Humanity itself has greed imprinted on our lizard brains. It is the ultimate tactic of survival. No matter how much you have now, you could always have more just in case shit hits the fan later. More money equals more power and more power equals more latitude in all situations. The more people there are in this world the easier it is to not care about them. Tribalism is a powerful drug.
Greed is then compounded by tribalism, or perhaps mitigated by it (depending on context). It is much easier to be greedy when the entity being exploited is outside the tribe. It is much easier to not be greedy when the people one is inclined to help are part of their tribe: Be it friends, family, or community members.
The population of a city can easily be a million strong. Our culture itself seems to lean into an ideology where it is not only possible, but actually likely, that one could live in a place for years and never know or care about any of their next-door neighbors. Community has been lost throughout the expansion of the digital world; an ironic turn of events indeed.
Bitcoin maximalism is hands down the most egregious Greed Cult in the history of mankind. Not because Bitcoin Maximalists are inherently the most greedy people the world has ever seen; far from it. Surely central bankers and corporate CEOs are far greedier. In fact a few poor people are greedier as well just out of basic necessity. Rather, the reason why the Greed Cult of Bitcoin is so offensive is the sheer hypocrisy of it all.
You have heard this term before. It's one that maximalists love to use in their rhetoric. Buy Bitcoin today and one day you'll be able to build a tribalist dynasty that extends for generations! Sounds pretty good, yeah?
The problem with this mentality is that it intrinsically implies that wealth is going to be centralized. "Disruption" is going to decentralize the banker's wealth and then recentralize it back to Bitcoin. Anyone who doesn't buy specifically Bitcoin will be left out in the cold.
"You're still early" implies that late adopters will be used as exit liquidity. This is not a new system. It's just a refactorization of the old system. The most frustrating part about it all is that maximalists have no idea what they are even implying; completely oblivious to the reality of their statements.
Perhaps the most comical part of the Greed Cult is this idea that men seem to think that they can leverage their big bags into becoming an "alpha male". Spoiler alert: alpha males don't even exist and even the person that coined the term tried to roll it back and let everyone know he was wrong. That didn't work because men simply like the idea that they will be Alpha and dominate all the Betas around them.
This is the result of imperialism on society and has nothing to do with engrained social dynamics within humans on a fundamental level. Just ask the Native Americans! Oops we killed them all never mind. Bad example. Or perhaps the perfect example depending on the angle.
My favorite spin-off with the incel logic is that "unvaccinated sperm" is highly desirable and women will be clamoring over each other to sleep with you because you didn't take the vax and you have a huge... Bitcoin bag. This is highly akin to "magic pill" theory. No one wants to do actual work to improve themselves so instead they are convinced that they already know/did everything within their power. The magic pill, in this case colored orange, is going to solve all the world's problems and more. Every solution to every problem is rooted in HODL-theory; a classically reductive outlook on life indeed.
None of this logic makes any sense and the very foundation of it is paradoxical. The core idea of decentralization is that wealth is going to be distributed far and wide. Everyone is going to be better off. Why are women going to care about how much Bitcoin you have when they have plenty of money themselves to do whatever they please? What's the point of "generational wealth" if everyone is going to receive their fair share of resources within this newfound society? Make it make sense. It doesn't.
Similar to the maximalists I also used to believe that Bitcoin was going to upend the entire financial sector. Enough time has now passed and research completed to know for a fact that this is not the case. The financial & banking sector will be forced to use Bitcoin. They will be "disrupted", as cliché as that word has become. But they will not be annihilated as was previously assumed.
Bitcoin is for everyone. Crypto is for everyone. There is no discrimination here. Open sourced code is open source, and anyone can use it and build atop it. I've come to the conclusion that Bitcoin is never going to be money, but it is the best and most secure form of collateral in existence to date. All of the incentives point to the idea that Bitcoin will certainly be usurped by the banking sector eventually. A few people getting rich here or there from this outcome is not a "new paradigm". It is very much the old one.
Given real adoption, Bitcoin fees will be too high for anyone to afford except the ultra-wealthy. The Lightning Network is touted as the solution, but the Lightning Network is a centralized hunk of code that relies on altruism. It can only scale WEB2 style (free service in exchange for data capture) which means Big Tech will move in and capture that market eventually. Again this is a very old-paradigm outcome.
The recent decentralized social media push from the Bitcoin sphere is the ultimate telling of pure delusion. Ask any maximalist on Twitter and they blindly believe that NOSTR will scale to infinity even though the protocol is already unusable. It is not acceptable to wait 20 seconds for 10 word 'Tweets' to load. NOSTR moves at the speed similar to 56k modems in the 90's. Nobody is going to tolerate that nonsense, and the chance that these speeds get any better as NOSTR scales up is virtually impossible. Maximalists don't care: it's built on Bitcoin so it's going to work. Blind faith is blind.
Bitcoin maximalism is hypocritical to the core:
Cults inevitably lead to delusions of grandeur accompanied with the overarching blind faith to fuel such a ridiculous ideology. The Greed Cult is no different. Certainly the most frustrating thing about this entire situation is that everything Bitcoin/decentralization stands for is the exact opposite of what this cult espouses. No critical thinking is involved. The rhetoric is the rhetoric and it shall be spewn blindly across the far reaches in the Internet. No exceptions. Zealots only.
Of course don't get me wrong. Bitcoin is the best. Bitcoin is my number two right behind Hive, and I strive to stack as much as I can when possible. Properly stored Bitcoin is the perfect backstop; The ultimate "oh shit" button. Bitcoin is a boring and solid network compared to the other stuff being built in this arena. That is a feature and not a bug. Boring consistency is great in this Wild West of volatility & uncertainty.
That doesn't mean it's the end-all-be-all asset from now into infinity as the Cultists of Greed would have us believe. Is this result disappointing? Sure. But it was also easily predictable. Never underestimate our tendency to lean into a greedy tribalist mindset. Idealists can always count on disappointment. That's a fact.
