Let's Try to Kill Tribalism in Crypto
By BCGamer —
Tags: editorial, bcgamer
Tribalism in crypto is not a discourse problem. It's economics. People don't defend theses — they defend bags, and bags don't update on arguments. So this post isn't going to convert anyone's favorite maximalist. It's for the smaller group: people who still run the numbers and want their numbers stress-tested. The method is simple — cut in both directions until only the true stuff is left standing. Here's what that looks like in practice, applied to the loudest fights in the space right now.
Start with the sentence Bitcoiners hate
Bitcoin cannot do the world's payments. Not "eventually," not "with L2s" — cannot, by construction.
The math: base layer does ~7 TPS, which works out to ~220 million transactions a year at the theoretical ceiling — the network's actual 2025 total was 154 million. The world is roughly 8 billion people making a couple of payments a day — around 185,000 TPS. Bitcoin covers about 0.004% of that, and no soft fork moves it by the four-plus orders of magnitude required.
Lightning doesn't rescue the arithmetic, because onboarding is on-chain. Every human needs at least one base-layer transaction to open a channel. Eight billion channel opens at ~220M tx/year is over thirty-six years of completely full blocks — no other payments, no closes, no rebalancing, no disputes. At the throughput the network actually runs, closer to fifty. And unilateral exit, the property that makes Lightning trustless at all, assumes you can get out on-chain when it matters. At scale, you can't. None of which makes Lightning useless — for the already-onboarded it's genuinely excellent: instant, near-free, a real working rail for remittances and micropayments. What it cannot be is the onboarding ramp for eight billion people. So the realistic L2 endgame at world scale is custodial-ish hubs and federations — a banking system with better settlement. That's not a dunk on the engineering; it's arithmetic the engineering inherits from the base layer.
If saying that out loud feels like betrayal, congratulations: you've located your tribe membership card.
Now the sentence the anti-Bitcoin crowd hates
None of that matters, because payments were never the job.
Hard money has never been the thing you buy gum with. The gold coin bought the horse; copper, banknotes, and credit at the grocer moved underneath it. Fedwire settles trillions per day with a comically small transaction count, because institutions net positions and settle differences. Seven TPS is plenty when the transaction is "two federations square their daily net." It's insulting only if you claim the coffee.
So the honest framing is: Bitcoin is a store of value with a real exit option — you walk into the store for a television, not for chewing gum. The exit being rare is fine. The exit being ceremonial is not, and that distinction is where Saylor's "never spend, spend fiat" pitch quietly kills the whole point. The credible threat of permissionless on-chain exit is the mechanism that keeps vaults and paper honest. Gold wasn't captured by changing the atoms. It was captured at the vault and the paper market. If your Bitcoin lives at three custodians and exit is theoretical, you own the sequel.
The spam war: both sides are right, which is why it's ugly
Bitcoin Core v30 lifted OP_RETURN from 83 bytes to 100KB, Knots node share exploded in protest, and both camps have been insufferable since. Here's the cut in both directions.
Core's technical argument is correct. The old limit wasn't stopping data — it was rerouting it into worse channels: witness stuffing, fake pubkeys and bare multisig that bloat the UTXO set forever, out-of-band deals with miners that bypass the public mempool. OP_RETURN outputs are provably unspendable and prunable from chainstate — it is genuinely the least harmful garbage bin available. Filtering at the policy layer is a fence against people with ladders.
Knots' instinct is also correct, for a reason the Core side keeps missing: Bitcoin's security model runs on unpaid ideological labor. Nobody operates an archival node for the economics. Volunteers are the subsidy — and spam taxes exactly them. The guy with the node doesn't quit because the SSD got $50 more expensive; he quits the day he feels like he's hosting someone's JPEG casino for free. Every volunteer system has a budget, denominated in motivation, and "it's not a big problem yet" is true on the spreadsheet and false in the morale ledger.
Add two clocks ticking against the "deal with it later" position. First, the damage is irreversible by construction — data embedded today is in the chain forever; no policy downgrade removes it. Second, every halving makes miners more fee-dependent, and spam is fees. The later the fight happens, the bigger the bloc whose cash flow depends on the junk. You negotiate norms while nobody profits from breaking them, or you don't negotiate at all.
