In 1816, a Baptist preacher named William Miller was reading the Bible in his farmhouse in upstate New York and had a tremendous realization. If you interpreted Daniel 8:14 literally (“Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed”), substituted years for days, and started the clock in 457 BC when Artaxerxes made his decree,1 you end up with a “cleansing of the sanctuary” in 1844 AD. Miller eventually determined that the sanctuary stood for the world and the cleansing meant its righteous destruction. Christ would return, the wicked would be destroyed, the faithful would be resurrected. Miller attracted large numbers of followers and the Second Coming was narrowed down through careful analysis to October 22, 1844.
As the fateful day approached, Miller’s supporters, now numbering in their tens of thousands, looked eagerly forward to the end of the world, Christ’s return, and their ascendance into Heaven. This was a considerable revival movement in the North East.
When midnight struck on October 22nd, nothing happened. The Millerites who had wagered everything on the second coming were devastated and subject to ridicule. The day became known as the Great Disappointment.
You might think to yourself that the Millerite movement petered out afterwards, facing clear and unambiguous invalidation. And that’s where you’d be wrong.
Some Millerites, disappointed, meekly returned to their mainline, non-apocalyptic churches. But many persisted, and determined that despite all evidence to the contrary, the prophecy was true and the date had been correct. It’s just that the Sanctuary wasn’t Earth, but in Heaven. Nowhere had Daniel specified that the Sanctuary was on Earth, after all.
According to these Millerites, Christ in 1844 entered a new phase of his ministry (in Heaven) undertaking a final period of investigative judgment, before the eventual Second Coming. So they weren’t wrong after all. They just misread the prophecy.
Would you believe that a church that considers all of this to be official doctrine has 24 million baptized members today? You might have heard of it – they’re called the Seventh-Day Adventists. Despite canonically incorporating the 1844 prediction into their belief set, this movement has not failed; far from it, the non-rapture, disappointment, and subsequent theological revision are foundational aspects of Adventist theology. Several other major sects also trace their origin to Miller’s prediction, such as Jehova’s Witnesses.
I say this not to criticize anyone’s faith, but to illustrate that invalidation of a testable belief does not necessarily doom a movement. People who have huge amounts of social capital tied up in popular movements will not necessarily abandon it when its key tenets are apparently invalidated; they will find a way to adapt their prediction and belief to the new state of the world. Failed prophecy, as it turns out, is entirely survivable.
Consider Bitcoin maximalism.
Bitcoin maximalists – or purists, or hardcore bitcoiners, or puritans, whatever you want to call them – people who believe in Bitcoin and only Bitcoin, think fiat is doomed, believe they will inherit the Earth when fiat finally collapses, revile intermediaries and custodians, and believe Bitcoin’s success as a payment system is preordained – the people who took a financial asset and constructed an elaborate ideology around it, incorporating social and political critiques alongside monetary theories.
Like the Millerites, the maximalists have devised an elaborate set of gloriously apocalyptic predictions, waiting patiently for the day that the dollar will collapse, fractional reserve banking will destroy itself, the post-1971 era of pure fiat central banking will be discredited, and the Bitcoiners as the chosen few will inherit the smoking ruins of a shattered world. Like the Millerites, they have been fairly concrete in their predictions (albeit with fewer specific dates); so much so that the quality of the ideology can be assessed on the strength of its prediction-making quality and epistemic framework. And like the Millerites, even as their predictions have failed to materialize, the acolytes have adapted, regrouped, moved the goalposts, and determined that the reckoning has only been deferred.
As Bitcoin exits its adolescence – it turns 18 this October – an accounting of the maximalist doctrine surrounding Bitcoin is finally due.
I want to be clear: I am not analyzing or attacking Bitcoin’s merit as I understand it. I remain an enthusiastic Bitcoiner.
My contention is simply that the maximalists were right about Bitcoin, but wrong about almost everything they inferred from Bitcoin. Bitcoin undoubtedly succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of its early enthusiasts; yet the ideological superstructure that sprang up around Bitcoin has proven to be a remarkably poor guide to the world.
What is Bitcoin maximalism, again?
The subjects of this essay will immediately protest that I am wide of the mark because I am criticizing a fictional ideology. So I’ll be extremely precise.
What I mean by Bitcoin maximalism or purist ideology is the prescriptive theory that preaches some combination of the below tenets:
- Bitcoin will eventually replace all fiat currencies, and is well on its way to doing so
- Fiat currency is sinful and causes a great variety of social ills
- All other altcoins or cryptoassets are scams, wasteful, or sinful; all other usage of blockchains other than Bitcoin is irrelevant or wasteful
- Blockchain use cases like stablecoins, DeFi, RWAs, DEXes are generally a waste of time and only exist because of VC “malinvestment”
- Bitcoin is categorically different from all other “crypto;” owning anything other than Bitcoin is unwise and probably sinful
- Bitcoin will go up, effectively forever. It’s morally praiseworthy to evangelize this to friends and family; if they lose money it’s only because they lost their nerve and sold during a temporary downturn
- Bitcoin’s price is strongly influenced if not entirely determined by its scarcity; four year halving cycles mechanically drive price
- Self-custody is sacrosanct; it’s wrong to custody with a centralized exchange or custodian; and it’s also wrong to use hardware wallets that pollute themselves by supporting altcoins
Not every Bitcoin maximalist believes every single one of these; but most maximalists believe substantially all of it.
