Michael Goldstein on The Bitstein Brief

I should not have included the third, and I see how the word "strategy" threw you off. The important distinction is the "monetary maximalism" and the belief that bitcoin has the possibility of being that money. As for "strategy," I did not mean in an activist sense. There is no requirement for any maximalist to "do something" or act altruistically "for bitcoin." I have always agreed with your analysis of the activist mentality. (Thank you for that, by the way. It saved me a lot of time in my youth.) What I meant by that was that if you believe (a) and (b), you are likely going to develop an analytical toolkit that can help filter BS claims, from an economic (everyone will have their own crypto token!), engineering (bitcoin block times are too slow!), or other relevant perspective (my grandma has trouble using bitcoin, therefore it's not going to be the dominant money). There are also potential real normative implications of (a) + (b). This framework often leads to different principles and heuristics: assuming everything that isn't bitcoin is a scam, that engineering resources shouldn't be wasted on shitcoin support, that trading is just not worth the risks, etc. So the "strategy," rather than being about how they can sacrifice themselves for the good of the network, is using their knowledge about (a) + (b) + whatever else to make prudent decisions about how they might personally orient themselves towards a monetizing good that could eventually become the dominant global money. I wrote an article about this mindset in 2014 called "Everyone's a Scammer": https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/everyones-a-scammer/ I can't speak for you, but I think you would be what people would generally call a "bitcoin maximalist." I hope that helps clear things up.