I used to be a shitcoiner.

That admission is not a very hard one to make, as I think most Bitcoin Maximalists can say the same thing, but it’s still kind of embarrassing. To have misunderstood pretty much everything that Bitcoin has to offer on such a philosophical level is a humbling mistake.

Since I’ve had my epiphany and “come out” as a maxi, I have found myself becoming more abrasive and less tolerant of other views. I used to look at maxis as this caustic section of the crypto universe and it always confused me, because I had perceived everyone in the “crypto” community as being on the same team. In my nascent understanding of the space, I conflated Bitcoin and shitcoins. As I understood it then, the different projects and their adherents essentially had the same goals.

“We all hate fiat” I’d tell myself. “We all hate the system. Why can’t these asshole “maxis” just get along with others?” My logic at the time was that the Bitcoin and shitcoin paths kind of lead to the same destination. I thought maxis should be more open minded, if for no other reason than to not turn people away. This is a movement that requires voluntary participation. It therefore follows that if you push people out of it, it will be less potent. If the goal is to supplant a system that robs people of their time and value, then everyone that is added to “our side” is one step closer to achieving that goal — and conversely every person that is driven out is a step backwards. 

Even as I came to understand the superior nature of Bitcoin — which has been discussed and dissected ad nauseum in other places, so I won’t rehash it here — I still desired to operate in that “we’re all on the same team” mentality.

I helped several friends into the space, and sadly some of them are still shitcoiners. I told them about Bitcoin every time we spoke.

I assume most maxis have gone through the phase of “I must tell the WORLD. I MUST SAVE THEM ALL!!” and I was heavily into that.

But like all complicated things, when it’s hard to understand something, it’s even harder to teach it well. I didn’t have the skills or vocabulary to effectively explain why shitcoins were bad. Every time I’d try to articulate my thoughts, people would just talk about their crypto gains. They would post the latest report on Cardano or how their technical analysis tells them that some shitcoin is going to jump 34% in the next two weeks. Or they would get excited about an idiot that owns a basketball team talking about “dojacoin”.

As time went on, I became increasingly irritated at these types of things. It grated my mind and I was confused as to why. I even began to get a little worried, and asked myself things like:

Am I becoming one of those irrational asshole maxis? 

Am I going to start verbally sparring with some idiot stranger on Twitter? 

Am I going to start ranting and foaming at the mouth?

But my biggest concern was; why did it bother me so much? Why do I care? Why is it so grating?

As a lover of freedom, my desire to be left the hell alone by the world is usually only outmatched by my desire to leave everyone else alone. One of my favorite quotes in all of cinema comes from (of all places) the movie Tremors. It’s a GREAT Kevin Bacon (“Val”) and Fred Ward (“Earl”) movie — if you’ve never seen it you’re missing out. Near the end of the film — as the heroes are about to escape — they notice, far off in the distance, the monsters doing something on the horizon.

Earl asks Val: “What the hell are they doing?”

Val's response, which is essentially my life mantra, is: “I don't care what they're doing as long as they're doing it way over there.”

That’s how I feel about pretty much everything. Do anything you want, just do it WAY over there. So why do I feel such consternation? Why does shitcoinery bug me so much? The answer has slowly become clear through discussions with my shitcoiner friends and reading the discussions of other maxis vs shitcoiners.

Often the argument is that people trade shitcoins to “make money to protect their family’s future” and they usually follow that with the fact that they are “converting the profits to BTC for “long term value”. 

Did you catch that dear reader? Shitcoiners will most often readily admit that Bitcoin is the ultimate store of value in the space. Bitcoin is the place they put any value that they want to keep for the long term.

Those that I’ve spoken to directly have confided in me that they trade to “make money so that they can get more BTC”.

It took me some time to process this logic. On the surface it seems to make sense. In the same way some people trade in the stock market to get wealthy, why shouldn’t someone trade shitcoins to get fiat wealthy to then buy Bitcoin?

Why does this strike me as fundamentally wrong?

As I have walked back through the conversations I’ve had regarding shitcoins since becoming a maxi, I’ve noticed that the moral and philosophical objections to this line of thinking are fairly clear. Or perhaps more accurately, they have always been clear but I didn’t know how to express them.

When discussing my distaste for shitcoins with shitcoiners, they will often cite “use cases” or throw links at me about how some shitcoin is going to change this or that for the better. They talk about “contracts”, “tokens”, “NFTs” and half a dozen other things that I genuinely could not give a shit about. I realized that I don’t care about these things for the same reason I don’t care about mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations or even the FED or day trading in traditional markets. Simply put, they were never meant for me.