The point is: they earnestly believe in Bitcoin. They are combative. They don’t just, in a benign way, exclusively focus on Bitcoin. They ardently preach that all altcoins are distractions at best and scams at worst. They are Bitcoin’s fighting priesthood – its Templars. Many of them wear the “toxic maximalist” label as a badge of honor.
Some of these “toxic maxis” are nice enough. I have in the past been friends with a few of them. Some of them have made meaningful contributions to Bitcoin. I am not saying they are bad people. I am saying their ideology has failed. It has ceased to be a useful description of reality.
Some hardcore bitcoiners reject the label “maximalist”; they might call themselves “plebs” or purists or “puritans” or hardliners or one of many other variations; the important thing is we all know who I’m talking about: people who endlessly moralize about how Bitcoin is superior to gold or altcoins; how fiat is responsible for most of society’s ills; how Bitcoin is the only financial asset worth owning; and how it’s guaranteed to replace fiat currency, any day now. I grant that it’s fair to object to the “maximalist” epithet since Vitalik popularized it as a kind of a slur for Bitcoiners; but there doesn’t exist a better term as of right now.
Like the Millerite sect, Bitcoin maximalist ideology is effectively an eschatological secular religion whose adherents believe they are chosen because they possess secret information about the impending doom (of fiat) and the preordained inheritance of a hidden kingdom. The religion preaches privation in the short term in exchange for abundance in the long term – when fiat collapses and Bitcoiners inherit the earth.
The proximate inspiration for this article is the failure of a breakaway purist faction (filters) and the Coldcard hack (in which users have lost over $100m and climbing) which is another dagger in the heart of Bitcoin maxi ideology: the idea that self-custody is inherently superior to centralized custody. Moreover, it again exposed the subculture of “bitcoin-only” startups, which were assumed to be inherently better because they only served Bitcoin. The users who tragically lost money in this hack were misled on both counts by purist influencers.
But really I could have written this essay at any point in the last few years, and indeed this is the second time I am writing it (see my first eulogy for maximalism back in 2022). It has been clear for a long time that the more hardcore strains of Bitcoin ideology are rotten and often, costly for their adherents – like an inverse prosperity gospel.
So it’s time to evaluate maximalism. How do you evaluate an ideology? Well unlike many others, this one actually blends the normative and the predictive. This makes it somewhat brittle. Maximalists are a bit more wishy washy on when the world will adopt a bitcoin standard, but it has been long enough. It has been well over a decade since Bitcoin maximalism was coined (in around 2014 by my reckoning). So let’s test the theory: has it led to correct predictions about the world and profited those who believe in it?
Virtually every testable prediction made by maximalists has failed
Unfortunately for them, the predictive body of work issued by self-described maximalists has largely failed. As a guide to the future, the ideology has shown itself effectively worthless. Let’s take stock, shall we?
Letter grades are my own subjective assessment
Falsified predictions:
- Price models like “stock to flow:” categorically and empirically total failures. Almost every hardcore bitcoiner I know was an enthusiast and promoter of the “stock to flow” model which premised Bitcoin’s appreciation on its “increasing scarcity” (or periodic decreases in new issuance). Who wouldn’t like something like that? It guarantees that Bitcoin goes up forever! These models, promoted by “PlanB” attached specific price predictions to Bitcoin on specific dates, positing that Bitcoin’s price was mainly driven by its issuance rate. Needless to say, these models have completely failed. Somehow, most hardcore Bitcoiners who endorsed the models have escaped any recriminations for issuing such atrocious investment advice.
- Total altcoin collapse: One essential tenet of maximalism was that all altcoins are scams and would eventually collapse. They have been very clear on this. Yet alts are very much still in existence. The vast majority of blockchain activity takes place on Ethereum, Tron, Hyperliquid, BNB, and Solana – not Bitcoin. They have not gone to zero; while alts have sold off (alongside Bitcoin), they are worth $600b at the time of writing (excluding stables). Ethereum alone is worth $220b. All of those named chains also earn more in fees than Bitcoin, which is arguably the best judge of a chain’s enduring value – is someone willing to pay to use it? Maximalists have been predicting the doom of alts since 2012 when they first emerged, and they have been wide of the mark the entire time.
- Nation state adoption: had some surges of excitement in 2021 and 2025 but has retreated. As of today, no country considers Bitcoin legal tender. The “Strategic Reserve” in the US was stillborn, the maxi enthusiasm for taxpayer purchases of BTC was embarrassing and ironic given their prior anti-government posture and purported fear of centralization. El Salvador stripped Bitcoin of virtually all the attributes of legal tender at the IMF’s request. No central bank has added Bitcoin to its official reserves. Bitcoin is showing no signs of displacing gold as a sovereign asset.
- No alternate use cases for blockchains: though some touted subsectors like gaming, metaverse, or NFTs did not pan out, blockchains have proven commercially useful for a variety of non-Bitcoin use cases, contrary to the predictions of the maximalists. Stablecoins are the killer app of blockchains by any metric; DeFi is well established; DEXes are flourishing and taking market share from centralized exchanges; prediction markets are a massive breakout winner.
- Regulation would favor Bitcoin versus alts. Not every maximalist believed this – some were completely indifferent to regulation – but those that cared about the US government would often insist that it was only a matter of time until the SEC banned Ethereum and all other altcoins, crowning Bitcoin as the sole legitimate cryptocurrency. This didn’t happen, and regulators adopted a more neutral and pluralistic approach, explicitly exempting many alts from the “security” designation. The landmark GENIUS bill was designed to entrench stablecoins, not Bitcoin.
