Leaving Behind Bitcoin Sectarianism

After years of infighting over how to scale the blockchain, the community is again experimenting with ways to turn Bitcoin into a suitable platform to develop on.
I’ve always tended to be heterodox in my beliefs, my social attitudes and the way I reason outside of scholarly consensus.
Patrick Dugan is the founder of the Omni Foundation, CEO of TradeLayer and coiner of the term "crypto-dollarization".
This article is part of CoinDesk’s “Future of Bitcoin” package.
It was about 11 years ago that I sent the wire to Mt. Gox to purchase my first bitcoins (BTC). A few months later I relied on those coins to survive getting robbed of all my items and cash in capital controlled Argentina. LocalBitcoins was my realization of the reality of Bitcoin as world-changing technology, and my survival tool in an emergency.
Then after getting into arbitrage trading and dipping into the bull market of 2013, I found work with the Mastercoin Foundation, funded by the first initial coin offering (ICO). In March 2014 I saw the debate over reactivating OP_Return as a soft-fork, but with a lower, 40 byte limit — the argument was that a higher threshold would enable spam.
I saw the vehement passion by which the byte-size conservatives argued, and found it perplexing. Little did I know that this debate over whether the limit should be 40 bytes versus 80 bytes would continue to snowball into a whole ideological sectarian rift in the Bitcoin community.
When I got into crypto, it was all about, you know, being able to control your own money, whether that means surviving being robbed of all your cash in a country with capital controls, buying LSD from a foreign chemist or any number of things synonymous with righteous resistance against tyranny and fostering human freedom and thriving.
See also: Designer Drug Markets Get Boost From Crypto
But what resulted in the intervening years has been infighting. In short, the Bitcoin community, since the so-called “Blocksize Wars,” has seen fierce opposition between the pro-data people and the people who want Bitcoin to be a data-light form of digital gold.
See also: What Is Bitcoin Meant to Hedge?
Meanwhile, I dreamed a dream of decentralized derivatives backing synthetic dollars without any banking, earning yield off of basis trades when bitcoin price trends lead to futures contango (when longer-dated futures have a higher premium so there’s time value in being long bitcoin and short futures).
To quote a famous man:
What
Here’s what happened:
A number of U.S., citizens who transacted sums as small as $1,500 on LocalBitcoins were arrested, serving jail sentences for peer to peer trading
LocalBitcoins and many similar platforms were shut down
BlackRock made us an offer we couldn’t refuse: Finally putting BTC as a ticker mainstream American baby boomers can purchase with their IRA accounts, causing our USD-denominated wealth to go up
U.S. resident participation in most crypto activities became so problematic through tax enforcement complications, know-your-customer headaches and increasingly draconian penalties (such as the i6050 $10,000 threshold penalty for sending someone BTC or any other coin), meaning U.S. bitcoiners became predominantly focused on holding and not using BTC
Stablecoins emerged as the de facto blockchain-based way to transfer value (which started on the Mastercoin protocol, but due to the fees, quickly migrated to Ethereum). USDT on Tron is the...
https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2024/04/19/leaving-behind-bitcoin-sectarianism/
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