Who is a Bitcoiner? The Saffron Warriors of Crypto

There is a reason why Bitcoin is portrayed in saffron colour. Saffron, eh? Rings a bell? Elections are around the corner and you will soon see news channels featuring saffron-clothed people speaking on how a particular religion is at risk. They will tell you how opposition party plays petty politics in the name of religion. All of it, while doing the same themselves.

But this ain't no political blog. We are all here to talk about the nerdy shit. Something that emerged from the smelly dorm rooms of misfits and rose to become one of the most valued assets in the world.

While you rub your eyes to read this again, below is a graphic representing Bitcoin's recent takeover of Silver in terms of M-Cap.

So why are we nitpicking the colours today? Well, I have my reasons. And the reasons shall be revealed.

But before that, let us discuss about the wars that crypto has waged and the wars that are on within the industry.

What is a Bitcoiner?

Outside the industry, anyone who owns Bitcoin is a Bitcoiner.

But the connotation is very different within this closed group. Bitcoiner is actually a mindset. It is a belief that all world currencies just suck big time and eventually Bitcoin will takeover as the sovereign currency of the world and everything will be hedged to it.

Another rationale that is often cooked up by Bitcoiners is that Bitcoin is censorship resistant. Which is also true, but too much in the face.

On that note, let us now understand what makes a Bitcoin akin to a saffron warrior. Let us get started.

The Split in the Crypto Community:

We look like a cohesive family from the outside. Just some geeks trying to change the world.

However, just like every other Indian family, we do a good job of pretending. Within the community, there are two types of people.

One of them are maximalists a.k.a Bitcoiners. These people believe that Satoshi Nakamoto (pseudonymous entity behind Bitcoin) came up with the concept of Blockchain only to run Bitcoin atop it. There is no other purpose of existence of Blockchain.

These people would argue that anything else that speaks of Blockchain is a scam. In fact they came up with a term for all other types of cryptocurrencies existing in the market. Its called 'Shit coins'.

There's also a famous saying in this community:

"There's no second best"

This signifies that even if you replicate the model and technology of Bitcoin for anything, you just cannot replace it.

Also, these people would then go on to bash the entire theses of decentralization outside the currency use case.

On the other side we have generalists. These people believe that Bitcoin paved the way for a movement. An ethos that takes the power away from the centre and hands it over the people.

You can apply this theory to any setup.

And thus emerged the era of decentralized storage, decentralized social media. So on and so forth!

So Who is Winning?

Well, Bitcoin came into being in 2008. It started gaining some traction 5 years later and is well established and regulated (somewhat) asset class in these 15 odd years of its existence.

On the other hand, Ethereum, which is the second largest cryptocurrency and came into existence in 2015 has a value of $52 Billion while writing this (source) locked on it.

My only submission here is that other general purpose Blockchains (the ones who have applications outside money, unlike Bitcoin), have so far not nailed any mass use case.

I mean for once let us even ignore NFTs and Doggy Coins. But even the meaningful use cases have not managed to scale outside the community.

We always tell ourselves that we are so early, but I do not know how long that 'early' is going to play out.

Why Bitcoiners are Saffron Warriors:

Due to the lack of meaningful use cases at an enterprise level, the interest in the industry is currently correlated to Bitcoin's price.

And our saffron warriors leave no chance of leveraging this vantage position. So much so that at times it seems they might stifle innovation in the process of disregarding other use cases of Blockchain.

One reason behind this is that these folks understand Bitcoin inside out. They have also made a fortune from that asset as they got in super early. Therefore, the definitely have a bias towards it.

Quick question. How do you know someone is a Bitcoiner?

A: You don't have to, they'll tell you.

There's this urge of talking about Bitcoin all the time.

Do you think I am a lowkey Bitcoiner as well? I started investing in 2020. So I do not think I am at even 1% of what these people have made.

So just like a saffron warrior, Bitcoiners try to convert you, try to shit on you if you believe in something else and bully you if you promote your own beliefs.

But then, every cycle, there is a conversation around 'flippening'. The event when ETH will surpass BTC. Do you think it will happen in this run?

Only time will tell.

This blog post is part of the blog challenge ‘Blogaberry Dazzle’ hosted by Cindy D’Silva and Noor Anand Chawla in collaboration with Mads' Cookhouse.

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