Michael Saylor: I’m a bitcoin maximalist
Yesterday Michael Saylor admitted what has been widely known for some time, namely that he is a Bitcoin maximalist.
I am a #Bitcoin Maximalist.
— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) 24 July 2022
A “Bitcoin maximalist” refers to a person who considers Bitcoin to be the only true cryptocurrency ever created.
Maximalists not only consider altcoins to be completely different from Bitcoin, but also often consider them to be cross-border legal projects, if not outright rip-offs.
However, a distinction must be made between those who simply claim that altcoins are anything but Bitcoin, and the outright maximalists who believe that all altcoins are not even worthy of interest because they are questionable projects.
It is worth saying that in absolute terms, out of the thousands of altcoins, there are many projects of a dubious nature, if not outright scams, but that is not the point. The really resounding stance of the maximalists is against Ethereum, Binance Coin or other cryptocurrencies that are instead often considered interesting projects.
There’s even a proper clash between Bitcoin maximalists and Ethereum maximalists, although it’s a clash that seems to have lost some steam in recent years, especially since BTC and ETH seem to have gone down two different paths .
The Divided Thinking of Bitcoin Maximalists
However, there is more. In fact, many Bitcoin Maximalists believe that even fiat currencies are unworthy of interest, if not even “fraud in disguise”. In other words, the strict maximalists believe that Bitcoin is a long way off best currency in the worldand the only one that can protect consumers from the central banks’ monetary policy, which is certainly not aimed at serving the interests of consumers themselves.
Therefore for pure maximalists even stablecoins are subordinate currencies.
From this point of view, Saylor has always seemed to be a Bitcoin maximalist himself, since he convinced the company he runs to convert all of its currency reserves into BTC, practically get rid of the dollars they held as reserves.
To date, it appears that no other major company in the world has chosen such a drastic and risky measure.
However, one point that raises many doubts about Bitcoin’s maximalist ideology is that BTC’s volatility does not make it a good transactional currency at all. Many maximalists simply believe that such volatility will be greatly reduced in the future, largely thanks to mass adoptionbut to date this seems more like a hope than a prediction based on objective and irrefutable data.
Should volatility remain an inherent feature of BTC, which by the way makes it such an attractive feature of the financial markets, it seems extremely difficult for it to replace fiat currencies and stable coins as a means of payment.
