Vitalik Buterin defended “Bitcoin Maximalism” in his blog. He called “Team ‘Bitcoin’” as “a highly diverse group of both rich and poor people. He further pointed to how the supporters are using “The capitalist tool of free self-sovereign money” to provide real value to human beings.
This should not be surprising because Buterin came up with Ethereum as an improvement Bitcoin.
Maximalism is a valuable defense according to Vitalik. With more money coming in to the space providing incentives for “short-term innovations” can undermine the importance of the “core premise” of Bitcoin.
Vitalik implied that it is okay for Bitcoin to play the safe choice by not trying to enable a choice of highly complex and risky decentralized applications. It can be a lot of work to deal with complexities that happen if Bitcoin network would enable Dapps.
Thus, Bitcoin choosing to “Just Be Money” is a “Safe Choice.”
The monetary disposition of Bitcoin can be undermined if there are secondary functions. If there were additional functions, this can add to lot of work for developers who have to keep adding features to “Keep up with the competition” provide for “developer needs” eventually being on a continual pressure to innovate and dealing with new risks.
The “Just Money” Ethos of Bitcoin benefits the rest of the crypto ecosystem. This makes things very direct as Bitcoin will serve as a collateral for other tokens like Terra and more. When Bitcoin Wins – Everyone Wins.
Some interesting Thoughts about Bitcoin from Maximalists:
Pomp: The 19,000,000th bitcoin was just mined. Only 2 million more bitcoin to go. Many people have critiques of bitcoin, but no one has built a more valuable digital currency.
John Pompliano: If you got $10k a day EVERYDAY since the pyramids were built (~4,500 years ago)… You would only have 6% of Elon Musk’s wealth.
Do Kwon: We are just getting started.
Muneeb.BTC, Stacks had a different take way back in 2021: Bitcoin maximalism as a strategy for growing Bitcoin is failing. The maximalist narrative has lost touch with reality. I say this as a Bitcoiner who started in 2013. I’ve held BTC through multiple bear markets & spent years building apps & protocols on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin maximalism assumes a zero-sum world. However, we’re in an expanding crypto economy. Attacking developers and new use-cases doesn’t help Bitcoin. It only encourages those developers and use-cases to move to other ecosystems like Ethereum and Solana.
It just looks like Vitalik thought out well than Muneeb and therefore gives his clear take on Bitcoin Maximalism, which makes more sense – Bitcoin does what it does properly.
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