Trending badly for the purists:
- Price predictions: Bitcoin has done exceptionally well as a financial asset over the last 15 years, but it has not lived up to the lofty expectations of its most hardcore fans. Bitcoin at the time of writing is trading at $63k,6 a price identical to its value in November 2021, five years ago. Bitcoin’s price action is better described as “going nowhere in an interesting way” as opposed to what maximalists loudly predicted, which is an indefinite (if volatile) appreciation. Compared with gold or equities, Bitcoin has fared much worse in recent years. It has served neither as an inflation hedge nor a truly uncorrelated risk asset. Those who heeded the purists’ exhortations to hold Bitcoin and Bitcoin alone incurred enormous opportunity costs, given the abundant investment opportunities that emerged elsewhere. Bitcoin was the trade of the 2010s; AI, not Bitcoin, has been the trade of the 2020s so far.
- The SoV -> MoE -> UoA progression. Bitcoin ideology as it developed over time came to stipulate that Bitcoin’s lack of progress on payments was ok, because new monies would emerge first as stores of value (SoV) and then later as media of exchange (MoE) and only later once ubiquitous as a unit of account (UoA). This is reasonable enough if something of a cartoonish interpretation of monetary history, but this progression has completely stalled. Bitcoin achieved a major feat in growing from zero to meaningful SoV status in a decade, but its success as a Medium of Exchange (as envisioned by Satoshi) has not materialized. Very few commercial transactions are denominated or settled in Bitcoin; stablecoins have completely eaten Bitcoin’s lunch in that respect. Of course, this does not mean Bitcoin is a failure, just that the maximalist inference of SoV to MoE and UoA was wrongheaded.
- The primacy of Proof of Work. For years many Bitcoiners maintained that Proof of Stake couldn’t or wouldn’t work. PoS of course works just fine, and predictions of centralization have not come to pass on successful PoS blockchains like Ethereum. While I am sympathetic to Bitcoiners’ rejections of the “energy waste” attacks on Bitcoin, from a mechanical perspective, PoS is perfectly functional and validated at scale.
- Stablecoins as a transient phenomenon. Most purist Bitcoiners ignored or underestimated the impact of stablecoins. “Why bother with dollars, if Bitcoin will shortly obsolete it,” has been the common refrain. Even though they began on Bitcoin, the purists had no time for dollar tokens, so the benefit of stablecoins went entirely to other blockchains. Some Bitcoiners felt that stablecoins might serve as a temporary bridge to Bitcoin, but rather the opposite has happened: infrastructure which was originally built for Bitcoin is now being deployed at scale for stablecoins, which have achieved a market penetration and real-world traction that Bitcoin never did.
- The merit of Digital Asset Treasury companies. While some purist Bitcoiners have rejected the DATs like Strategy and its ilk, many climbed on board and became ardent supporters and even promoters of these structures. Many prominent maximalists like Adam Back, Jack Mallers (and obviously Michael Saylor) became DAT entrepreneurs themselves. This was ironic considering that many longtime bitcoiners were deeply suspicious of Bitcoin derivatives or adjacent equities, preferring the real thing. Though this doesn’t indict all Bitcoin purists, it’s undeniable that some of their most treasured maximalist heroes issued or endorsed DATs, most of which have completely failed. Strategy still exists, but the possibility that it would trade at a premium forever and be a long-lived Bitcoin acquisition vehicle seems more tenuous than ever.
- The fee market would replace the block subsidy. This is a necessary component of Bitcoin’s vaunted scarcity. If Bitcoin fees don’t rise to a sustainable plateau, Bitcoin will not be able to fund the block reward and hence security in the long term, as issuance declines to zero. If fees don’t materialize, Bitcoin will have to consider changing its treasured monetary policy, undermining its main value proposition. Fees have collapsed since 2024 to almost nothing; today they account for around 1% of the entire security budget – a number that was meant to be high and climbing. In other terms, annualized fees equal about 1 basis point of Bitcoin’s market cap – likely insufficient security spend as the subsidy goes away. The purists barely acknowledge this looming problem – to talk about it is to “FUD” Bitcoin. Bitcoin culture is so parochial that uncomfortable long-term issues cannot even be openly discussed.
Unfalsifiable by construction but not trending well:
- Fiat currencies: they are still very much with us. Have not collapsed. When and if blockchain infrastructure causes fiat currency collapse, it’s more likely that US dollar stablecoins will be the culprit (“crypto-dollarization”).
- Hyperbitcoinization: Was it a rhetorical flourish or a real prediction? Who knows. What does it mean? Anyone’s guess. Either way, it’s not happening, nor does it appear to be on the horizon.
- Bitcoin as a salutary cultural and political asset, lengthening society’s time preference, improving art, ending ruinous credit cycles, fractional reserve banking and central banking altogether, constraining the fiscal state, and ending war (yes, bitcoiners have claimed that all these things would happen if it was successful enough): none of this has occurred. Bitcoin is nowhere near popular enough to leave a meaningful political or cultural imprint on the world, even if these sound money theories might have a kernel of truth to them.
Some of you might object that I am being unfair to the hardcore Bitcoiners because some of these predictions might well come true one day. Bitcoin might end up displacing gold and eventually the dollar. Maybe Bitcoin will reclaim the MoE throne from stablecoins and become a dominant transactional network. Perhaps Ethereum and all the other blockchains will finally go to zero. Maybe Bitcoin will put an end to bad art and war. Maybe hyperbitcoinization will even happen one day!
