The Martin Luthers of Bitcoin: How Ordinary Magicians Challenge the Religion of Maximalism

This is an opinion editorial from Nathan Crider, COO of a renewable energy company and founder of a bitcoin-focused holding company.

Its unlikely that the mysterious, pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, satoshi nakamotoWhen he first released his code to the public, he knew how much in common bitcoin would one day share with the world’s great religions.

That “genesis block” was mined on one of Nakamoto’s computers on January 3, 2009, a day now observed as one of several bitcoin “holidays” to commemorate the legacy of the world’s first cryptocurrency and blockchain. For some, January 3rd has become “Proof of the Keys Day” to promote the importance of holding your own private keys, rather than trusting them to a cryptocurrency exchange or other third party. Other bitcoin holidays commemorate the first bitcoin transaction (“Bitcoin Pizza Day”), the sovereignty of community consensus and the resolution of “blocksize wars” (“Bitcoin” Independence Day”), and the day Nakamoto publicly released the white paper on the concept of bitcoin (“Bitcoin White Paper Day”).

Coincidentally, it falls last On the same day, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church in Germany.Ultimately many of the most cherished traditions of the Catholic Church were overturned, which had hardly changed in 1,500 years.

Strange as it may sound, but if a group of self-proclaimed magicians have their way, the bitcoin “religion” will soon recognize yet another holiday to mark another day of significance in bitcoin history, less At least in their eyes. in a twitter space, i hear udi wertheimer And Eric WallTwo proponents of bitcoin ordinals who call themselves “taproot wizards” discuss promoting January 24 as bitcoin “JPEG Day” to commemorate the day that a user bitcoin talk Forum, known as “Sabunir” Attempted to sell JPEG in 2010 with technical support from none other than Nakamoto himself (about five months before the infamous pizza purchase).

Maybe it’s not too hard to see Wertheimer and Wall Casey Rodermersomeone who developed the ordinus, and someone who is known by the pseudonym domoWHO BRC-20 token standard developed – The bitcoin community is the equivalent of Martin Luther. These four “heretics” managed to make the bitcoin network an environment for non-fungible tokens (NFT) transactions, resulting in a Twitter uproar by many hardcore bitcoiners (often referred to as “maximalists” or “maxis” for short). .

religion of bitcoin

I’m certainly not the first person to compare the most ardent Bitcoin enthusiasts with religious preachers. Michael LewisAuthor of books such as “Liar’s Poker,” “Moneyball” and “The Big Short” This comparison was used on the Bitcoin 2023 forum, Describing the process of interviewing bitcoin enthusiasts for his upcoming book about Sam Bankman Fried, the disgraced founder and CEO of FTX, Lewis said:

“I have a feeling you may have said something wrong. When I was writing (writing) “The Blind Side”, my main characters were evangelical Christians, but they were suspicious of me because they felt I didn’t share their belief structure… It’s not like I’m in or out when it comes to bitcoin, to be honest, I haven’t thought much about it. I’ve interviewed – I don’t know – 200 people, and a lot of them were like, ‘What would you say about bitcoin?’… It’s interesting, it’s kind of a religious thing.’

This “religious thing” has always bothered me, and here’s why: The extremists who have collectively created their bizarre bitcoin religion have appointed themselves as its custodians and constantly try to apply the litmus test to other bitcoin enthusiasts, except for no particularly good reason other than to reinforce it. Their “street cred” is more hardcore and extreme than the next guy’s (I’d say “boy or girl,” but Maxis are overwhelmingly male).

On Twitter, you’ll recognize him by his “laser-eyed” avatar, in which he has digitally replaced his eyes with fluorescent, red ones to clearly and proudly mark himself as part of the religion. Maxis are a disproportionately vocal minority on “Bitcoin Twitter,” trolling anyone deemed insufficiently loyal to their conspiratorial rhetoric on topics ranging from vaccinations and sunscreen to seed oils, anti-gun laws, and corporate ESG mandates. Takes pleasure in mocking and ridiculing. You see, in the upside-down world of laser-eye, being toxic is a virtue. Being toxic to them is the way to win hearts and minds anyhow.

