‘Fire and Brimstone’ Bitcoin Maxis Are Being Unrealistic: Dan Held

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Promi­nent cryp­to influ­encer Dan Held believes Bit­coin devo­tees could ben­e­fit from being more open-mind­ed and less dis­mis­sive of oth­ers’ choice of cryptocurrency.

Held, a mar­ket­ing advi­sor for Trust Machines and for­mer head of growth and mar­ket­ing at cryp­to exchange Krak­en, refers to him­self as a long­time Bit­coin­er but no longer as a “maximalist”—someone who believes that Bit­coin is the only dig­i­tal asset worth invest­ing in.

Hav­ing been engaged in the cryp­to com­mu­ni­ty since 2013, Held says he remem­bers a time when the cul­ture around Bit­coin was ori­ent­ed around rad­i­cal free­dom and asso­ci­at­ed with events such as Burn­ing Man, which is found­ed on prin­ci­ples of self-reliance and self-expression.

On the lat­est episode of Decrypt’s gm pod­cast, Held said he’s since seen a diver­gence among Bitcoin’s advo­cates into two dis­tinct sides.

“One is more reject­ing any sort of iden­ti­ty out­side of a very con­ser­v­a­tive one,” he said. “And then the oth­er one, it’s just more permissive–let’s build new things on top of Bit­coin, and we should­n’t demo­nize peo­ple for own­ing oth­er assets.”

Not­ing that Bit­coin is a per­mis­sion­less network—meaning the involve­ment of par­tic­i­pants isn’t con­trolled by a cen­tral­ized author­i­ty like an administrator—he sees the cur­rent tone of Bit­coin max­i­mal­ism as some­what counter to its orig­i­nal ethos.

“I see one side being more increas­ing­ly con­ser­v­a­tive, where they’re requir­ing puri­ty tests that are some­what impos­si­ble to achieve,” he said. “I think that that’s unrealistic.”

Accord­ing to Held, a seg­ment of Bitcoin’s biggest pro­po­nents behave today more like mem­bers of a reli­gion than investors, with a degree of intol­er­ance for peo­ple who aren’t recep­tive to only invest­ing in Bit­coin. He thinks a soft­er approach in advo­cat­ing for Bit­coin as a dig­i­tal asset would ulti­mate­ly be more productive.

His log­ic is that Bit­coin was built around ideals of finan­cial free­dom and that telling peo­ple how they should invest in cryp­to with­out some degree of per­mis­sive­ness isn’t the best way to go—even if Held still thinks that Bit­coin is the best store of val­ue as a dig­i­tal asset.

“Some of these more hard­core con­ser­v­a­tive types are akin to a preach­er being out­side of a casi­no,” he said, describ­ing Bit­coin max­i­mal­ists who try to dis­suade peo­ple from pur­chas­ing oth­er coins. “The preach­er is not wrong, they just come across a lit­tle annoying.” 

Held thinks it’s more impor­tant to put an empha­sis on argu­ments for Bitcoin’s long term suc­cess rather than sim­ply advo­cat­ing for the cryp­tocur­ren­cy as fer­vent­ly as pos­si­ble, specif­i­cal­ly try­ing to con­vey the poten­tial trade­offs between it and oth­er dig­i­tal assets.

He said. “I guess it’s a fire-and-brim­stone ver­sus a more accept­ing, we’re-all-sin­ners sort of vibe.”

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