Polkadot - Bitcoin Maximalist Right? NFTs make sense?

Welcome back to the channel. I hope you're having a great day. So today we want to talk about the Bitcoin maximalist. Is the Bitcoin maximalist correct? Is he right? And what I mean by that is it's been coming out that Bitcoin maximalists, or at least a great portion of them, believe that most of the cryptocurrency space either the coins and projects are going to end up in the category of redundant or they're scams or something to that effect. And in the idea of the Bitcoin maximalist saying that, you know, really at the end of the day, really everything could be pretty much used with Bitcoin, is that correct? And, and how, and, and what is the final verdict on that? So I want to go over a few things. First, what is my position? Am I a Bitcoin maximalist? I'm some weird combination of a Bitcoin maximalist and, uh, um, I see, whereas I agree with the Bitcoin maximalist is that many things Bitcoin can account for, be used in place of, that you don't need another cryptocurrency or another project to a certain degree. Uh, most of my interest in other cryptocurrency projects have been more as an assistant arm for Bitcoin, right? To work alongside with Bitcoin, to optimize Bitcoin, make Bitcoin more efficient in a way. And, and the deal in looking at it, a project like Polkadot, in the Polkadot community I, you know, I think it's important that any idea of Polkadot, there was going to have to be a situation where the network could scale, right, and it could do some in the most efficient way. The parachain technology that Polkadot uses makes a lot of sense to me that you will want to have these block— these interoperable blockchains to have the easy way to scale cryptocurrency, that Bitcoin running, you know, servers to no end with proof of work was just not going to be a sustainable model into the future. It was just not going to work out if Bitcoin could grow to the scales that I think many in the space would like to see it at. So what does this all mean, right? What are, what are we saying here? Are the Bitcoin maximalists right? Are all these cryptocurrency projects just, uh, uh, basically going in circles, right? Not really gonna do anything. And we're gonna talk a little bit about NFTs today. I'll talk a little bit about DeFi. I'm gonna try to get a little deeper into the Bitcoin maximalist philosophy and a little understanding. So, so let's first start at the beginning before we approach it. Let's look at how the idea of the Bitcoin maximalist came about. So first in the beginning, of course, it was Bitcoin, right? And Bitcoin, when people talk about blockchain technology, the Bitcoin maximalist would say that they're really talking about Bitcoin, right? You can't talk about the blockchain, and the only standing example you would have for a blockchain working at any conceivable level as we could imagine would be Bitcoin, right? So the Bitcoin maximalists would say you cannot divide the blockchain from Bitcoin, right? And so they're correct in that the only— the best model in cryptocurrency we've seen work is Bitcoin, right? They're correct, and it's the safest network so far, um, that's been tested and proven, you know, to the, to the fullest degree so far. And it's the first of its kind, right? Now, of course, when the cryptocurrency economy first started, it was very small. And when you got something like Bitcoin, um, it could facilitate Bitcoin in this small pool, right? But as you start to begin to get more altcoins, other projects, some would argue that the idea of the introduction of more money was, uh, questionable to agree to a degree. And what you might see is, uh, altcoins starting to gain some dominance over Bitcoin. That's to say, from that small pool, you could possibly be diluting Bitcoin. And there may be some truths in that and some falsehoods. Some people take it to the extreme and they say, well, you're creating more Bitcoins and thus diluting Bitcoins, although you're only saying it's only 21 million now. The thing is, early on, many projects did pretty much run on Bitcoin code, right? We got your Litecoins and your Dogecoins. And not only did they run on Bitcoin code, they were— some might think of as redundancy coins, you know, as to say they were doing the same thing as Bitcoin, that they weren't really, you know, doing anything different or anything new. Of course, one could argue that in any market you would need competitors, and you can, you know, you can argue that, you know, some of the other platforms, chains, might have worked better for smaller transactions, whereas Bitcoin didn't. And so there was this type of justified existence of many of these cryptocurrencies despite the possible dilution that was caused to Bitcoin from them now pulling from Bitcoin pool of funds. I, I think when we fast forward that to the future, we get a similar throwback gene, you know, with the Bitcoin maximalists. And the more of these altcoins pop up, the more of these platforms pop up, and the more of these scams pop up, it only hurts the value of Bitcoin ultimately. right? It hurts their personal investment, so they're going to be naturally against any competitors. But if we were to take a purely scientific approach, a non-biased approach, what is really happening, right? So, um, let's think of it as what's happened with the space over the last several years, right? If the Bitcoin maximalists are correct, what we've actually seen in a, in a, in a weird way, if we kind of go back, we had many several kind of cryptocurrency hype cycles going, right? First we heard had the Lightning Network, right? Not to be confused with Bitcoin Lightning, so to speak, because Lightning could work on any chain. But just this, this