To be fair, the Maxis are not a homogenous group, but they do share a common view that bitcoin is the solution to many of the world’s problems and subscribe to the political principles of libertarianism and Austrian economics, and the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum. Hate hopelessly corrupt institutions like that. I kinda like this part. On a continuum of shared-beliefs with bitcoiners, I generally lean their way. I, too, subscribe to most Austrian economic theories, have many libertarian leanings, and am increasingly skeptical of the mainstream media. And, most importantly, I believe that bitcoin has the potential to become the best currency ever created.

What I hate, however, is that Maxi subscribes to a whole lot of conspiratorial rhetoric about just about anything you can imagine, many of which are non-monetary in nature and when bitcoin When it comes to, they are all completely non-sequitur. I’m sure most maxi would argue that all of these things are in some way related to the “fiat system” they seek to overturn to set the stage for a new world in which bitcoin reigns supreme (“bitcoin standardas author and laser-eyed saint Saipedian Ammos describes it).

However, I would argue that these are issues about which the average person knows little or cares little and that focusing on them is extremely counterproductive in terms of spreading bitcoin adoption. If the world is ever to convert to said bitcoin standard, widespread adoption would need to be orders of magnitude greater than where they stand today — and the stupid litmus tests are a massive change, at least, and a massive distraction, at best, for all but the most extreme among us.

an ossified base layer

The parallels between bitcoiners and religion go beyond Maxis’ dogmatic in-group mentality. For example, the “base layer” code of bitcoin is similar to scripture in many ways. Whereas many offers There have been efforts over the years to change this, but only a significant few have been approved. In fact, the Ten Commandments are slightly less likely to change than the software code that runs the bitcoin network — a feature, not a bug, in the view of many bitcoiners.

The process followed by bitcoin’s core developers to change the code is cumbersome by design, requiring anyone proposing a change to write a bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP), with the aim of achieving some sort of community consensus to implement the changes. The sharded nature of bitcoin’s base layer is in the eyes of most Maxis a testament to bitcoin’s decentralization – something that sets it apart from more centralized blockchains like Ethereum, which have far less threshold for implementing changes. Changes to bitcoin’s “Layer 1” functionality will always be controversial; However, Taproot and SegWit upgrades designed to make the bitcoin protocol more secure and efficient were adopted relatively easily by the bitcoin community, and Taproot was activated in November 2021.

Herein lies the irony. If those who determined the administration of the bitcoin network had known at the time that these upgrades would enable Rodermer to create ordinals and inscriptions, it seems unlikely in retrospect that the changes would have been accepted with such relative ease. Church fundamentalists lost at their own game, and many of them (with Greg FossA podcaster and contributor to Bitcoin Magazine over 130,000 Twitter followers) have been on the war path ever since.

Most bitcoin miners prefer Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens because they increase transaction fees, while many Max are against them because they see NFTs as a distraction from the core function of bitcoin, which is a better way to send, receive, and store value. The network was designed as a monetary settlement and transaction platform, not for the tokenization of digital art or real-world assets.rwa), says the laser-eyes. As far as they are concerned, JPEG Day might as well be called “Scam Day”.

A battle for the soul of bitcoin

While the story of inscriptions and ordinances is still being written, the reality is that JPEG “art collecting” and other common use cases may be here to stay, resulting in yet another internal culture war reminiscent of bitcoin.block warsFrom 2015 to 2017. Rather than simply “small-blockers” versus “big blockers,” Ordinals pits maximalists against NFT creators and enthusiasts.

Growing Tensions Finally Ended on Bitcoin 2023 During a well-timed on-stage event that the organizers of the conference called “great ordinance debate, dressed as wizards (and “floss“as soon as they reached the stage), Wertheimer and Wall displayed their mastery as propaganda artists while debating Matt Corallo (specifically, an anti-toxic maximalist) of Block and Spiral and one who hid his face with sunglasses, a bandana over his nose and mouth, and a camouflage uasf hat (referring to himself as “the little blocker”) who goes by the name shinobi, It was like some kind of weird, nerdy version of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), as if Don King had somehow sneaked into an episode of “The Big Bang Theory.” and convinced Sheldon Cooper and Howard Wolowitz to come to the ring.

I looked up from the audience, laser-eyed in amazement at the spectacle of heretic wizards extolling the virtues of toxicity to the detriment of something I had come to love as they debated the ordinals and gleefully fought for the soul of bitcoin.

This is a guest post by Nathan Crider. The opinions expressed are solely his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.