Perhaps. But a prediction that relies on an indefinite time horizon is a worthless one. I am interested in assessing the credibility of the most hardcore Bitcoiners and so far, their ideas have largely not played out as expected. Indeed, Bitcoin looks to be in retreat relative to most of their expectations. It has been nearly 18 years since Bitcoin was released, and it’s only fair that at some point, we take stock in its present reality versus the dreams of its most ardent promoters.
So what were they right about?
A handful of things. Bitcoin has survived and even thrived for 17 years. It has suffered very few major incidents at the protocol layer, the last critical bug taking place over a decade ago. It has continued to appreciate in a roundabout, cyclical way, peaking at $2.5 trillion in 2025. Bitcoin is an emerging digital-native commodity of real consequence, and it has not been supplanted by any competitor (as a digital SoV). Maximalists correctly identified Bitcoin as a historically important monetary asset, some of them very early on. They correctly predicted that the vast majority of all altcoins, tokens ICOs, yield schemes, NFT projects would prove to be meritless garbage. Bitcoin’s conservatism most likely contributed to its monetary credibility and success.
But their predictions regarding Bitcoin’s interactions with finance, fiat money, technology, other blockchains, politics, and society have almost universally been wide of the mark.
By any reasonable measure, Bitcoin has done extraordinarily well. But has it measured up to the stated expectations of the hardcore Bitcoiners? No, and things aren’t trending in their direction, either.
The maximalist-approved applications of Bitcoin have not succeeded
One of the most curious things about Bitcoin maximalism is how technologically regressive it is. In the early 2010s, Bitcoin was exciting, bleeding edge technology, blending innovations in cryptography, networking, hash functions, Proof of Work, distributed systems, and the academically exciting field of digital cash. It was truly bracing stuff and created a vast opportunity space that entrepreneurs began to explore. Early Bitcoiners used to say things like “Bitcoin will embrace all of the best ideas from altcoins after these ideas are proven”. And indeed, altcoins have created tremendous innovation.
- Ethereum gave us smart contracts, tokens, AMMs, DEXes, stablecoins at scale, RWAs, ENS, rollups, prediction markets, EVM, DAOs, account abstraction, and much more
- Monero gave us RingCT and Zcash gave us the first operational zk-SNARKS
- Solana gave us high throughput at the base layer and parallel execution
- Polymarket gave us scaled on-chain prediction markets, realizing a dream economists had harbored for decades
- Hyperliquid gave us a global and scalable decentralized perpetuals exchange on chain
Despite the hopes of early Bitcoiners, none of these ideas were ultimately absorbed into Bitcoin – or even meaningfully considered. Bitcoin retreated into its shell and focused on socially permitted innovation like Lightning, and very little else. A conservatism crept over Bitcoin and progress at the protocol layer slowed to a crawl; in the last decade only two major upgrades have been added in Segwit and Taproot. Dozens of good ideas have been met only with apathy and torpor.
Of course, you could say that blockchains were always going to specialize, and Bitcoin focusing more on the monetary use case and being hyper conservative made sense; Ethereum could have smart contracts and DeFi and Solana could have fast transactions. But the Bitcoin purists go further, and maintain that nothing happening on any other blockchain is interesting; none of it is durably commercially meaningful; and that Bitcoin has nothing to learn from any other blockchain. They move from focus to deliberate ignorance, and that has cost them dearly. Does Bitcoin really have nothing to learn from any other blockchain? Stablecoins began on Bitcoin via Omni, but migrated to Ethereum, Tron and Solana, where today they are a massive consumer of blockspace. Purists barely even acknowledge them or regret the missed opportunity. DeFi is virtually nonexistent on Bitcoin and largely exists on Ethereum and Solana. Bitcoin’s blockchain is a transactional ghost town; blockspace clears at the minimum market price of 1 sat/byte, since there are no applications that consume it at scale. (Bitcoiners would do well to recall that Bitcoin’s entire long-term security depends on there being meaningful enduring demand for blockspace in the years to come.)
The only somewhat ambitious applications of Bitcoin besides the socially approved “buy Bitcoin and hold it in self-custody for long periods of time” have been failures.
Liquid
Sidechains as a scaling model for Bitcoin dominated developer attention from 2014 to 2017, yet ultimately yielded nothing (on Bitcoin). Blockstream’s Liquid was the most prominent of these, as they had the most leverage due to most of the important developers working there. Bitcoiners at the time were fond of saying that Ethereum was unnecessary as all of these use cases could just be done in a Bitcoin sidechain. This didn’t come to pass, because Bitcoin was too limited in its programming language to introduce trustless pegs. Years later, Ethereum would perfect this vision with ZK Rollups, which are effectively trustless, but are only possible on a richer virtual machine. I mention Liquid and sidechains because these were frequently employed as a rhetorical technique by hardcore Bitcoiners: “no need for altcoins,” they would say. “We will fold everything into Bitcoin with sidechains.” In the end, Bitcoin was too limited a programming environment for this vision to play out, and Bitcoiners were unwilling to gut the protocol and make the necessary changes. So this early maximalist prediction failed, and these compelling use cases were realized on Ethereum.