idea that you're gonna have in some type of custodial capacity, and this is gonna kind of relate to what's happening with wrapped, you know, Bitcoin and wrapped, you know, Ethereum as we go on with this. But you, you had that hype cycle that was supposed to be the breakdown in the new way forward to the future, and I kind of went away, right? And then what you had was you had the security coins, uh, security tokens, uh, that came out, and that was supposed to be the next way forward. That didn't work out, or it kind of just went away. And then you had, um, Of course, first was the ICO craze with all the different projects popping up in Ethereum being created and all the funding happening off Ethereum. Now we get— now the latest thing is, was DeFi, right, for this year, decentralized finance. And we saw what happened with that, scam after scam and project hopping after project hopping. And, uh, some people are now predicting the next several months DeFi will be another thing that kind of gets— I won't say taken off the list because there are some decentralized finance projects that I think are going to still be pretty strong and around, but obviously the hype cycle will be gone and everything will level off like all the other, uh, ideas I just mentioned that went through this space. And then last but not least, the NFTs. So where is this in relation to the Bitcoin maximalists being correct? Is NFTs in that succession, uh, just another thing that's going to be pushed under the bus? So let's get a little bit into the minds of some of the things that they're saying about it, because, you know, the, the obvious thing is that the Bitcoin maximalist, if he's not going to accept altcoins and if they're going to, uh, not accept wrapped, uh, Bitcoin and liquid Bitcoin and so on and so forth, then I— my assumption is they're going to have a lot of problems with the idea of NFTs. But let's get into this article a little bit from Cointelegraph. It was written by— get the author here— Andrew Shevchenko. And let's just read a little bit what he was saying about this. It says that Consensus distributed on May 12th, Blockstream presented Light Night, a Fortnite-like game that used the Liquid network for storing non-fungible tokens representing game items, right? Uh, non-fungible tokens mean, you know, uh, if you're, if you're not familiar with NFTs, non-fungible tokens, these are like one-of-a-kind, uh, cryptocurrencies. Like you think of something like a baseball card a rare baseball card, think in terms you could do this virtually with a cryptocurrency. And this level of authenticity that can be, you know, basically gathered from this thing is of value to someone, whether it be an artist or creator, so on and so forth, right? If it's a work of art, you can have a one-of-a-kind work of art. And it says here, while the game is developed by independent company Satoshi's Games, Blockstream has sponsored the game by running a token giveaway. The announcement has garnered a considerable amount of criticism from Ethereum fans given the longstanding rivalry with the Bitcoin maximalists. Non-fungible tokens are traditionally associated with Ethereum and other smart contract blockchains and receive constant criticism from Bitcoin community members as part of that association, right? So not all Bitcoin community members welcome the Liquid NFTs, with notable Ethereum critic, uh, Udi Wertheimer commenting that nobody wants NFTs. So that's, uh, some commentary from the, from the Bitcoin community. And the reasoning behind this, the only thing I can think of is, you know, of course there have been these notable Bitcoin maximalists. Some, some that come to mind are like Trace Meir, Tone Vees. People are just diehard on Bitcoin and they don't believe anything else really needs to exist in the space. Um, and whereas I, I do share some similarities to them, not in the sense that I don't think there should be other cryptocurrencies, but in the sense that I feel that it doesn't necessarily need to be redundant cryptocurrency projects. You know, in other words, if you know, if you had a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and there was a creation of more Bitcoin-like products with Bitcoin Gold, you know, unless it's going to be doing something Bitcoin can't do, you know, specifically like being able to transfer the value of Bitcoin some type of way or so on and so forth, you know, it's probably not going to really serve a lot of space to just keep creating, you know, the same type projects, right? You know, in that way, I think that might be signaling or helping to understand why Bitcoin maximalists feel this way, because like what Trace Mayer would say was the way that they look at altcoins is that, yeah, they're fun, you know, they're fun. It's fun to gamble. It's like a like a night at Las Vegas. But what they're really saying is that these aren't really investments. These shouldn't be taken as serious investments on the level of maybe a Bitcoin or possibly an Ethereum. But again, with the Bitcoin maximalist, he's probably the hardcore Bitcoin maximalist. He's probably going to have a large issue with Ethereum as well, right? Even though Ethereum has— is pretty much up there at the level of Bitcoin. And as far as the decentralization in many respects may have achieved that, um, to, you know, or, or close, as close as possible to a level of Bitcoin. Uh, the Bitcoin maximalists would still have some, uh, some, some issues with that. Um, so, so in, in digesting NFTs a little bit more, this gamer's pitch, right? This like Fortnite type project and all of the hopes and aspirations of the cryptocurrency now, uh, pushing NFTs, you know, along with DeFi and the many other things that they push that they're