Bitcoin.org co-owner warns that crypto tribalism is creating “culture rot”

With over 2000 cryptocurrencies, the crypto industry has been attracting newbies into the market. While investors and users try to comprehend how smart contracts work and what a blockchain is, teams of developers keep changing goals, resetting roadmaps and updating proposals. 

The competition to come up with the best crypto asset has also sparked rifts that lead to forks. Bitcoin itself has been forked to create new cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin Gold, etc.

CØ₿RA, the co-owner of Bitcoin.org and the popular forum Bitcointalk.org, calls the quarreling “culture rot.” He said:

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 stated that several altcoins can perform certain functions better than Bitcoin. She said:

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.