BTC maximalists took to social media this past week to whine about the Trump Executive Order exploring the creation of a digital assets stockpile.
Leaving aside for a moment that there’s no good reason for a government to create a stockpile of essentially worthless digital assets, BTC maximalists bemoaned that the long-awaited reserve would seemingly include coins other than their beloved BTC.
While some, like MicroStrategy’s (NASDAQ: MSTR) Michael Saylor, seemed to embrace the idea, saying, “The Crypto Renaissance has officially begun,” on X.com, other hardliners like those at Bitcoin Magazine launched a social media campaign against the idea.
The contrast is easily explainable; Saylor is a businessman and understands what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, while many old-guard BTC maximalists have never produced real value or played politics at this level.
Of course, it wasn’t just BTC maximalists who opposed the proposed digital asset reserve. Many of President Trump’s political opponents tried to link it to attempts to enrich himself and his family. In fairness, this isn’t a stretch after the launch of Trump memecoins on Solana, both of which have completely collapsed in short order.
Jack Mallers accuses Ripple of undermining BTC
While most BTC die-hards are upset by the inclusion of other digital currencies period, they are particularly irked by the fact Ripple’s XRP is in the lineup. Trump made it clear that American-made digital assets will receive preferential treatment, and Ripple’s CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, wasted no time highlighting how Ripple is an American company and supporting a diversified approach.
Jack Mallers, who contributed significantly to the Lightning Network, released a video on X accusing Ripple of undermining American prosperity, freedom, and BTC. Claiming a BTC reserve would be “one of the most important economic announcements in American history,” Mallers accused Ripple of spending millions of dollars to undermine the idea and promote XRP instead.
Apparently, it’s fine to lobby the government as long as it’s for your preferred digital currency, but if anybody else does it, it’s a scam.
Showing how divorced from reality many BTC maximalists are, Mallers claimed that BTC is “owned, operated, and governed by the people.” The truth is the top 100 BTC wallets control over 14% of the supply, and the top five mining operations control 85% of the hash power. This is the furthest thing from money for and by the people that has ever existed.
This is all the fault of the small blockers
Before the BTC/BCH split, Bitcoin had 90% of the value in the digital currency industry, with only a handful of competitors. Since the split, no Bitcoin fork has ever achieved 90% dominance again, and tens of thousands of blockchains have sprung up, offering tens of millions of tokens.
This sad state of affairs could have been avoided had small blockers agreed to raise the block size and leave Satoshi’s original design alone. As demonstrated on BSV today, the original Bitcoin implementation could always scale on-chain, Satoshi’s opcodes allowed for a plethora of transaction types, and it was always possible to build apps that use the coin natively on the blockchain, generating fee revenue for miners for years and decades to come.
Rather than acknowledge this, small blockers were and still are fixated on so-called decentralization. Blocks had to stay small enough so that anyone could run a node, they claimed, even though Satoshi Nakamoto had dismissed that idea.
With the subsequent SegWit and Taproot updates and their insistence on scaling via convoluted, flawed solutions like the Lightning Network, BTC maximalists opened the door for others to step in with blockchain solutions to the problems they created.
Now, they have no other option than to cry about it as their dream of seizing American taxpayer money to pump their bags dissipates, and their bags only slip away. It seems the Number Go Up crew will have to make do with a percentage of the loot, and they’ll have to share the gains with the XRP Army and others.
The irony is that they cannot see how, to most rational people, their favorite coin is of no more inherent value than any of the others. BTC is no better than XRP, but to them, saying so is heresy.
Saifedean Ammous can write endless books, Michael Saylor can talk gibberish on CNBC until the cows come home, and Max Keiser can grow old yelling and pontificating on RT, but nothing will change the fact that these very same people broke Bitcoin, and in doing so, they created the ‘crypto’ they are being forced to share the ultimate victory with. Talk about poetic justice!
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