CHAIN REACTION

We Need to Talk About Bitcoin (Not What You Think)

Somewhere along the way, the Bitcoin crowd lost the plot.

Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing more underground and contrarian than a new form of digital money that builds itself outside the US dollar. It still has a viable future, at the very least as digital gold for a newer generation.

This is more about the followers: the more recent adopters and the new era of media Bitcoin maximalists (maxis, the Bitcoin-only crowd).

WHERE IT STARTED

Back in Issue 1 we talked about the cypherpunks: DIY rebels who built in code instead of asking permission. Bitcoin was their masterpiece. Sound money with a fixed supply, no central bank, and no way to print more and inflate the currency.

We forget that Bitcoin started underground. Early meetups were small, some needed a passcode to get in, and phones got checked at the door. People worried the government would come after them for building money outside its control. This stuff was genuinely disruptive. It wasn’t a corporate networking event. It wasn’t socially accepted. You got looked at sideways for even talking about it.

That’s what being early was.

FROM REBEL TO TICKER

And here’s what being late looks like. Above, at the 2025 Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas: Michael Saylor, Steve Aoki, Natalie Brunell and Donald Trump Jr.

Safe to say, they’re not early.

Brunell went on Fox in August 2025 and laid out the easy trade: Bitcoin goes up as governments print money, so just keep buying. Soon after, that correlation broke, and Bitcoin is down roughly 30% since. Not her fault. But funny how it works. The moment easy money gets said out loud on TV, it stops being easy.

Bitcoin has Wall Street ETFs. Public companies stack it on their balance sheets. It went from a disruptive force to the status quo.

And somewhere in there, with a lot of new people coming in, the community changed too.

THE GOALPOSTS KEEP MOVING

People need to wake up and realize the days of Bitcoin going up multiple times in a year are over.

The vocal new wave of online Bitcoiners first said all we needed was 0.1 Bitcoin to retire early. Then it was 0.2, then 0.25, and now it’s one or even five Bitcoin and you’ll be set for life.

Meanwhile, right under everyone’s nose sit undervalued crypto communities and protocols still innovating: privacy solutions, app building, and transaction times that don’t make you wait.

It’s doubly irresponsible to sell false hope about Bitcoin’s growth rate, then to trash every other crypto project for not being “pure.”

THE NEW MIDDLEMEN

Even crazier: the Bitcoin treasury companies. If you haven’t heard of them, here’s the gist. A company (sometimes a brand-new one built for this) exists mainly to hold Bitcoin on its balance sheet. It goes public, and the pitch to regular people is: buy our stock and you get Bitcoin exposure, with smart people managing it for you. By this year, more than 170 public companies were doing some version of this.

How’d that go? Plenty of them have crashed 90% or more. Twenty One Capital, the company Jack Mallers ran, is down more than 80% from its 2025 high, and he stepped down as CEO in July.

The irony writes itself. The movement that was supposed to cut out the middleman built a whole new layer of middlemen, and regular people bought in at the top. Nobody talks about that.

That’s the Bitcoin maxi. And the maxi has gotten delusional, and not in a good way.

DON’T TOUCH THE CODE

The maxi position is basically: don’t touch the code, ever. Michael Saylor, the biggest corporate Bitcoin holder on the planet, said it straight this year. The biggest threat to Bitcoin is “ambitious opportunists” who want to change the protocol.

Fine. If you want Bitcoin to be pristine sound money and nothing else, I get it. The fear is that if you build too much on top of it, it turns into one more parasitic, capitalist machine. And that changing it in any way opens the door to more changes down the road.

But protecting Bitcoin’s future is one thing. Discouraging people from looking at innovation in other crypto communities, some of which may be real opportunities, is another thing entirely. Sometimes it’s trash talk. Mostly it’s silence. Saylor, the movement’s biggest voice, is careful about what he mentions. And the Bitcoin conference doesn’t put Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, on its stage. Keep in mind, Vitalik co-founded Bitcoin Magazine. He’s pro-Bitcoin, and one of the most important figures in the broader crypto community.

THE SPLIT

This summer it got biblical. Back in 2023, people found a loophole that let them stamp images and tokens, basically NFTs, directly onto Bitcoin. Purists led by developer Luke Dashjr called it spam and pushed a rule change, BIP-110, to shut it down and keep Bitcoin money only.

Saylor led the campaign against it. His argument: the network shouldn’t judge what a transaction is for. “Bitcoin does not need guardians of purity. It needs guardians of neutrality.”

Miners didn’t go along. Support peaked around 2.5%, nowhere near the 55% needed. So on Aug. 8 the purists broke off and launched their own chain, now called Bitcoin BLAKE2b (XBT), as the “real” Bitcoin. It’s still running, traded on a handful of small exchanges.

Here’s the kicker. One side wanted Bitcoin to do less. The other wanted it left exactly as is. Nobody was fighting to let it do more.

That’s the pattern. Most maxis call everything that isn’t Bitcoin a “sh*tcoin.” At best they play nice with Solana, a chain known for meme coins, because they don’t feel threatened by it.

Ethereum, on the other hand, is the one they won’t give its due. It once climbed to about half of Bitcoin’s market cap, close enough to make “the flippening” (Ethereum overtaking Bitcoin) feel possible.

That’s not purity. It’s fear.

REBELLION TO RELIGION

When Bitcoin was a dollar, it was unknown and undervalued. The weird thing nobody believed in.

It’s not purity. It’s fear.

Today’s maxis took that rebellion and turned it into a holier-than-thou religion, and lost the cypherpunk vision along the way.

Here’s the punchline: if Bitcoin showed up today, as the strange little underdog it once was, the maxis would be the first ones calling it a scam.

That’s not cypherpunk.

It’s just the herd, all over again.