Stephan Kinsella on The Bitstein Brief

Oh, no, I was not thrown off. It only confirmed me for me something I'd recently started to realize. I used to think bitcoin maximalism simply meant you understood a few things: (a) there is need for money; (b) there is thus a need for one money (c) fiat moneys suck; (d) so there is a need for a better money, which should be digital, i.e. a cryptocurrency with enough aspects to make it superior enough over commodity (and fiat) money to surpass them, and not itself to be easily surpassed (e.g .by new features); (e) there will be a tendency to replace existing fiat with a new money, and it will be one money; there is only a need for one; (f) of the 15,000 cryptos now, one of them will probably be the one that replaces the existing fiat stuff; (g) BTC is likely to be that one, simply because it is oldest, has the longest blockchain, and has the largest market share. But I do not think BTC is anything special; I see no reason why it could not have been litecoin or bitcoin cash or whatever. It's just more likely to be BTC. Moreover, (h) all these new cryptos flagging new features--it's all bullshit. Because either the basic initial ones, like BTC, are either basically good enough (meaning: it serves the function of money, and is better in most respects than, say, gold), meaning BTC can become the new monetary medium (it doesn't need to be "perfect"--if fiat is 70%, gold would be 90%; if BTC would be 98.5%, it doesn't matter if Bitcoin-Manga would be 98.6%). given all this, some new emerging money will garner more and more inertia and the alt-currencies will be more and more scammy and shitcoiny and pointless. So my hope is that a new digital money displaces fiat, that it is decentralized, and my prediction is, - it might as well be BTC. Then the others fade away. I assume you would not disagree with much of this. But none of this implies "you should not try to start a new one" or all this strategy stuff. That is a wholly separate thing. So at this point I am not sure I am a BTC maximalist or not, since I am not yet clear on what the accepted coherent definitino is. Michael Goldstein 59 min ago Author I should not have included the third, and I see how the word "strategy" threw you off. The important distinction is the "monetary maximalism" and the belief that bitcoin has the possibility of being that money. As for "strategy," I did not mean in an activist sense. There is no requirement for any maximalist to "do something" or act altruistically "for bitcoin." I have always agreed with your analysis of the activist mentality. (Thank you for that, by the way. It saved me a lot of time in my youth.) What I meant by that was that if you believe (a) and (b), you are likely going to develop an analytical toolkit that can help filter BS claims, from an economic (everyone will have their own crypto token!), engineering (bitcoin block times are too slow!), or other relevant perspective (my grandma has trouble using bitcoin, therefore it's not going to be the dominant money). There are also potential real normative implications of (a) + (b). This framework often leads to different principles and heuristics: assuming everything that isn't bitcoin is a scam, that engineering resources shouldn't be wasted on shitcoin support, that trading is just not worth the risks, etc. So the "strategy," rather than being about how they can sacrifice themselves for the good of the network, is using their knowledge about (a) + (b) + whatever else to make prudent decisions about how they might personally orient themselves towards a monetizing good that could eventually become the dominant global money. I wrote an article about this mindset in 2014 called "Everyone's a Scammer": https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/everyones-a-scammer/ I can't speak for you, but I think you would be what people would generally call a "bitcoin maximalist." I hope that helps clear things up.