This is an op-ed by Nathan Craider, COO of a renewable energy company and founder of a bitcoin-focused holding company.
It is unlikely that the mysterious and pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi NakamotoOnly he knew how many similarities Bitcoin would one day share with the great religions of the world when they first released their symbol to the public.
This “genesis block” was mined on one of Nakamoto’s computers on January 3, 2009, a day celebrated annually as one of bitcoin’s many “holidays” to celebrate the legacy of the world’s first cryptocurrency and blockchain. For some, January 3 has become “Proof of Keys Day” to promote the importance of keeping one’s private keys, rather than trusting them with a cryptocurrency exchange or a third party. Other Bitcoin holidays celebrate the anniversary of the first Bitcoin transaction (“Bitcoin Bitcoin Day”), the supremacy of community consensus and the resolution of the “Block Wars” (“Bitcoin Independence Day”) and the day Nakamoto publicly released the white paper depicting Bitcoin (“Bitcoin White Paper Day”).
Coincidentally, the latter falls On the same day, Martin Luther hung his 95 Theses on the door of Wittenberg Church in Germanyultimately upending many cherished traditions of the Catholic Church, which had hardly changed in 1,500 years.
Strange as it may sound, if a group of self-proclaimed wizards find their way, the “debt” of bitcoin will soon recognize another holiday to celebrate another significant day in bitcoin history, at least in their eyes. You’ve heard in Twitter Spaces Audi Wertheimer And Eric Walltwo Bitcoin Ordinals who refer to themselves as “Taproot wizards,” discuss promoting January 24 as “JPEG Day” for Bitcoin to celebrate the day a user Bitcoin discussion Forum called “Sabunir”, He tried selling JPEG in 2010 with technical support from Nakamoto himself (Almost five months before the infamous pizza purchase).
Wertheimer and Wall’s offer may not be a stretch – along with Casey Rodarmourwho developed Ordinas, and someone using the pseudonym Domofrom Developed the BRC-20 symbol standard — as the bitcoin community’s equivalent of Martin Luther. These four “heretics” have managed to make the Bitcoin network an environment for dealing with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which has led to many die-hard Bitcoiners (often called “maximalists” or “maxis” for short) blowing up a Twitter feed.
Bitcoin debt
I am certainly not the first person to compare the most ardent Bitcoin enthusiasts with religious missionaries. Michael Lewisauthor of books such as “Liar’s Poker”, “Moneyball” and “The Big Short” They used this comparison on stage at Bitcoin 2023. Describing the process of interviewing bitcoin enthusiasts for his upcoming book about FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fred, Lewis said:
“The feeling I get is that you can say something wrong. When I was (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 that I’m in or out of bitcoin when it comes to bitcoin, it’s just that I didn’t think much about it, honestly. .”
This “religious thing” has always bothered me, and here’s why: extremists who have created their own bizarre Bitcoin religion community have anointed themselves as its custodians and have constantly tried to apply litmus tests to other Bitcoin enthusiasts for no particularly good reason other than to bolster their “street cred” as more hard-line and extreme than the next guy (I’ll often say “guy or gal”).
On Twitter, you’ll recognize them from their “laser-eyes” avatars in which they’ve digitally replaced their eyes with glowing red ones to clearly and proudly mark themselves as part of the religion. Maxis are a disproportionately vocal minority on “Bitcoin Twitter” who seem to enjoy, above all else, trolling and mocking anyone they deem insufficiently sincere for their conspiratorial rhetoric on topics ranging from vaccinations and sunscreen to seed oils, anti-gun legislation and corporate ESG mandates. You see, in the upside-down world of laser eyes, being toxic is a virtue. For them, being toxic is a way to win hearts and minds.
To be fair, the maxis are not a homogenous group, but they tend to share a common view that Bitcoin is the answer to many of the world’s problems and they tend to subscribe to the political doctrines of Austrian libertarianism and economics, and they tend to hate what they see as hopelessly corrupt institutions like the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum. I kind of like this part. In terms of continuity of beliefs shared with bitcoins, I generally lean their way. I also subscribe to most Austrian economic principles, have many libertarian leanings, and are increasingly suspicious of the mainstream media. More importantly, I believe Bitcoin has the potential to be the best money ever created.