no longer pushing at this point in time, that hasn't moved the overall cryptocurrency markets forward, um, anywhere like I believe they say it has, right? Um, in that, in that way, then, um, what are NFTs and what can we expect from them, or an idea? So it's hard to really, I think, for anybody to really 100% narrow down what NFTs are, or rather what the success rate of them going to be. Uh, we do have just history to see what many of the hype projects have done You know, remember, it's a lot of scammers in the space. There's a lot of people want to turn a quick buck. It's a lot of, uh, coin and project, uh, creators that want to make quick, fast money. And, uh, right, they want you to put your money in. You're gonna lose your money, right? Are NFTs gonna be it? So, and are NFTs unique? So first of all, you know, I think, you know, even in the cryptocurrency space, we could call to attention something like CryptoKitties. Um, you go back before that, the concept of, um, NFT-like virtual items, right? These non-tangible items is not new at all. It— this was not the first attempt of it. Many virtual worlds have done this, um, and have done them on a level that I think is far beyond what many of the cryptocurrency projects are doing now, where you can enter into these virtual worlds and you can go to an art show And you can have a VR headset and you can look at this art and the art would be no copy, no transfer, right? And it wasn't just art. It could be motorcycles, cars, uh, private jets, planes, yachts, whatever, right? And, uh, they would meticulously build these, uh, very, uh, valuable virtual pixels on a screen, right? And this is the idea that this is— we're talking probably about going back to the early 2000s, you're talking about maybe 20 years ago that this concept has been explored. Uh, there are many technical reasons why it didn't take off. Um, you know, of course, if you're doing something like that on a level I think people, you know, like the gaming community would appreciate it. Um, you know, because you're looking at something like Fortnite and people are making money to do that, and, or you're making a, uh, or a lot of these billion-dollar video game companies are would probably want to just start their own blockchains and do a similar thing and keep their base there. And they may not even do it— they wouldn't necessarily need to do it with cryptocurrency, right? They could kind of do a similar thing to what they've done with many of these virtual worlds. So I don't know if that necessarily would work, you know, and as far as authenticating, you know, the artists. Well, let's look at this other article that talks about some incidents that happened with NFTs thus far. Okay, so this article was taken from Liam, Liam Kelly of Crypto Briefing. Solving for identity is proving difficult for the crypto art scene. Um, on February 8th, artist Karan Singh notified the blockchain-based art platform Rarible that some of his work had been fraudulently listed. Although the issue was quickly resolved, the NFT space has since been debating how to prevent future incidents, right? So this crypto art heist, as it were. And so the article goes on to speak about, you know, ways to deal with the security issue in this, you know, but what's driving this one-of-a-kind, you know, new technology, you know, is there are some problems with it, it might possibly seem, and that's going to be the most important aspect of the dependability of this type thing. And once you get past that part, also, if it's really something necessary that the space is gonna need and that people are gonna really be using. Now, I was watching, um, um, an interview earlier. I think it's called the Bitcoin Sessions. Some of you are probably familiar with it, and they talked a lot about how many of these NFT projects that existed past and prior that had the same promising hype around it that not many people used it, right? That it didn't catch fire. So is this another prophecy from the Bitcoin maximalists and that they're saying, hey, you know, this NFT thing, this DeFi thing, we're staying away from all of that stuff, right? And we're just gonna ride the censorship resistance, um, solid, sound money, uh, blockchain idea of Bitcoin and leave it at that, right? The overall question, do we need everything on the blockchain? That is another important question, right? Is it necessary to have, uh, many things on the blockchain, right? Or is it just so much we have what we need now? I do agree with Bitcoin maximalists in many ways on those ideas. And getting back to the Polkadot network and the Polkadot community, I'm a big believer in the Polkadot community because to me, I feel it's the lead right now on how the cryptocurrency space can scale. Because even if you're a Bitcoin maximalist, you still have to maneuver around what are we going to do about all these servers spending all this energy, right? It's going to have to be some type of sidechain or way to work with Bitcoin to some capacity. And, um, you know, much of the Liquid Bitcoin, the wrapped Ethereum, the wrapped Bitcoin, and so on and so forth, you know, many of these, these issues with that is that they aren't on the Bitcoin blockchain, right? And that creates many issues for um, the Bitcoin maximalists. So BitcoinMYK, which is on the Polkadot network, another cryptocurrency that's not on the, uh, the Bitcoin blockchain per se. Let's talk about why BitcoinMYK is different within the Polkadot community yet serves the Bitcoin community, if we are to believe the narrative that the Bitcoin maximalists has put out there that Bitcoin is, uh, really the only cryptocurrency that we need, right? That everything else is a waste of time, that's out or scam, or it's a waste