Everybody likes to talk about Bitcoin maximalism.
Mostly, it's people trying justify something they don't understand or dismiss something they don't like. Occasionally, such essays are produced by people looking to claim the label. They will all tell you what Bitcoin maximalism is.
They are all wrong.
While maximalism is a constant in Bitcoin, navel-gazing about Bitcoin maximalism comes in waves -- usually inspired by the people it most threatens. The most recent little wavelet was inspired by the filter-people trying to claim that maximalism means trying to prevent valid transactions from being included in blocks and whining about relay policies. Jameson Lopp produced a history of Bitcoin maximalism in response to the filterers (which Lopp calls NIMBYs). Lopp's history is extensive but also reasonable and therefore wrong.
Lopp references this 2020 tweet from Brad Mills
This is all wrong. As is so often the case, the people talking about toxic maximalism are important and successful people. They are not tactless individuals and so they completely fail to understand it.
The toxic maxies are dimming my star!
Prior to the fragility of the filterers, talk about maximalism resurfaced in the summer of 2022 when Nic Carter insisted that his star would continue to rise (#42457). Carter wrote a lengthy piece about maximalism which inspired further pieces by Pete Rizzo, Stephan Livera, Boomer, John Vallis, Shinobi and others. Also all wrong.
Earlier in 2022, Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum and often credited with coining the term Bitcoin maximalism, published a defense of Bitcoin maximalism in which he asked: what if we are all wrong about maximalism?
What if we live in a world of honest cryptocurrencies (of which there are very few) and grifter cryptocurrencies (of which there are very many), and a healthy dose of intolerance is in fact necessary to prevent the former from sliding into the latter?
Buterin pulls a host of morals out of maximalism such as intolerance is good, simplicity is stability, stand for something rather than everything, and fight for your values -- and yet, he, too, is wrong, even if he did publish the article on April Fool's Day.
A year before Nic Carter's feelings got hurt, Robert Breedlove decided to "liberate" himself from toxic maximalism after trying to sell his BitClout. BitClout was a shitty platform that tried to monetize famous people's audiences by requiring them to tweet about the project in order to claim their profile...which they could then sell or trade or something. He was also wrong about toxic maximalism.
Earlier in 2021, Tromer Strolight and Gigi both tried to make the case that the toxicity in Bitcoin maximalism is actually misinterpreted integrity or love. Wrong. All wrong.
Toxic maximalism can't be made cool
Several years before this, a bunch of people got mad at Kevin Loaec and the good people who put on the Breaking Bitcoin conference in 2019 because one of the conference t-shirts was a beautiful shirt that said Toxic Bitcoin Maximalist. There was such a meltdown about the shirt that Loaec felt he needed to post a thread explaining that the shirts (which really were awesome) were sarcastic.
Matt Corallo expressed displeasure at this:
The problem is that in some groups it's become "cool" to be a dick (hence why I'm not a fan of joking about it - it just makes it cooler).
This is also wrong.
After the conference, Udi Wertheimer showed up at ETHBerlin wearing one of the shirts with predictable results. The shirts also seemed to inspire Samson Mow to produce a glow-in-the-dark toxic maximalist hat for his hat store. And it was around this time that NVK started hosting a toxic maximalist meetup in Toronto.
Before the Breaking Bitcoin conference, in April of 2019, Kyle Torpey wrote an article entitled "Why Bitcoin's Toxic Maximalism Makes Sense" in which he argued:
The “toxic maximalism” that is sometimes associated with Bitcoin has its roots in the structure of incentives originally put into place by Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin users are effectively incentivized to attack anyone who attempts any sort of social attack on the system.
Also wrong. At the end of his article, he cites as inspiration two podcast episodes: Erik Voorhees on What Bitcoin Did and David Bailey on The Stephan Livera Podcast. I listened to both of these episodes. While they are interesting for their historical details, neither of them really explain what toxic maximalism is other than Bitcoiners yelling at you.
But where did the term "toxic bitcoin maximalism" come from?
This is the question Leo Weese asked in the fall of 2018. Weese correctly identified Vitalik Buterin as the initial source, but doesn't explain very much of how the term was popularized. It seems to have been in the air in 2018, because around this time there was also a BitcoinTalk thread asking if Bitcoin maximalism is toxic or a good influence -- as usual with people who ask such questions, none of them identified as maximalists.
