Since Unwriter lifted a commented of mine from the (in)famous "Gold Collapsing, Bitcoin Up" thread on https://bitco.in/forum to paint my attitude as irresponsible toward investors, I would like to that a moment to respond openly.

Before continuing, I would like to emphasize that I'm a huge fan of the work Unwriter has done on top of and around Bitcoin Cash. It is stellar quality, and I'm sad to see him express his intention to leave for BSV. That emotion aside, I believe his work so far has been fully open source, which is exemplary and I'm sure it will be picked up and continued on BCH. This demonstrates the value of open source, and in contrast, the relatively minor value of closed source or proprietary contributions to our ecosystem.

On the rebuttal of his points, I fully concur with the points expressed by Jonald Fyookball in his rebuttal, to the extent that I do not want to dwell on any of those in this post.

If there is anything to add from my side, it would be that I find Unwriter's post to be lacking a listing of how exactly ABC's recent development have impacted his own code and projects. I've not noticed any ABC changes to consensus or API breakage that would affect application projects in a negative way, but I'm certainly interested in his perspective on that as an application developer. What is the case, imo, is that ABC's "floating checkpoints" have temporarily secured a predictable environment in terms of required confirmations for commercial actors. But I'm willing to admit that there has been a cost too, as pointed out elsewhere, and I'd be happy to see these measures deactivated by default eventually, once the hostile hashpower threats have been surmounted.

On to my actual point of this post: Maximalism.

In the quoted comment, I used somewhat strong language, calling the maximalist position "dumbshit".

If this offends any sensibilities, my apologies, but I do stand by it.

What you need to understand is that this is one comment out of an entire conversation in the GCBU thread, presented without context, and without the clarifications which I had provided on my own position as regards "maximalism".

Here is the link to the cited post where I respond to a question posed to me by Cypherdoc (the creator of the original thread):

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-1310#post-84951

At the point of the above comment, there had been heated conversations between SV supporters and those that weren't, for many pages starting from the outbreak of the hash war.

Here is my initial comment where I called the maximalist position as I viewed it on offer largely by SV proponents in the thread as 'dumbshit':

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-1302#post-84644

I'll quote myself so you can understand what I'm trying to get at. Remember that CSW and others had been promoting a particular aggressive anti-everything-but-Bitcoin-SV type of maximalism up until now:

And I don't need to tell businesses which currencies they should or should not accept.

I'm not trying to create a NWO here.

I'm much happier with a free market, "currency competition" to keep people on their toes and counteract the massive concentrations of power that create so many problems.

Bitcoin is only ever going to become a *dominant* world currency, not *the single* world currency as some dumbshit maximalists believe.

Others have described this view far better than I, but this is a forum conversation between long time bitcoiners who don't need to mince words or write beautiful essays there to get their points across to each other.

Unwriter characterized my attitude towards maximalism without reference to my previous clarifications in the thread, including this one from Sunday (!):

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-1310#post-84954

I do indeed view "Bitcoin" as a tree with many branches, some of which give up fundamental aspects of monetary soundness and will imo be pruned / fall away by the action of the market, as most will.

Some may deliver good and necessary improvements or vital course corrections (like massive on chain scaling pursued in the Bitcoin Cash branch). Such branches may come to replace the main branch over time by gaining the value and most-proof-of-work-put-in over time.

This is where the branch analogy probably breaks down and these so-called "altcoins" can be like seeds that can carry and sprout to bring peer to peer electronic cash to people, even if what the masses know as "Bitcoin" dies. Which is not to say it will -- it might linger around longer than any of us will ever experience.

Finally, in another comment posted there today, I went about criticising what I perceive some people mean by calling themselves "maximalists", which is not even as "maximalist" as can be.

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-1317#post-85176

and this one where I explain briefly why I don't think the kind "maximalism" propagated by certain people makes for a sound crypto investment strategy:

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-1317#post-85176

Take my aggressive tone with a bit of salt. It is often tongue in cheek since I see quite aggressive tones from the SV camp (who even threaten to attack other fork branches and cryptocurrencies with SharkPool). This isn't a joke to me. I see them as a threat to the welfare of cryptocurrency as a whole, which includes the entirety of the Bitcoin space.

Now you have a bit of a fuller view of my opinion on crypto maximalism. Make what you will of it - it is only my opinion, and I am not anyone's representative. Just one Bitcoin user, and someone who thinks that we can still learn from other coins and other "experiments" going on within Bitcoin and outside.

Learning stops when you close your eyes and ears to the world around you.

Happy to discuss and debate 'maximalism' in this thread, but not other topics.