of money, or it's a boom and bust cycle, wouldn't happen like the last many several others that happened. So let's talk about that a little bit. Okay, so we're here on the BitcoinMYK site, and I thought it was important, uh, try to end this video with trying to help the cryptocurrency community to not only see some of the issues of how Bitcoin maximalists feel and why I believe they're right about many things that they, you know, that many problems and issues that they bring up, right? Problems that need to be solved. I believe that interoperability is still going to be necessary and there's going to need to be some type of, uh, Bitcoin sidechain to facilitate the growth, some parachain as it were, like Polkadot has. And we believe Bitcoin MYK is what's making that, uh, it's going to be one of those projects that make that possible to use these sidechains in order to facilitate the scaling of Bitcoin and help it to work more like what we believe its true idea was to be more like a currency that has more use and not so much as a store value. The US dollar and the euro are the most traded assets in the world. It's not gold. Um, it's not platinum. It's not something like that. It is the, um, the US dollar and it's the euro, right? So these are things that are getting the most use. So being able to help Bitcoin facilitate this way, in a way like that, we think is part of the answer solution. At the same time, be able to scale. Now, um, in looking at what we believe to be the problem with what's happening with many of these ideas like Liquid Bitcoin and wrapped Bitcoin is that a lot of times these things happen off-chain, as it will be happening with us. But here's the, here's the difference. It usually requires some type of movement of the Bitcoin itself, right? Whether it be in some custodial capacity, um, under a governance model like, you know, it's proposed with Liquid Bitcoin, and these, uh, this, this group can make whatever decisions they want, which makes the decentralization of it quite questionable. But what if instead of you actually having to turn over your Bitcoin to these entities and, and, um, have them off, you know, of, um, things happening off the chain. What if you could just keep your Bitcoin in your wallet and use what we believe to be what we call the Bitcoin Wave Network, uh, where we basically can use, uh, versions of, um, social media, uh, these decentralized social media which protects your identity and link your accounts together so we know which wallets belong to what accounts whilst at the same time protecting your identity through decentralized social media. And basically use that as a claim function in which you will be able to move your Bitcoin value without actually moving it out of your wallet. And that's, that's very important. And we're not going to go into detail on this video, but You can look at our white paper. We'll try to leave a link in the description, and you can see where we believe this idea like this would work better, where your, your Bitcoin doesn't actually move, right? It stays in your custody, but you verify that you own it and you're able to move it. It works different than just a type of airdrop or fork system, and that through these networks you're able to verify that you hold so many Bitcoin, you're able to just claim the BitcoinMYK cryptocurrency. So it's very interesting, and it does require, uh, people involved with this project who are creating useful cryptocurrency beyond just the profit margin and just making money. I think that's what's— if you look at the early days of Bitcoin, the engineers and the developers who put so much of their heart and soul into developing Bitcoin. These people weren't necessarily looking to get compensated or paid from this, you know, so to speak. I don't believe they all were. So the point I'm making is there's a, there's a big line between developing great technology and supporting its value in the future and just trying to turn a profit, right? There are examples of CEOs who have given up large salaries and given all their employees the same amount of money that they make, and it's proven over the years later to be a profitable model that works. So part of the cryptocurrency problem space, or part of the problem with cryptocurrency, is Unlike Bitcoin, which were a lot of people who put their heart and soul in to believe in Bitcoin and probably did it not just to make profits, cryptocurrency has become this very capitalistic, business-driven model now where everybody's just trying to make as much money and value as they can, and they're putting that forth over the actual use and values bringing people. And that doesn't always work out best for the advancement of technology in every situation, right? We have many examples where it hasn't worked. But Bitcoin NYK, very interesting. Imagine a network so vast using a combination of universal basic income and absorbing the Bitcoin network to where without moving their Bitcoin they can transact, um, throughout, on, throughout the Polkadot network the Bitcoin value, right? Without taking value away from Bitcoin itself, as the actual Bitcoin would stay in their wallets, right? They would just have this cryptocurrency, but it would be, um, proven that they're the owners and that that value means something as they grow the Bitcoin MYK network and move from place to place. So it's a very interesting idea. I invite you all to look at the— read the white paper, check it out. We'll leave a link in the description. Give me your thoughts on it, what you think about it. Uh, we think it makes perfect sense, but that's all I want to say in this video. If you like content like this, don't forget to like and subscribe. And as always, until next time, take care.