Bitcoin is hard. Hard money, yes, but also hard to find consensus and the people in your corner.
I often hear people refer to Bitcoiners as being tribal. While I’m proud to count myself a member of that tribe, they don’t mean a fun club; they mean a difficult and provocative group of people who won’t bend on an argument that threatens their core beliefs. (Any altcoin shiller can attest!)
Store-of-value believers don’t care about other protocols because there is nothing to learn about not moving. While hodlers may not need other chains, Bitcoin itself is still competing for attention against the AI trade, debasement trade and paper bitcoin.
Newcomers are dismissing Bitcoin as being ‘expensive’ while filling their wallets with the tenth or one-hundredth coin on the crypto market cap table. Paper altcoins, ETFs/ETPs and perps continue to turn the prospective Bitcoiner into a casino junkie.
Medium-of-exchange rails are out in the wild competing for speed, cost and position. As I explored in recent articles, these are not global solutions, but driven by local use cases and subject to compromises.
Capital providers (to borrowers) and allocators (for investors) are emerging participants where products often become commoditized and product fit hangs on reputation, margins and UX.
‘What type of Bitcoiner are you?’ is a question I get a lot – directly and indirectly – and trying to please every faction of the tribe leads to paralysis and the risk of nothing being built.
To answer the question: I am store-of-value by conviction, medium-of-exchange by trade, and thinking hard about the capital layer.
The playing field today is different to the early days: the OGs still set the rules, but the newcomers – whether retail, family office or institutional buyers – bring the volume.
Bitcoiners are great and the most rigorous checkers I know. Consider BIP-110 and the divisions it created between many public OGs. A fight three years in the making yet miner support peaked at 2.53% against a 55% threshold, every signalling block came from a single pool and the enforcing chain managed two blocks before stopping.
Bitcoiners will scrutinize whatever is named and contested, which is why BIP-110 died while an unnamed flaw sat in Coinkite’s code for five years.
Don’t expect grace and do expect things to get tribal.
It may not be what you expected, or even wanted, but ignoring the results of builders going a different direction – inside Bitcoin and in other ecosystems – is a decision with a nonzero cost of ignorance.
Visa, Mastercard and BlackRock are inaugural validators on Circle’s Arc, and Nasdaq, Goldman and BNP Paribas are lining up behind Canton – permissioned chains with real money attached1.
Despite all these headwinds, I’m more optimistic than ever. The groundwork is being laid for the future financial system and I see my duty as ensuring that Bitcoin captures as much of that as possible.
Find the people whose redlines match yours and build with them, because the tribe will argue either way.
So, where are my builders?