Lightning
from 2016 to just recently, Lightning has been the almost exclusive “application-side” focus of the Bitcoin development community. Lightning was partly a reaction to the large blocker faction of Bitcoin that defected alongside Bitcoin Cash; they argued that Bitcoin needed more block space so that it could be more suitable for everyday payments. In effect, these people believed that Bitcoin needed to focus on the MoE aspect rather than just treating Bitcoin as a SoV. The response by the Bitcoiners to this critique was to develop Lightning – an overlay network on top of Bitcoin where individual payments could be aggregated and periodically settled. This was an immensely delicate and complex protocol and required a substantial update to the protocol in Segwit in 2017. Ultimately, while Lightning has been significantly refined since 2018 and become much more user friendly, it hasn’t achieved what its early advocates hoped for:
- Lightning has not established Bitcoin as a widely-used day-to-day payments protocol
- Lightning has not re-centered Bitcoin as the dominant blockchain or asset for on-chain payments (these mostly happen with stablecoins on high-throughput blockchains)
- Lightning has not led to an explosion of rich applications
- Lightning has not meaningfully created reservation demand for Bitcoin
Lightning processes, generously, perhaps $10b per year.7 This may seem like a lot, but it’s vanishingly small when you compare it to stablecoins, which settle around $15T a year and growing (all on non-Bitcoin blockchains). Lightning certainly exists. It’s a thing some Bitcoin enthusiasts use sometimes. But if dollar tokens on other blockchains are doing 1500x more volume (real number!), is it even reasonable to call Lightning a success? I don’t think so. Go back in time and tell Satoshi it was going to end this way – would he have said “Great! Looks like Bitcoin won!”?
In context, Lightning is not a relevant blockchain-based payments medium. Partly, this is because no one wants to transact IN Bitcoin, for obvious reasons of tax inefficiency and the issues inherent in transacting in a volatile currency. Because Bitcoiners resisted and ignored stablecoins (fiat is going to 0, remember), Bitcoin never realized the benefit of the trillions in stablecoin transactions. Other chains reaped those rewards.
Nostr
Nostr is the main “purist approved” non-monetary application of Bitcoin. Most hardcore Bitcoiners shrugged at or ignored the waves of NFTs on Bitcoin, chiefly Ordinals, but Nostr was billed as the application layer for Bitcoin. At its core Nostr is a messageboard, though it also supports other applications like DMs, longform, video, marketplaces, and identity. It’s very much a Bitcoin-flavored version of Web3. Core to Bitcoin ideology is “anything they can do; we can do better”. Ethereum was the early leader in decentralized internet Web3 use cases, and Nostr was Bitcoin’s answer.
Though it was much hyped, Web3 never did very well on Ethereum; decentralized social like Farcaster or DeSo faded away. A handful of things like decentralized storage (IPFS), identity (ENS), wallets (metmask, walletconnect), authentication (sign in with Ethereum) were indeed qualified successes. But regardless of substrate, blockchain-based decentralized internet was awkward and user-unfriendly. The billions poured into Ethereum’s Web3 sector never really made it mainstream. As investor interest in the category waned, and lacking a meaningful concentration of builders, Bitcoin’s version of Web3 never had a chance. Nostr has stagnated, plateauing at around (generously) 10k WAUs and 40k MAUs, assuming those aren’t bots. Bitcoin culture is not oriented around experimentation, tinkering, or building; the monetary faction very much won and today it’s more about holding your coins in cold storage and writing blog posts about the Fed and how Bitcoin Fixes Culture.
Aside from sidechains, Lightning, and Nostr, there have been virtually no purist-approved applications of Bitcoin that have reached scale. Concepts like e-cash, DLCs, RGB, Fedimint, and Taproot assets have little traction. The most popular application on Bitcoin in recent years was Ordinals, which was derided by the purist faction, and even that has faded from view.
Faced with the failure of most Bitcoin native applications, the purists are forced to retreat into ever-shrinking terrain, arguing that Bitcoin is fit only for monetary uses (buying and holding). If Ethereum or Solana has success with payments, or DeFi, or Web3, Bitcoiners must move the goalposts. If the bailey in 2016 was “Bitcoin can do everything any altcoin can do – and better,” the motte in 2026 is “Bitcoin is just money. It doesn’t need to do anything else. Those other use cases are irrelevant anyway.”
Now personally I have mixed feelings on non-financial uses of blockchains, or payment systems that rely on a volatile native token, but it’s worth pointing out that purist Bitcoiners did attempt to compete here. As these attempts have stalled, they are retreating into techno-ludditism, denying the utility or worthwhileness of any blockchain application other than the anointed behavior (buying and holding BTC).
Filters and Coldcard further undermined Bitcoin orthodoxy
One phenomenon which characterizes Bitcoin alongside many other militant or radical groups is purity spirals: true believers trying to outdo each other by showing just how committed they are to the cause, accusing each other of being insufficiently zealous. Think of the Bolsheviks purging the more moderate Mensheviks.
I think the history of Bitcoin culture is best understood if you view Bitcoiners writ large as a loose confederation of affinity groups held together by shared grievances and the continual reinforcement of these beliefs through price appreciation. Early on you had the cypherpunks; paranoid privacy and cryptography advocates focused on anonymous cash and communication. Early too you had the libertarians: the Austrians, the Fed critics, the goldbugs. Within them you had the “fractional reserve is fraud” types, the Rothbardians, the anti-credit hard money types. Also within the libertarians: the Agorists, the anti-state grey and black market people who built and popularized the early darknet marketplaces.
Later the Silicon Valley types got involved; the digital cash entrepreneurs trying to create faster, global payments systems. They ran headfirst into the goldbugs and libertarians who were more focused on Bitcoin as a monetary, not a payments system, and were violently ejected into the Bitcoin Cash fork and other payments-focused cryptocurrencies. As Bitcoin went mainstream it attracted more populist, anti-establishment people. The Joe Rogan conspiracy types. The “it’s all rigged, man” guys. “Have you heard of the Cantillon effect?”
