On Monday (August 8), Matt Corallo, an open source engineer at Spiral, which is “an independent, bitcoin-focused entity within the Block ecosystem of companies”, criticized those Bitcoin maximalists who are more focused on “attacking other projects” than with explaining why Bitcoin is “great and unique”.
Corallo joined the Spiral team at Block in October 2019. Prior to that, he was working as an engineer for nearly three years at Chaincode Labs, which is “a Bitcoin research and development center based in Midtown Manhattan, New York.” Corallo has been writing patches for the BitcoinJ Open Source Library since June 2012.
Corallo, who is the 10th known contributor to Bitcoin Core, took to Twitter to criticize the small segment of Bitcoin maximalists that is usually labeled “toxic” by the crypto community:
He went on to say:
“This is particularly damning to Bitcoin b/c, instead of its most vocal proponents explaining why Bitcoin is great and unique, its most vocal proponents spend all their time just attacking other projects. Sure, some of them are scams and may deserve it, but it doesn’t help BTC. The ‘narrative wars’ are coming, arguably are already here.
“With ETH (finally) moving to PoS, people who’ve only heard about how ‘PoS won’t work’ from Bitcoiners will have even less reason to care about what Bitcoiners have to say. And because of the ‘us-vs-them’ culture that has developed in cryptocurrency, many ETH folks (like Ripple before them) will move on to lobbying regulators to make it harder and harder to access Bitcoin ‘because PoW boils the ocean’.
“Focus on why Bitcoin is unique, talk about the difference of approach and conservatism and a focus on why Bitcoin is the only real candidate as a truly neutral currency for the internet. Point out how funding models change neutrality, but don’t call that a scam, cause its not.“
On August 6, ShapeShift Founder Erik Voorhees also made a similar criticism:
According to a report by CoinDesk, on July 27, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, who is a self-confessed Bitcoin maximalist, spoke at a two-day crypto conference in Turkey — “Blockchain Economy Istanbul” — where he shared his thoughts on Ethereum.
The CoinDesk report mentioned that Saylor had “noted that he was speaking as an institutional investor and in that regard, one would ‘have to wait until the protocol is complete.’” Apparently, “he pointed out that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said in a speech last week that Ethereum was 40% done and had laid out a roadmap of three to four years, which means the ‘protocol doesn’t look like it’s going to be completed or stable for another 36 months.’”
Regarding the soundness of Ethereum, Saylor said:
“‘Technically sound’ means I need to see the protocol function for that thing after about five to 10 years. So we don’t know that, either. Right? Because if you are hard forking and changing it, every time you do a big upgrade, you introduce new attack surfaces…
“‘Ethically sound’ means I need to know that nobody could change [the protocol], which includes Vitalik. I need to know that no one at the Ethereum foundation, no individual can change the protocol because if they could change the protocol, it makes it a security and if it makes it a security, then it’s not going to become global money.“
This led Buterin to wonder out loud on July 30 why Bitcoin maximalists like to choose as heroes “total clowns” like Michael Saylor:
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