To be fair, I can be "hostile" at times, but that is only when I'm clearly being provoked by trolls or others that are being disingenuous and throw the first stone. I personally go out of my way to assume good faith and remain civil, but once I can gauge a users intention is to be a prick I'll reverse troll them like a champ
. Unfortunately Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies attract a massive amount of trolls and know-it-alls so being "hostile" is sometimes the only way to restore civility (ironically) because if I let them walk all over me, they'll be emboldened to continue doing the same thing to others.
I don't consider myself a "maximalist", I'm simply naturally sceptical. Nearly all other blockchains really didn't do anything that Bitcoin couldn't, or the features they espoused weren't really useful for end users. Projects can also become corrupted by it's user base and diversity of development is critical if a project is to survive. So when I see a group ruling a blockchain project with an iron fist, I become sceptical of it's success as it's clear that users' best interests are not a priority. So I could hardly be called a maximalist when I turn on Bitcoin after 5+ years as a result of the censorship and hamstringing of development. I want the blockchain that serves users' needs best to be the one to succeed.
Aside from Bitcoin's technology, I was also attracted to Bitcoin in the early days because it's goal was to keep the issuance and handling of money honest, so to speak. It can't be corrupted or misused by a select group or entity and that is very important to me. I'm a staunch supporter of honesty and integrity, whether that be keeping governments honest, banks, organisations honest, etc. . Unfortunately, Bitcoin has become mired in politics, and we can all see that since miners have ignored users, and now answer to Blockstream Core, they are corrupting the very foundation of Bitcoin by yet again allowing a group/organisation/company make all the calls.
So, to answeru/beerbellyfatass more specifically, I've seen a LOT of alt coins pop up over the years. I got into Bitcoin in 2010 so, I've witnessed every single alt pop into existence from the beginning, and I've shitcanned 99% of them as the vast majority were scams to try and loosen Bitcoins from naive users in the early days. I can't even begin to tell you how dumb some early users were, they'd pretty much throw their coins at anything and scammers arrived in droves to try and capitalise on early users' idiocy. Thus my standard for what constitutes a sensible altcoin is understandably very high. It takes a lot for a coin to get past my BS filter, but here is a list of things I find myself looking for when taking another Blockchain project seriously.
- Fair issuance: No IPO, fundraising BS, no premine, the announcement and mining/node software for the network should have been released and open source well in advance.
- Features that answers genuine use cases that users have, and that other coins struggle to satisfy. It MUST be useful to end users in some way, and that use should be obvious. "Turing complete", smart contracts, etc. is NOT a use case.
- Based on solid CS and cryptographic principals. The underlying security should not be based on brand new research, or dubious mechanisms. It is meant to support an economy, so trusting the security to untested, poorly understood, or brand new algorithms or complex mechanisms is a big red flag as tiny bugs could bring everything down, as they say, the devil is in the details (even when I first discovered Bitcoin, I was very sceptical as bugs could undermine even sound theory). For obvious reasons, Zerocoin fails this sniff test. So does any project that uses POS.
- The mining/wallet/node software must be open source, no exceptions.
- It should not be founded, or organised by a for profit group (think Ripple). If it's for profit, you can almost be guaranteed that governments can shut it down, or have backdoors to control the system. And besides that, for profit coins don't exist to benefit users, they exist to benefit the company/organisation, and can be very easily corrupted.
As you can see, Ethereum sits on the fence of most of these criteria, but Monero clearly passes, thus where my "bias" lies. I like Monero a hell of a lot more than Ethereum, but I can't quite throw Ethereum in with all the other scam/shit coins out there. Ethereum has too many red flags but unfortunately users, as usual, have little idea what/why they are getting into Ethereum and simply flock to it because "turing complete" and think nothing of the underlying code or design, or what use cases it's trying to satisfy for end users. Ethereum as a result looks far more like a pump and dump than a serious contender. Monero OTOH has obviously been carefully designed to address certain needs everyday users have, and many long term problems considered and addressed before getting started. They never had an IPO, all coins were issued via mining, was open source from the outset, based on solid algorithms, and done by volunteers.
/essay