Let me quote Steven Brill from a Time Magazine article from 2018 titled “How Baby Boomers Broke America”:

Bitcoin is simple. Light weight. Direct. You trade your fiat for it, and it holds its value. Maybe someday you trade commodities for it, maybe you take a loan against it as collateral, but overall, it’s pretty straightforward. It’s limited in production, and therefore will never be inflated into worthlessness. It’s fairly anonymous, so the common man doesn’t have to have everyone know his business. (People can be “way over there”.)

Shitcoins however, are not any of these things. Like Brill’s “inventions in law and finance”, they are a derivative of a broken system. They are an extension of thinking that says, “if we make things complex enough, we can keep OUR wealth and take some of the common man’s wealth too”. They are a throwback to the very system that inspired bitcoin in the first place. They are a step backwards in the sense that Bitcoin brought the needs of the common man forward, while the jungle of shitcoins attempt to cover those needs up behind a smokescreen of protocols, applications, and “advanced features”.

This leads to a couple of major conclusions for me as to why I’ve become more caustic regarding shitcoins and those that shill them.

Firstly, Shitcoins by design, simply steal the wealth of the ignorant and uneducated and transfer it to the educated and early adopters.

You can’t fix a broken system by using the broken system. Everything about the financial system at large is rigged against the common user of that system. Endless fiat printing and constant devaluing of the time people have. Purposeful lack of educating the population about money. Incentivizing debt. Tax laws. Endless bailouts. ALL OF IT is rigged. It’s all geared to preserve the power and wealth of those that already have it. It’s a system designed to keep the population ignorant and allow those in power to profit off the very same.

Therefore, you will not force this system to change or improve by using it. You force change in a system by either refusing to be part of it (starving it) or putting pressure on it from the outside. When one says that they are investing and trading shitcoins to get BTC wealthy, what they are really saying is “I am going to prey on the less educated to take their money from them and then put that money into Bitcoin.” These people are not defeating the system, they are part of it. They are perpetuating it.

To repeat the words of Brill; they have “created an economy built on deals that moved assets around instead of building new ones.” Crypto traders (and more specifically the creators of the 8000+ shitcoins out there) are not creating wealth, they’re transferring it. Just like the Fed. Just like banks in the years leading up to the 2008 collapse. Just like every hedge fund manager. They’re not creating goods or services of value, they are simply moving assets around and collecting on it.

Bitcoin maxis believe in Bitcoin. They see it as the way to free everyone from the current system that is so corrupt and so damaging. They see a principled vision of the future and they are striding towards it.

Secondly, Shitcoiners perpetuate fiat ways of thinking about money and wealth.

They have simply supplanted the fiat system of complicated financial devices with a new system of complicated financial devices that steal wealth, kept the poor down, and line the pockets of the already wealthy.If you took all the money that has been put into shitcoins and dumped it into Bitcoin, it would massively increase that outside pressure I talked about earlier to destroy the current rigged system.

When I spoke of the end scene in Tremors earlier, Val’s statement was prematurely uttered. You see, the monsters had been busy “over there” building a trap to prevent the heroes’ escape and the heroes end up falling into it. Life is sadly like that sometimes. Just because you don’t know or care about a thing, that doesn’t mean it can’t screw you up or trap you.

I didn’t really know about the Fed or the Creature from Jekyll Island until this year, but it’s been screwing us since 1910. I didn’t know about FDR confiscating gold or Nixon taking us off the gold standard, but those actions paved the way for the continued theft being perpetuated on us to this very day.

When you consider where we could already be if shitcoiners would stop pursuing fiat wealth, you realize that even though they’re doing shitcoin things “way over there” they’re still gumming up the works.

They are delaying the day when the world could be free of fiat, and not for some noble or self-sacrificing cause.

Not even because they are unaware that bitcoin is the right path to that freedom, but simply because they want more money. Instead of creating value, they are taking it from others and delaying our chances to see freedom from a system that has stolen countless years of toil and life.

Bitcoiners and shitcoiners are not on the same team, we are not on different paths to the same destination. Therefore, it’s hard not to be “toxic” to people that want to gobble up your wealth, slow human progress, and delay the departure from a system that enslaves all but the very wealthy. 

I find that my response to shitcoiners is now usually very similar to Val’s in a scene where one of the monsters kills itself by smashing into a concrete retention wall while chasing Val and Earl:

I used to be a shitcoiner. 

After a lot of contemplation and introspection, I am now a Bitcoin maximalist. 

Fuck you, shitcoiner. 

The end.