Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin is passionately defending Bitcoin (BTC) maximalism – which may or may not be an April Fools’ Day joke.
In a new blog post, Buterin argues that storage of wealth and payments have been by far the most successful applications of the blockchain, despite the droves of other use-cases laid out in documents like the Ethereum whitepaper.
He notes that 3% of Argentinians, 6% of Nigerians and 12% of Ukrainians own crypto. He also points out that cryptocurrency donations account for $100 million in value sent to the people of Ukraine.
“What other application has anywhere close to that level of actual, real adoption today? Perhaps the closest is [Ethereum Name Service]. [Decentralized autonomous organizations] are real and growing, but today far too many of them are appealing to wealthy rich-country people whose main interest is having fun and using cartoon-character profiles to satisfy their first-world need for self-expression, and not build schools and hospitals and solve other real-world problems.
Thus, we can see the two sides pretty clearly: team ‘blockchain,’ privileged people in wealthy countries who love to virtue-signal about ‘moving beyond money and capitalism’ and can’t help being excited about ‘decentralized governance experimentation’ as a hobby, and team ‘Bitcoin,’ a highly diverse group of both rich and poor people in many countries around the world including the Global South, who are actually using the capitalist tool of free self-sovereign money to provide real value to human beings today.”
The ETH founder also points out that Bitcoin developers have allocated a significantly smaller portion of BTC’s overall supply to themselves compared to other crypto assets.
“Which blockchain communities deeply value self-sovereignty, privacy and decentralization, and are making to get big sacrifices to get it? And which blockchain communities are just trying to pump up their market caps and make money for founders and investors? The above chart should make it pretty clear.”
It remains unclear whether the timing of the blog’s publication on April 1st indicates Buterin is trolling. The ETH founder has previously decried Bitcoin maximalism, saying the creation of an ecosystem that uses Bitcoin exclusively would be “a highly suspect endeavor” that will lead to “a total reduction and increased centralization of funding.”
Buterin, however, closes out his most recent blog with a sincere-sounding call for maximalism.
“It’s better to mislead ten newbies into avoiding an investment that turns out good than it is to allow a single newbie to get bankrupted by a grifter.
It’s better to make your protocol too simple and fail to serve ten low-value short-attention-span gambling applications than it is to make it too complex and fail to serve the central sound money use case that underpins everything else.
And it’s better to offend millions by standing aggressively for what you believe in than it is to try to keep everyone happy and end up standing for nothing.
Be brave. Fight for your values. Be a maximalist.”
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