There are over 2,000 cryptocurrencies. The sheer number has enticed newbies into a world loaded with lexicon, bold ambitions, complex protocols and radical solutions. The wild array of projects has also been a big turn-off.
While average users and investors try to grasp how smart contracts work and what a blockchain is, teams of developers keep shifting goals, resetting roadmaps, reinventing protocols and updating proposals as they debate everything from best practices to best methodology to efficiency, security and relevance.
The competition to create the best crypto asset has also sparked the kinds of rifts that lead to forks, where coders spin off in various directions without looking back, birthing new cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin Gold, to name a few.
The co-owner of Bitcoin.org and the popular forum Bitcointalk.org, aka CØ?RA, describes the quarreling as “culture rot” and says that pushing for Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency, to slay every single one of its competitors is fueling hostility.
“Bitcoin maximalism has caused a general culture rot in the cryptocurrency community. Before maximalism people would see an interesting project and say ‘oh, cool’ and move on, now it’s become a religion to scream shitcoin and scam from the rooftops, even at legit projects.
In turn this makes the communities of various altcoins hostile to Bitcoin, since they see what *they* wrongly perceive as the Bitcoin community hating on them. Instead of everyone working together to succeed, we all shit on each other.
Even if Bitcoin completely fails, and something like Zcash or Grin or even Dogecoin succeeds and takes over the world, that’s already a *much* more free and open world than the pre-Bitcoin era.
Let’s also not forget that many people somehow jump into altcoins as their first exposure to crypto, and a lot eventually then migrate to Bitcoin. I guarantee you a lot more migrated back when there was less hostility between projects.
Someone who jumps into Bitcoin Cash as their first investment now is going to get even more entrenched and closed minded once they’re exposed to constant ridicule and flame wars. Sadly most of these maximalists would rather everything fail if Bitcoin doesn’t succeed.”
Bitcoin supporter Trace Mayer argues that there may be a number of altcoins that can perform specific functions better than Bitcoin and will have a reason to exist and thrive.
“Bitcoin doesn’t need to satisfy all the needs for all the people. Sometimes you want a knife. Sometimes you want a fork. Sometimes you want both of them together. So we have to keep an open mind.”