Perhaps the reason everyone was talking about Bitcoin maximalism was because earlier that fall, Giacomo Zucco gave a talk about toxic Bitcoin maximalism at the 2018 Baltic Honeybadger conference, producing an "axiomatic deductive treatment" of Bitcoin maximalism, delivered in the sonorous tones of his Italian accent.
Probably the most authoritative discussion of it to date. Unfortunately, Zucco was also wrong about toxic maximalism, though he gets close: Zucco says "Toxic maximalists are bad people. But we have good reasons for it" and those reasons are explained in an article by Sosthene, which delivers a very compelling defense of small blocks.
In his talk, Zucco also shares a picture of Jimmy Song wearing a "Shitcoin Minimalist" shirt -- a sadly sanitized version of toxic maximalism -- and a Grubles post that tries to connect Bitcoin maximalism to the maximalist fashion movement. Obviously wrong.
Zucco says the motivation for his talk came from a tweet storm from earlier in the spring, which led to people calling him toxic. In response, Zucco proclaimed (among many other things):
I am proud to be a toxic, maximalist troll, member of the Bitcoin cult, very religious & surrounded by several, huge conflicts of interests. Deal with it.
Zucco is so close here. Really, the point of Zucco's talk is that Bitcoin maximalism is fun -- and this is almost right, but still wrong.
The first recorded use of "toxic Bitcoin maximalist"
Zucco may have been thinking about toxic maximalism because Paul Sztork had just published a lengthy article full of charts and diagrams about "Bitcoin Post-Maximalism." As always, his point largely comes down to: "we need drive chains" -- and, of course, he is wrong. But a useful thread for us in our search for the roots of maximalism is that Sztork frames his article with the then-recent debate/war about Bitcoin's blocksize, which we will come to in a moment.
The first recorded instance of the full term "toxic Bitcoin maximalist" is a tweet by Kevin Pham on 21 December 2017.
Someone called Pham a "toxic bitcoin troll" the month before and throughout the fall of 2017 Beautyon was saying things like "DON'T MESS WITH TOXIC BITCOIN" and "I'll take Torvalds, McAffee, and the "Toxic Bitcoin Culture" any day over PC East Coast mindless spineless, Statist Eloi EVERY SINGLE TIME." This seems to be fallout from the blocksize wars.
In the leadup to the activation of Segwit, Jeff Garzik frequently accused Adam Back, Samson Mow, and Greg Maxwell of "toxic Bitcoin" behavior -- but he didn't connect the phrase with the word "maximalism." Gavin Andresen also called the people at Blockstream "toxic trolls." Neither Garzik nor Andresen had a clue what they were talking about.
The Eth people really do not understand toxic Bitcoin maximalism
This trend of calling Bitcoiners "toxic" may have been popularized by Fred Ersham (the co-founder of Coinbase), when, in 2016, he wrote a lengthy promotional piece for Ethereum:
Beyond a leadership vacuum, Bitcoin’s “leadership” is less clear and toxic. Greg Maxwell, technical leader of Blockstream which employs a solid chunk of core developers, recently referred to other core developers who were working with miners on a block size compromise as “well meaning dips***s.” A second discussion board needed to form on reddit, /r/btc, because of censorship on the original /r/bitcoin.
While correctly identifying the behavior, Ersham obviously fails to comprehend it.
There was another Bitcoin maximalism scare in 2015 around the time that Ethereum mainnet went live. The good people on r/Buttcoin devoted a post to the "Toxic Bitcoin Community" and Andreas Antonopolous did a whole Let's Talk Bitcoin episode about maximalism and how bad it was. Sadly, they were completely wrong.
"I'm proud to be a maximalist!"
As early as the spring of 2015, the use of Bitcoin maximalism on the BitcoinTalk forum was already unremarkable. People frequently said things like, "I'm not a Bitcoin Maximalist, but..." and "What kind of a Bitcoin Maximalist are you if..." and "Seems he is a Bitcoin maximalist!"
Even at this early point in the term's existence, Bitcoiners were using it to describe themselves. Chris DeRose, of Bitcoin Uncensored fame, is one of the first people who embraced Bitcoin Maximalist.