And of course, you have the subject of this essay, the maximalists. These are the Bitcoin IRGC, the true believer’s true believer. They determine what is true and good and permissible, and hound and shut down any aspect of Bitcoinism that isn’t orthodox and proper. What is actually entailed by proper Bitcoinism is curiously obscure and seems to tautologically rely on what the maximalists think ought to be the case at a given point in time.
From obscure origins in 2009 to semi-mainstream status in 2017 during the first major bull run, Bitcoin grew the tent outward until it contained many different groups with mutually incompatible views of what it is and should be. Hence the ejection of the payments people like Roger Ver and the smart contract people like Vitalik.
You could argue that these periodic purges were actually good for Bitcoin in that they eliminated a kind of subversive sect and allowed Bitcoin to refocus on its core task with new efficiency and clarity of purpose. But surely, at a certain point, eliminating advocates, capital, and talent is negative for the protocol. Since about 2021 in my subjective estimate, the talent environment in Bitcoin has actually been shrinking – even as it has enjoyed price appreciation due to financialization and a White House embrace.
Partly this is due to Bitcoin’s terrific rigidity; Bitcoinism discourages actually doing anything with your coins aside from storing them. The lack of updates to Bitcoin’s protocol (two in ten years) stifled its ability to host experimentation and creativity. The remaining Bitcoiners gradually focused on the monetary use case: that is, buying and holding Bitcoin or adjacent financial assets like ETFs or DATs like Strategy. Most of their energy went into debating the merits of financial instruments like Strategy or expounding on how Bitcoin adoption might change society for the better. The maximalists seemed to have effectively consolidated power.
Yet this summer, two events that took place within two weeks of each other undermined the core of the maximalist doctrine.
1. The Coldcard hack
On July 30th, a relatively obscure but surprisingly popular Bitcoin hardware wallet, Coinkite’s Coldcard was exposed as having insufficient entropy. In other words, the wallet was using poor randomness when generating Bitcoin private keys and exposing users to attacks where malicious parties could simply guess at those keys. Once this became public, additional hackers joined the fray and began cracking even more Coldcard wallets. Over 1,816 BTC, worth $116m have been stolen (and counting). It was undoubtedly the worst consumer hardware wallet failure in cryptocurrency history. (Neither Ledger nor Trezor, more established hardware wallet brands, have ever been exploited in such a manner.)
The Coldcard exploit was particularly bad because the wallet was highly touted by prominent Bitcoin maximalists and podcasters as a more pure and aligned option for Bitcoiners, as it supported only Bitcoin and not altcoins. This posture of being “Bitcoin-only” was meant to minimize the attack surface. In practice, it minimized the revenue potential of the company, and Coinkite never scaled and audited the code sufficiently. Coinkite’s prominence was the result of a kind of Bitcoin maximalist DEI; a tiny Canadian company ended up having an outsized market share, simply because it was endorsed as the de facto wallet for “true believer” Bitcoiners who didn’t want to patronize services that supported altcoins. “Bitcoin-only” became an affinity signal that people mistook for a quality signal.
The hack itself was catastrophic because Coldcard users were the truest of the true believers; they had “done everything right” – refusing to store their funds on exchanges, using deep cold storage airgapped custody, using a “bitcoin-only” solution, following the instructions issued by the most hardcore Bitcoiners. A good number of Bitcoiners had their entire life savings in Coldcards and lost everything. In terms of harm done, this was arguably worse than many larger DeFi or exchange exploits because this represented the accumulated savings of many individuals; compare it with other crypto hacks often mainly affecting wealthy traders losing out on paper gains. The Coldcard hack affected ordinary people who had diligently followed the instructions of the Bitcoin high priesthood.
So what does the hack say about Bitcoin maximalism?
- Bitcoin-only is not a foolproof doctrine. There do exist truly exceptional “bitcoin-only” companies, and my firm is an investor in a few. River is a great example. They are focused on Bitcoin, but have a variety of product lines and have invested appropriately in security. There are however several cases, and Coldcard is the latest, of companies using “bitcoin only” as a kind of affinity marketing to Bitcoiners, creating a goodwill dividend which has been used to paper over cracks in otherwise unviable or insecure businesses.
- Maximalist advice is not universally good. For years the refrain from maximalists was: Bitcoin always goes up (in the long term), use self-custody, use Bitcoin-only hardware (in particular Coldcard), avoid exchanges, put your entire savings in Bitcoin, keep the faith. Virtually every tenet of this doctrine has been challenged by recent events. Most ordinary Bitcoiners would have been better off buying a Bitcoin ETF, holding Bitcoin on a reputable exchange or brokerage, or if they had to self-custody, using a more mainstream product like Ledger or Trezor. Self-custody is simply too difficult and risky for most ordinary people. I’m glad it exists as an option, but it’s not something that should be recommended for the average user.
- Self-custody is in decline. Today, there’s limited reason outside of extraordinary or unusual circumstances (say, you’re a refugee fleeing across borders with no digital accounts of any sort; you’re withdrawing funds from a custodian; you’re a HNW individual holding funds on a multisig with Casa) to favor self-custody over intermediated custody. There’s just too many ways it can go wrong; from footguns to exploits to phishing to scams and hacks. In a world of Bitcoin ETFs, the overwhelming majority of users can happily and safely use paper Bitcoin. Self-custody remains an extraordinarily powerful tool, but it is not universally safer, and the maximalist’s insistence that it is the morally and practically superior default ignored substantial tail risk. When the history of Bitcoin is written, the Coldcard hack will be looked back on as a key moment bookending the era of self-custody.
