Crypto Tribalism is Silly
My favorite place to visit on Twitter and probably the whole internet is the CryptoTwitter community. I follow so many hardcore Bitcoiners, Ethereans, OG cypherpunks, macro investors, tech guys, Andreas Antonopolous, who introduced me to Bitcoin, etc. It’s an incredible resource that feeds me information which I decipher through and formulate my investment plans from. Whenever I’ve tapped in to the CT community, I learn something new and often mind blowing. It has paid dividends.
But lately, like in all realms of society, I’m noticing a cringeworthy trend of tribalistic behavior. Crypto-identity politics if you will. I see Bitcoin Maximalists completely ignore brilliant human beings because they’re working on Ethereum instead, for example. And I see Ethereans act like they don’t need Bitcoin, even rendering the soundest money ever invented as a useless artifact. Then I see the incredible community of Monero folk who keep trying to say Bitcoin has no use because it’s not private like Monero, without seeing all the potential mutual benefits of having open public blockchains as well as private ones. Meanwhile, everyone seems to want to dump on Litecoin despite its Mimble Wimble privacy upgrade, and so on.
In some way you can almost be assured a project is thriving if other smaller projects are competing against it to catch up. Bitcoin definitely gets the brunt of this. It’s similar to the New England Patriots experience throughout their 20 years of winning, everyone was trying to find their flaws and explain why this time they’d fail while they just kept going back to the superbowl year after year and winning. Though, Ethereum is getting its fair share of knocks from newer projects now, too.
On the positive, this cynical eye helps make these digital networks more robust as all legitimate critiques raised along the way present learning and growth opportunities for the networks as they evolve with solutions.
But as much as I appreciate all the tribes hyperfocusing in a competitive manner to make their protocols and technologies the best possible, I still find it silly that each faction in the CT community would continue to bash on each other. This is not a zero sum game. With the macroenvironment and money printer go brrrr being what it is, Bitcoin is clearly paving the way for the rest of cryptocurrency right now with institutional adoption and its inflation resistant properties. But this doesn’t mean other projects cannot be valuable as well, specifically in my view Ethereum and Monero.
In reality, these technologies are symbiotic and synergistic. Meaning, they can work together and together they work much better. What’s the point of Decentralized Finance and banking on Ethereum if there is no sound money? Privacy is great for civilians, but don’t we want to track every monetary move of our public government’s expenditures?
There certainly isn’t room for everyone. We don’t need five different coins acting as digital gold, that would be wasteful and confusing. But there’s certainly room for a lot of good ideas including DeFi and privacy in general as we enter 2021.
So, from how I see it, the sooner we realize we’re all in this together to create a more economically fair and inclusive world, the more constructive the community will be and the more fun my Twitter feed will become again.