He did a little video about Bitcoin maximalism at the beginning of 2015, and you can tell that it's a new term:
I'm sitting here on a wonderful Florida sunny day here on the pier in Fort Lauderdale beach. I want to talk a bit about Bitcoin Maximalism. What is it? What's that about? How do I feel about it. And let's begin. Bitcoin maximalism is a relatively new phrase, I think Vitalik himself came up with. I hadn't heard of it prior...it was an accusation perhaps that some of these [people are] unapologetically pro-Bitcoin. That's probably a little accurate and I think I identify with that.
DeRose comes almost as close as Zucco to understanding toxic maximalism, yet sadly, he falls short.
The Crypto Mises Podcast, hosted by Nakamoto Institute founders Michael Goldstein and Daniel Krawisz, did an episode on Bitcoin maximalism in the middle of December, 2014 -- less than a month after Vitalik's article featuring the term -- but neither of them seemed inclined to reappropriate the term, instead trying to defend Bitcoiners from such pejoratives -- horribly wrong. They did graciously say that Vitalik could return to the cool kids camp as long as he didn't turn out to be a scammer.
Vitalik Buterin's famous Bitcoin Maximalism blog post
On 20 November 2014, Vitalik Buterin published "On Bitcoin Maximalism, and Currency and Platform Network Effects" on the Ethereum blog. This is the post that is most often referenced as the source of the term. It's a long post, written in Buterin's typical schematic style. Mostly it tries to produce an argument why Bitcoin's network effects are not as strong as Bitcoiners think they are. But along the way, he ends up describing an attitude already widespread in Bitcoin which can be summarized by this reddit post:
Buterin calls the attitude "Bitcoin dominance maximalism" or just "Bitcoin maximalism" and the article got a fair amount of traction, especially after CoinTelegraph (and the bots) picked it up in early December and when people started noticing that something called the World Technology Network (now defunct) had named Buterin as one of their award-winners.
Notably, the word "toxic" does not show up in the Ethereum blog post. Also notable: Buterin is completely wrong.
As a source for the term Bitcoin maximalism, Buterin references a Reddit thread where he describes
the "Bitcoin will be the only one and rule them all" viewpoint (or at least the "it is morally good that Bitcoin be the only one and rule them all" subtext that is often present) that many people here support.
But nobody in the thread actually uses the term "maximalism."
Buterin also references an earlier blog post (from 22 October) by dccwilliams, "On Sidechains, Bitcoin Maximalism and Freedom". This is mostly a response to the Blockstream sidechains whitepaper, which dccwilliams says "is thin on technology and spends much of its time expounding a dangerous and damaging philosophy that is gaining the moniker “Bitcoin Maximalism”."
So, did Vitalik come up with "Bitcoin maximalism" or not?!?
The earliest record of the term I could find is from somebody named Andrew Barisser:
In September, Barisser wrote "An Open Letter to Reddit: Why You Should Build on Bitcoin" and said:
Altcoins exist by the thousands and they are regularly ridiculed. Altcoins are on their own little islands, apart from the gigantic Pangea that is Bitcoin.
This is a moderately maximalist attitude, but Barisser is evidence that the actual term "Bitcoin maximalism" was indeed coined by Vitalik Buterin.
But where did Vitalik get the term from?
It's a little known fact that Vitalik Buterin's father, Dmitry, is a wild fan of the 1984 cult classic The Toxic Avenger. It's the story of a scrawny outcast mop-boy named Melvin who gets tricked into wearing a pink tutu by a woman who promises him sex. Instead of having sex, Melvin ends up kissing a sheep in front of a crowd of people (while still wearing the pink tutu). Fleeing in embarrassment, Melvin falls out a window into an illegally parked truck hauling barrels of toxic green sludge. The toxic sludge turns Melvin into a gigantic monster who can't stop himself from tearing limbs off scammers.
This unlikely story is strongly emotional and it seems to have captured Dmitry Buterin's heart. Here is a picture of him and his son reading in bed at night. Do you notice the book Vitalik is reading?
Here is another picture of Dmitry and Vitalik:
This may not seem like it has much of a connection to Bitcoin maximalism until you learn that, as a Toxic Avenger afficionado, Dmitry also had a much-treasured copy of one of the early mockups of the film's cinematic poster on which the film's original title was still used and which I am now going to reproduce for you here:
The Toxic Freak Dominance Maximalist
Melvin was a tactless individual. The toxic avenger he became is even worse. He is the superhero version of all the mundane ugly qualities that are represented by the unwashed masses. Not likable. Not good-looking. Not polished nor self-aware.
And for all these reasons, we are inclined to like him. Because that is how real people are.