A look back in to the Bitcoin ideals on maximalism by Robert Breedlove: Bitcoin maximalism—an ideology ostensibly premised on freedom, truth, and self-sovereignty—was having an autoimmune shock, abdicating all of its values in a fit of emotional fervor originating at the utterance of a trigger word.

In a free market, people naturally and rationally choose to store their wealth in the monetary technology which is hardest to inflate (by mining, printing, counterfeiting, etc.)

Throughout history, money has evolved many times – it has taken the form of seashells, salt, cattle, stones, precious metals and most recently government paper.

Monetary technologies are always in competition with one another and undergo market-driven natural selection which gives rise to new forms of money and leads old forms to extinction.

Monetary evolution, a market-driven technology selection process, is somewhat similar to the evolutionary process we see in telecommunications technologies.

No matter what technology is used to accomplish it, the purpose of telecommunications remains the same: to communicate information across space and time.  However, the telecommunications technologies we use to communicate evolve over time (from cave paintings to carrier pigeons to newspapers to telegraphs to telephones to digital media).  As newer telecommunications technologies are invented that provide higher speed, fidelity, reliability, traceability or mobility – they become the dominant means of communicating information across space and time.

Similar to the purpose of telecommunications, the purpose of money also remains the same: to communicate value across space and time.  However, the monetary technologies we use to communicate value also evolve over time (from seashells to salt to cattle to stones to precious metals).

As newer monetary technologies are invented that provide higher hardness, divisibility, portability, durability or recognizability – they become the dominant method of communicating value across space and time.  Money has many characteristics, but the primary trait which determines whether it succeeds or fails in the free market is called ‘Hardness’ (on which we will now focus)

Hardness is the difficulty to produce an incremental unit of the monetary instrument (ie. the energy expenditure necessary to mine an ounce of gold or produce a US dollar, for instance).  Hardness is quantified by the stock-to-flow ratio. Stock is the existing money supply. Flow is the newly produced money supply over a given time period. The higher the stock-to-flow ratio, the Harder (or sounder) the money.

Each time an additional monetary unit is created, the other monetary units become less scarce and lose purchasing power, an effect commonly called inflation (the inverse of the stock-to-flow ratio).