralized paradigm. But I think even a stance like "Bitcoin will be the only surviving cryptocurrency" is worthy of being discussed, for example when this asumption is justified by security issues (e.g. "Bitcoin is the only truly 51% resistant coin"). This means I would not rule out maximalist predictions completely. In my opinion, it is however much more likely that altcoins are here to stay, and the best "maximalists" can do is to try to protect others from investing in centralized scams.

I try to be unbiased, but let's be honest here, bitcoin is so much better when you compare it to all the shitcoins out there. Also, it's not like they try to promote their projects on their own, without either using bitcoin's popularity to their advantage (all the coins with the word bitcoin in their name, like bitcoin gold), or attacking it as bad for environment (like Ripple did), or too slow and too old to work (BCH), or calling themselves the real bitcoin (BSV). I'm not even going to mention real scam coins here because we all know how many there were. Therefore, I completely understand maxis.

Bravo.

Bitcoin may well be around forever, but that doesn't mean it will necessarily always be the "king", i.e. the digital currency with the highest market cap. Maybe it will be, but there's no cosmic force keeping it that way either--we may see something come along that will be even bigger.

I personally think the market cap for all digital currency will be 10x what it is today within 10 years. How much of that market will be controlled by Bitcoin? We'll see. Things with such huge market shares often don't stay that way*. But Bitcoin's share can diminish greatly in that scenario and it will still be worth many times what it is today.

Technology, I should remind the youngsters here, has a strong tendency to change over the long term, and us oldsters have been taken in by so many technologies we thought would last "forever" that we're getting pretty tired of being proven wrong over and over again.

Keep an open mind, people. It makes life more interesting, and you'll profit more as well.


(* I know, I worked on Netscape Navigator** when we had a 95% market share for browsers ).

[ ** For anybody here under 30, that was the first popular web browser, before others like Firefox, Chrome and Safari ]

I'd say live and let live. We don't have to have a mad Max situation between Bitcoin maximalists and non-bitcoin maximalists. In my own estimation as long as your not hurting anyone we don't need to fight over Bitcoin's superiority over other cryptocurrency or not since this is not a cult and no one is pushing it down anybody's throat. Let those who want to do Bitcoin do it in peace and let those who want to do Monero and Litecoin do it peace. As a person from Africa our common enemy is the government and our goal is to escape their limiting economic system that keeps us poor and if any of the guys from my community feels that Bitcoin, Monero, or Litecoin does it for, bravo so be it. I won't tell them otherwise or oppose them because I am all for Bitcoin.

Growth contribution doesn't mean that you will downplay one thing in order to promote another; the world is too broad to accommodate any form of change and development that can aid humanity.
 
Because I'm a fan of a particular football team, that doesn't mean that every other team is playing rubbish or is not making an effort to stand out.
 
If I'm to give an honest opinion and description, it should be like this: this is why I like this club because they consist of this and that, although this other club has other things that the person will also list, leaving whomever you are communicating with the option to make their own choice and not the way most people criticise any other currency that's not bitcoin in this forum; they can all coexist and they have a purpose to serve.
 
One thing we should keep in mind is that nothing is created with 100% perfection.

When I say that it has terrible privacy, I don't mean it's impossible to maintain privacy. What I mean is that the protocol lacks a strong focus on privacy. Sure, you can take advantage of the way transactions work, and build things like coinjoin, but the network, given as is, does not come with anything apart from coin control.

Coinjoin is an interactive process, which is a significant drawback. The ability to seamlessly pay anyone without any interaction beyond broadcasting the transaction, as in ring signatures, is vastly superior to coinjoin. Not only does it offer greater robustness by eliminating the need for a coordinator, but it also provides an anonymity set that is orders of magnitude larger. (Since you can pick decoys from outputs of past transactions.)

Bitcoin doesn't have terrible privacy, your transactions are untraceable when you use coinjoins: https://mempool.space/tx/fc13786aa9a350d06e7f63c69e7989917981c689f284a7eba3130cde958e23bb

yes it does appreciate well.

i have personally watched six dollar price turn into the current 60,000 price now.

but due to its vast size it simply is not suited well for p2p

i do not get my pzzia delivered to me in a mack truck it is not suited for shipping a single pizza 🍕 shop to private home.