American Hodl summarized the psychological impact of the hack well:
Psychologists call what just happened “shattered assumptions” the world is basically predictable, effort gets rewarded and if i do the right things i’ll be ok.
Our version was something like self custody done while following guides from educators in the space is safe. Cold storage. Air-gapped bitcoin is safe and if that’s my setup then i can rest easily at night even as the fiat world burns around me.
This entropy bug completely inverted that assumption and turned a lot of our world’s upside down over night. The people hit the hardest weren’t degen leverage traders. They were the careful ones. The prudent ones. The ones who did everything right. The ones who did the homework. Bought the “right” devices. Followed the guides.
The hack seriously affected several pillars of the Bitcoin maximalist worldview, hence the outsized fallout relative to the size of the theft.
2. The failed Filters coup
I’m not going to recap the long-winded and tedious Filters debate here – if you are interested you should read Jameson Lopp’s thorough account – but suffice to say, a group of hardcore Bitcoin puritans attempted a coup which failed. The thrust of their complaint was that the Bitcoin protocol had become polluted by arbitrary, non-monetary data. This has been going on since the dawn of Bitcoin – it’s actually very hard to design a protocol which doesn’t support arbitrary data insertion – but the Filters crowd were upset about non-monetary protocols like Ordinals which simplified putting arbitrary (image, eg) data on Bitcoin. To them, Bitcoin was money, and only money, and not a vehicle for frivolities like pictures of cats. Besides the object-level complaint, the Filters people also correctly pointed out that Bitcoin development had become effectively tyrannized by a tiny oligarchy of unaccountable developers who were completely immune to any form of feedback. Most Filters people self-identified with the “bitcoin pleb” epithet; that is, relative newcomers to Bitcoin. Think of them as a kind of anti-establishment group, taking pride in the fact that they represented the “everyman” rather than the established Bitcoin elite.
Their metacritique was actually fairly reasonable, but that wasn’t enough for them to prevail.
The gang, led by longtime Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr, rallied behind a minority fork of Bitcoin, BIP 110, that failed instantly after being born from a chainsplit on August 8. The interesting thing about the filters crowd is that it was an example of an ultra-orthodox breakaway group that was defeated by the more moderate majority (unlike for instance the blocksize wars in which the ideologues defeated the pragmatists). The Filters crowd employed the same tactics that the maximalists had historically leveled against perceived enemies of Bitcoin – but this time directed at core developers and established Bitcoin maximalists. I might be thinking wishfully here, but I think the main contribution of the Filters people was to give prominent maximalists a taste of their own medicine: relentless mean-spirited attacks from a small army of largely anonymous and extremely aggrieved Bitcoiners claiming the high ground and greater moral purity.
The other outcome of the Filters debate is that a meaningful subset of the “toxic maxi” crowd became disillusioned from Bitcoin and will presumably quit being actively involved. While extremely unscientific and not at all proportionate, this graphic depicts the reported positions of a subset of Bitcoiners on X on the filters debate, with the breakaway faction on the right in green.
Some fairly well-known Bitcoiners – maxi footsoldiers in wars past – found themselves on the losing side of the filters debate: Luke Dashjr, Hodlonaut, GrassFedBitcoin, Justin Bechler, Knut Svanholm, Matthew Kratter, Fred Krueger counting among the most notable, alongside a legion of “plebs”.
Now the Filters civil war did not end Bitcoin maximalism, but it was a meaningful blow against the institution. It helped exhaust the movement by stripping the orthodox wing of some of its most radical footsoldiers. It subjected established maximalists to nonstop “pleb” harassment tactics. And it did resurface a reasonable critique: Bitcoin Core is dominated by an unaccountable priesthood of developers, and is far too rigid to accommodate legitimate grievances.
An ideology designed to be unfalsifiable
A decade and a half in, being a Bitcoin purist became less about believing a fixed mantra, and more about signaling in-group status for social benefit. The reaction to my list of bankrupt claims in the first section will undoubtedly be “I never said that. No one ever meant that. We didn’t seriously believe that”.
And that will be true to a certain degree, because provocative internet ideologies thrive in the space between sincerity and irony. Say outrageous things; if they don’t land or you get serious pushback, claim you were only pretending.
“Hyperbitcoinization? That was just a rhetorical tactic. We didn’t really believe that nation states would adopt a Bitcoin standard. We were moving the Overton window. It was a joke, chill out.”
Constant goalpost shifting achieves a real social objective: it allows members to feel like they are part of a group that has been “right about everything” without requiring them to have been right about everything. Successful predictions are valorized and written into the ledger; unsuccessful predictions are retroactively recast as trolling or propaganda.
This results in an asymmetric epistemology. If Bitcoin actually hits $1m, the predictors can claim to be world historical savants; if not, it was just a way of expressing confidence. If a country adopts Bitcoin, hyperbitcoinization is well on its way; if not, Bitcoin never needed filthy nation states anyway.
Over time this makes it virtually impossible to pin down what the maximalists actually believe. The doctrine isn’t written down and its aggressive claims become non-binding when history moves against them.
The same instinct that led the Millerites to reinterpret the prediction when the rapture did not happen has powered maximalists’ remarkable doctrinal migrations over the years.
