Du kan tro maksimalistene: Bitcoin er atskilt fra Crypto PlatoBlockchain Data Intelligence. Vertikalt søk. Ai.

Du kan tro maksimalistene: Bitcoin er atskilt fra krypto

Dette er en meningsredaksjon av Stephan Livera, vert for "Stephan Livera Podcast" og administrerende direktør for Swan Bitcoin International.

Financial Times spaltist Jemima Kelly publiserte en artikkel med tittelen "Don’t Believe The ‘Maximalists: Bitcoin Can’t Be Separated From Crypto” earlier today and I’d like to share some reactions from a Bitcoiner perspective. Quoted text below is all from Kelly’s article.

“If you have ever dared to direct criticism at the world of crypto, the chances are you will have received some charming rebukes. You are likely to have been told to ‘have fun staying poor’…”

For hva det er verdt, tror jeg at "ha det gøy med å holde deg fattig"-meme stort sett er ment i spøk og ikke en alvorlig uttalelse om dårlige hensikter mot en annen person. Hvorfor? Fordi vi så populært Bitcoiners telling Elon Musk, the richest man in the world at the time, to “have fun staying poor” as he backs away from his public support of Bitcoin. Clearly, this is not meant as a serious rebuke.

“But there is another slightly more sophisticated flavour of counter-criticism finding its way into my inbox with increasing regularity these days. It usually starts with something designed to appease — some kind of agreement that crypto is immoral, a scam, or some version of a Ponzi scheme. But then it quickly changes course, to explain that none of this applies to bitcoin.”

Here is where my principal disagreement with this article lies. I and many other Bitcoiners do believe that we bør draw a line of distinction between Bitcoin and “crypto.” Bitcoin is unique in many ways:

  • It has no pre-mine or “dev. tax” to enrich the founder or founding team.
  • It has a culture that actually prioritizes decentralizing the ecosystem.
  • It enables cheap blockchain validation and participation (i.e., it’s relatively easy to run a fully-validating Bitcoin node), while also maintaining a robust, open, scalable, trust-minimized system.
  • It has a very strong preference for soft forking and retaining backwards and forwards compatibility for those running older Bitcoin node software.
  • It is continually growing in acceptance and mindshare around the world. Of course, this does wax and wane with bull and bear markets, but zoomed out, bitcoin liquidity and acceptance is only going one way: up.

Når du virkelig har utforsket disse punktene, vil du finne det bare Bitcoin meets these criteria. Many altcoins regularly hard fork, which is an indicator that they have a certain level of centralization in their development and community. Other altcoins do things that simply would not be scalable if they were scaled up to the level of Bitcoin and the number of bitcoin transactions. Other altcoins do things that are more permissioned, and thus they are not an åpen system like Bitcoin is.

Du kan til og med hevde at en spesifikk altcoin gjør det en specific thing better than Bitcoin does, but are any of them meaningfully making improvements on the whole? I don’t think so, and that’s why Bitcoin is rightly in a category of its own. There is also the question of whether Bitcoin bør har disse antatt andre funksjonene eller tingene, da dette også kan forårsake negative avveininger i en av de andre verdifulle egenskapene til systemet (robusthet, desentralisering, skalerbarhet, verifiserbarhet, etc.).

Kelly seems to believe that Bitcoin “arguments don’t stand up,” as she takes issue with any financial incentive whatsoever. For instance:

“First, it doesn’t matter what bitcoin’s origins were — the people who push it now have the same financial incentives as those pushing any other crypto token.”

How is this a justified attack on Bitcoin promotion? Imagine that you are an investor in a company, and you openly promoted that company without hiding the fact that you are an investor. Is there an issue with this?

Tenk deg nå at det er uredelige konkurrenter som utgir seg for å være «i samme bransje». Du tar til orde for at folk bruker produktet fra ditt ikke-svindelbedrift i stedet. Hvor er det etiske spørsmålet? Hvordan ville dette "motbevise" deg? Det gjør den rett og slett ikke, med mindre du griper i sugerør.

Of course, Bitcoin is not a company. But in any case, the promise of Bitcoin is not that “there were no people who got in cheaper than you,” which is an absurd and impossible standard to live up to. The promise of Bitcoin is an open, decentralized, scarce, robust, programmable monetary system with no rulers. The product does what it proverbially says on the tin and Kelly’s critique falls flat.

“Second, bitcoin is not in fact decentralized — not only do miners group together to form ‘mining pools’ but wealth is also hugely concentrated.” 

Kelly oppsummerer ikke forholdet mellom gruvearbeidere og bassenger korrekt. Gruvearbeidere er forskjellige enheter fra bassenger, og de kan raskt peke hash-raten sin til en annen pool. Og selv om det kan være relativt sett et mindre antall bassenger, kan individuelle gruvearbeidere bytte mellom dem, ettersom det er et brutalt konkurranseutsatt marked. Se dette skjermbildet fra 23. september 2022 fra Braiins Insights Dashboard, som viser hvordan bassengene har hovedkontor i forskjellige land rundt om i verden:

Aktuelt er også de siste Poolin-nyhetene, som så selskapet suspendere uttak. Gitt dette pekte mange gruvearbeidere på hash-rate borte from Poolin. Notice how Poolin’s global share of bitcoin mining hash rate has gone from 12% previously, down to around 4% at the time of writing. 

"Tirsdag kunngjorde MicroStrategy at den hadde bought another 301 bitcoins, noe som betyr at dette selskapet alene nå har nesten 0.7 prosent av hele forsyningen.»

Kelly claims to “steelman the argument” in this article, but unfortunately, she does a poor job steelmanning on the question of bitcoin ownership. If she grasped the libertarian and cypherpunk ethos of Bitcoin, she would understand that the point is to create a monetary system uten å tvinge folk til det. So, of course given this, there will be some people who get it before others do. Those who get it will buy, earn or mine coins before others do. The fact that one company owns 0.7% of the circulating supply of bitcoin is not an issue.

So, Bitcoin remains far more decentralized than the “crypto” coins.

"For det tredje, en 'first-mover-fordel' varer ikke alltid." 

That’s true in a general business context, however to understand why Bitcoin is distinct, we have to understand just why and how far it beats alternatives, be they fiat money, gold or altcoins. Generally, in order to displace another product, you have to come up with something ten times better. But with Bitcoin, it’s doubtful that ten times better is even mulig. Her skal jeg sitere min venn Gigi hans nylige Twitter-tråd:

 The design space of money is limited, and a ten-fold improvement on the monetary properties of Bitcoin is simply not possible. You can marginally improve one thing, but only by dramatically worsening trade-offs in other ways (verifiability, scalability, robustness, accessibility).

Kelly skriver deretter igjen om insentivet til Maximalists:

“The real reason bitcoin maximalists want to separate bitcoin from the rest of crypto is to create the illusion of scarcity in a world where there is none.”

It’s fair to say that Bitcoin Maximalists have an incentive and want to distinguish bitcoin from “crypto.” But the real question is: Are they right? Yes, they are.

Bitcoin is rightly distinguished from altcoins, but it just takes a lot of research and reading to understand why. Unfortunately, Kelly has not done the research required and presents only a shallow surface level misunderstanding.

Dette er et gjesteinnlegg av Stephan Livera. Uttrykte meninger er helt deres egne og reflekterer ikke nødvendigvis meningene til BTC Inc eller Bitcoin Magazine.

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