However, the part I hate is that maxis overwhelmingly engage in conspiratorial rhetoric about almost anything you can imagine, many of which are non-cash in nature and all of which are completely non-sequitur when it comes to bitcoin. I’m sure most maxis would argue that all of these things are somehow connected to the “monetary system” they wish to overturn in order to pave the way for a new world where Bitcoin will prevail (“Bitcoin standard,” as author and laser-eyed saint Seif El-Din Ammous describes him).
However, I would argue that these are issues that the average person doesn’t know much about or doesn’t care much about and focusing on them is insanely counterproductive in terms of spreading Bitcoin adoption. If the world is to convert to said bitcoin standard, widespread adoption is needed by orders of magnitude greater than it is today — and stupid litmus tests are a huge turn-off, at worst, and a colossal distraction, at best, for all but the most radical among us.
Fossilized base layer
The similarities between bitcoin and religion go beyond the dogmatic mentality within the group to the extreme. Bitcoin’s “base layer” code, for example, is similar to writing in many ways. while Many proposals They have been made over the years to change it, and only relatively few of them have ever 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 by which the core Bitcoin developers commit to changing the code is cumbersome by design, and requires anyone proposing a change to write a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) that aims to achieve some sort of community consensus to enact the changes. The fossilized nature of Bitcoin’s core layer is a testament to Bitcoin’s decentralization in the eyes of most Maxis — something that sets it apart from more centralized blockchains, such as Ethereum, which have a much lower threshold for implementing changes. Changes to bitcoin’s “layer 1” functionality will always be controversial; However, the Taproot and SegWit upgrades, designed to make the Bitcoin protocol more secure and efficient, were adopted by the Bitcoin community with relative ease and Taproot was activated in November 2021.
And herein lies the paradox. Had those who determined the governance of the Bitcoin network known at the time that these upgrades would enable Rodarmor to create Ordinals and Ordinals, it seems unlikely in retrospect that the changes would have been accepted with such relative ease. Church fundamentalists have been beaten at their own game, and many of them (Including Greg Fosspodcaster and contributor to Bitcoin Magazine with More than 130 thousand followers on Twitter) has been on the warpath ever since.
The majority of bitcoin miners love the Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens, as they have increased transaction fees, while many maxis are adamantly against them, seeing NFTs as a distraction from what they see as a core function of Bitcoin as a much improved way to send, receive, and store value. The network is designed as a platform for monetary settlement and transactions, not for tokenizing digital art or real-world assets (RWAs), such as a laser. Then JPEG Day might as well be called “Cheat Day” as far as they are concerned.
Battle for the soul of bitcoin
While the story of inscriptions and arrangements is still being written, the fact that JPEG “art sets” and other ordinal use cases may be here to stay has led to yet another internal culture war reminiscent of “Blocksize WarsFrom 2015 to 2017. Only, instead of “small blockers” versus “big blockers,” the Ordinals pitted extremists against NFT creators and enthusiasts.
The rising tension is finally coming to a head in Bitcoin 2023 During a perfectly timed on stage event that the conference organizers dubbed “Grand ranking debate. “dressed as witches (and”Cleaning teethWhen they got on stage), Wertheimer and Wall showed their mastery as risque entertainers during the debate Matt Corral (in particular, anti-venom) from Block and Spiral and a person who hid his face with sunglasses, a handkerchief over his nose and mouth and a disguise UASF Hat (referring to himself as a “little blocker”) who uses the name shinobi. It was like a twisted, zany version of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), as if Don King had somehow snuck in an episode of “The Big Bang Theory.” He convinced Sheldon Cooper and Howard Wolowitz to enter the ring.
I watched from the audience, amazed at the spectacle of laser-eyes-wielding heretical witches extolling the virtues of toxicity at the expense of something I loved when they discussed Ordinals and joyfully fought for the soul of Bitcoin.
This is a guest post by Nathan Crider. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.