1. Payments -> Store of Value technology
Satoshi’s own framing of bitcoin was overwhelmingly payments first. As Bitcoin confronted its technological limitations and a conservative design philosophy, that vision was mortgaged to Lightning, and then abandoned altogether. Payments occur on other blockchains largely in dollar denominations. Maximalists today maintain no allegiance to early Bitcoiners’ vision of a payments network.
2. Absorbing the best ideas from altcoins -> those ideas are pointless
This has been completely memoryholed, but early Bitcoiners were adamant that the best ideas from altcoins would be implemented on Bitcoin. None of this happened, and Bitcoin gradually lost the ability to implement any new ideas whatsoever. Bitcoin has been at a virtual technological standstill for a decade, and the maximalists have adapted by insisting that those ideas are bad and pointless. Their need to win has forced them into the unenviable position of maintaining that no technological development outside of Bitcoin is worthwhile.
3. Escaping Wall Street -> Wall Street as the vehicle of victory
Early Bitcoiners were libertarian cypherpunks who believed in creating private, personal spaces through cryptography that governments and corporations could not penetrate and police. Around 2017, Bitcoiners accepted an explicit tradeoff, though they didn’t realize it at the time: Bitcoin would become institutionalized, derivatized, centralized, and captured by the institutional architecture of finance, in exchange for price appreciation. This Faustian bargain powered several massive rallies, but extinguished Bitcoin’s potential as a true cypherpunk technology.
4. Separating money from state -> state adoption as the prize
What would Satoshi and his early co-conspirators have thought about American Bitcoiners begging the government to buy Bitcoin and put it in a Strategic Reserve? Virtually every Bitcoiner bent the knee when the Trump administration signaled that this was a possibility. This was the clearest illustration to me of how even the most hard-nosed maxis could easily be persuaded to compromise their principles.
5. Hyperbitcoinization as a forecast -> an indefinitely deferred destination
Like the Millerites after the Great Disappointment, Bitcoiner hardliners had to downgrade and revise their most cherished belief, slowly coming to accept that they might have been wrong on the timeline. As the realization dawned that the world was no nearer to adopting a neo-gold standard with Bitcoin as the substrate, the goalposts have shifted to the indefinite future. Anyone blithely pointing out that it has indeed been 18 years is met with reproach: “this won’t happen overnight! These kinds of things take generations”. The Maximalists have now adopted an entirely unfalsifiable thesis.
Where does this leave Bitcoin?
Today in 2026, Bitcoin maximalism is a niche ideology with little appeal to new adherents. At best, it offers simple answers to those who find themselves confused by the dizzying array of options in crypto: Bitcoin, and only Bitcoin, is the answer. Everything else is a scam. Just buy Bitcoin, hold it in self-custody, and you will eventually be rewarded.
The problem is that with time, these claims have been largely revealed to be questionable. Bitcoin has stagnated price-wise. Gold stole most of its thunder in 2025, and inflation subsided in the major fiat currencies. Other investments outperformed. Other blockchains came to offer plenty of valid use cases. Buying and holding is not the only thing you can do with digital assets. Self-custody ended up being fragile, complex, and too risky for ordinary retail investors.
In other words, the Bitcoin prosperity gospel preached by the maximalists stopped producing prosperity. Powering all the elaborate claims about Bitcoin healing society and politics was one simple reality: if you buy Bitcoin, you can make money and maybe even get rich beyond your wildest imagination. For most new Bitcoiners (anyone who joined in the last five years), this simply hasn’t been the case. In this cold hard light of day, people have become less receptive to the more outrageous claims made by the purists. The ideology simply has less to offer today, and fewer and fewer people are willing to indulge the maximalists. I see nothing on the horizon that might reverse this trend.
As for me, I still like Bitcoin. I will keep holding Bitcoin (via ETFs only). I will continue investing in Bitcoin companies. I will continue advocating for changes that I deem important to the success of Bitcoin, which include adding crypto-agility to tackle a future quantum threat. As I said in my last post on this topic:
Ultimately, Bitcoin is not a lifestyle. Bitcoin is not a steak dinner. Bitcoin is not memes and it’s not laser eyes. Bitcoin is a profoundly useful tool. It is impregnated with some ideology, but it is not the ideology that these people profess. The core Bitcoin values have to do with property rights, individual human dignity, self-determination, privacy, autonomy, and monetary predictability. Bitcoin attracts me for that reason, and I’ll keep supporting it with all the resources available to me regardless of how anyone describes me.
I am not pessimistic about Bitcoin. I’m just interested in the world as it actually is, instead of the world of utopias and pleasant delusions. My case for Bitcoin has always been more robust and resistant to shocks than the case these maxis make, because theirs relies on fantasies like the stock to flow, the inevitable collapse of all altcoins, or hyper bitcoinization. I’d be upset if I believed in those things too.
One of the great victories won by the maximalists was convincing ordinary Bitcoiners that Bitcoin needed them to succeed. Sure, they might be a little wacky talking about how Bitcoin ends wars or saves us from bad art, but the movement needed its shock troops in the wars against the central bankers, academics, economists, and shitcoiners.
I want to disabuse Bitcoiners of this notion. Maximalism feeds off Bitcoin, rather than the other way around. Maximalism confuses Bitcoin’s success with the vindication of maximalism itself. The asset and protocol can succeed while the radical ideology around it fails. And, indeed, that is more or less what has happened. Bitcoin thrived and became a global monetary asset of consequence. The elaborate body of prophecy around it ended up being a poor description of what success would look like.
The maximalists will not concede this. They have built an ideology so flexible that encounters with reality will do little to dissuade them. There will always be another timeline, another win condition, another interpretation. William Miller would be proud.