I rarely encounter Bitcoin developers who are maximalists. Typically, they are open-minded and appreciate the strengths of other networks that address areas where Bitcoin has limitations, such as privacy (e.g., Monero).

I get it, Bitcoin is more ethical than all the other altcoins. It is superior in that particular property, but "superior in general"? I wouldn't say so. Bitcoin has terrible privacy, everyone I know is migrating to Monero, and for good reason.

Again, I wasn't talking about capital appreciation. More about the protocol properties and its trade-offs. It does appreciate better than other altcoins, given the less risk.

When you're involved in a project that has current and emerging competitors and you know that relative to all the other competitors around it, none's better than it, do you just sit back and allow the others to paint themselves as the best while you do nothing about it? I feel we've got to know that nothing is irreplaceable as long as people aren't enthusiastic about it. Part of what makes Bitcoin what it is now is the fact that people believe that it's the best digital asset that is and that can possibly ever be. It's left for those involved in another project to put in the required effort in promoting theirs.

Except I'm getting it all wrong if not I don't think it's a bad thing to be a core Bitcoin enthusiast who speaks and defends what he knows about Bitcoin that propels him to consider it an asset to invest into. Even in the sports niche, Real Madrid fans believed that the club is the best in the world even though there had been instances when other clubs did better than them. It's not that they are maximist but rather they are just enthusiastic about their club. Though not too old in the bitcoin ecosystem, I'm yet to find an alternative digital asset that's as strong and resistive as Bitcoin and if I'm being bullish about it in my views about it, it's based on this ground.

That's why I'm not someone who always say Bitcoin for everything.

If someone looking for safe investment, they should go for Bitcoin.

If someone looking for privacy, they should go for Monero.

If someone looking for cheap fees, they should go for Litecoin or Doge.

I don't get the point when people are supporting the countries should accept Bitcoin as a legal tender, I really doubt that they will choose to pay using Bitcoin over fiat since using Bitcoin make you need to spend fees whenever you create new transaction.

bitcoin maximalism is not about thinking bitcoin should be only managed as one project EG (only core decide protocol changes)
bitcoin maximalism is not about thinking bitcoin should be the only currency(all other coins are dead)

its that some people only WANT to personally hold and use bitcoin and support bitcoin personally

its also funny how for many years blackhatcoiner was supporting that core be the only protocol manager of bitcoin proposals, he have been vile in his arguments about any other dev group attempting to offer proposals

seems he is again trying to change history and attempting to control the narrative.. re defining buzzwords to his preference
.. and no i dont think blackhatcoiner has made a genuine change to his motives and is now thinking independently he is still a core centric supporter and has never even tried to be sceptical or critical minded about the decisions of core

These Maximalist will not say anything bad about Bitcoin but for them everything outside Bitcoin is not good.  I tend to believe that these people think that you will lose your life if you patronize other cryptocurrency.  I agree that they are part of people who push Bitcoin to become essential commodity but due to their belief that other than Bitcoin any cryptocurrency is inferior, they tend to neglect a possible development with the help of altcoin technology.


I do not think that this is an issue if we talk about Bitcoin maximalism.  It is the state of mind of people not the state of their pocket.

Thanks for saying it and that's what I've been experiencing with majority of the threads so far. Bitcoiners tend to ignore the obvious to push the narrative and their refusal to try to address or acknowledge Bitcoin's shortcomings is laughable. There were instances, specifically recently where I've been engaging in several discussions relating to Bitcoin as an investment, Bitcoin's "HODL" mindset and volatility is good just to name a few.

Tons of these threads are literally circlejerks with repeated parroting of the Bitcoin is the best narrative, or whatever the topic was about. Threads like these are frankly rather pointless and don't encourage any discussion or critical thinking. I'd attribute most of this to the maximalism mindset and some of this to their limited understanding.

Bitcoin has never been proven to be a best long term investment. The horizon for what is considered long term is far beyond Bitcoin's current lifespan, and that the fact that we've been through so many volatile periods practically proves my point. If you argue that Bitcoin is good because it has experienced XXX% growth in the past 5 years, then it cannot be considered the "best long term investment". This is a good example of Bitcoin maximalism.