And one assumption just died quietly: every "chain growth is fine" argument since 2010 leaned on storage getting perpetually cheaper. In 2026, with AI datacenters eating the world's DRAM and NAND supply and SSD prices doubling, that curve inverted for the first time in Bitcoin's existence. The chain grew ~80GB last year; the disk to hold it doubled in price. Purists worrying about node accessibility aren't LARPing anymore.
Be precise about what "node accessibility" actually means, because the entry math for an ordinary user never worked as economics — running a node has no revenue side. No block reward, no fee share, nothing. It is a pure cost center: hardware, bandwidth, electricity, attention, all paid out of conviction. The system's quiet genius was keeping that cost low enough that conviction alone covered it. Every dollar the entry price rises is a dollar deducted from that margin. And yes — thankfully there are people with money who buy big drives and keep full copies alive; they're load-bearing right now. But decentralization was never measured by whether the wealthy enthusiast can afford the hardware. He always can. It's measured at the marginal participant — the student, the mechanic, the guy for whom $200 is the deciding argument. The network is exactly as decentralized as the thin end of that distribution, and rising entry costs amputate it from the bottom, silently, one non-decision at a time.
The Kaspa test: can you praise without a killer narrative?
Here's a clean tribalism detector: describe a competing project accurately, costs included.
Kaspa attacked the one place where a real scientific gap existed. Nakamoto consensus throws work away — every orphan block is paid electricity in the trash, which is what forces the slow block rate. GHOSTDAG showed that's an artifact of the linear chain, not a law of nature: include the parallel blocks instead of losing them, and security stops paying a speed tax. That's moving the tradeoff frontier, not repainting it — unlike bigger blocks, which buy throughput with the same coin, just more of it, or bigger hardware. And to be fair to the bigger-hardware school: Solana shipped. Real throughput under real load, real users, real fee revenue, the fastest-growing stablecoin rails outside Tron. Its honest cost is a validator class that lives in datacenters rather than living rooms and a Nakamoto coefficient hovering around twenty — a different bet, openly priced, not a scam. Kaspa's bet is that the frontier moves without paying either bill.
Crucially, the costs are named and priced. Nodes get heavier with every bps. Pruning isn't a feature, it's a survival condition — history is disposable by design, archival is a luxury tier. And state bloat is taxed in consensus via storage mass (STORM) — Kaspa wrote the invoice for the exact externality Bitcoin still debates the existence of: the spammer pays a miner once, every node pays storage forever, and nobody bills the difference.
Does that make Kaspa a Bitcoin killer? No, and the reason is the most useful concept in this entire post. Monetary premium and utility premium are different games. When silver was demonetized in the 1870s, the gold:silver ratio didn't hold at 15:1 — it roughly doubled within two decades and eventually blew past 80:1. Not because silver got worse as a metal, but because it lost the monetary role, and the monetary premium consolidated into one asset. Schelling points don't take roommates. Bitcoin plays for the monetary premium, where the inert asset wins — everything improvable is changeable, and changeability is exactly what you don't want in hard money. Kaspa plays for utility premium, where the capable network wins. Asking which kills which is asking whether the Visa network kills gold. The question isn't wrong as an answer. It's wrong as grammar.
The only scenario where they actually compete is if Bitcoin's governance drags it into the utility game — pictures, expressiveness, "Ethereum but better." A contest it is objectively mediocre at and always will be. Which means Bitcoin minimalism isn't nostalgia. It's competitive strategy: undefeated at one table, second-to-last at the other, and every "enrichment" is a voluntary seat change.
Sit with the irony for a second, because it's the best one in the space: Bitcoin minimalism is the actual maximalism. The people fighting to keep the protocol small, boring and untouched are the ones maximizing the only premium it can win — while the self-declared maximalists demanding it do everything are quietly shorting it at both tables. The loudest defenders are the attack vector. Crazy world.
Multi-chain is not amnesty
The multi-network conclusion has a failure mode of its own, and it's worth disarming before someone weaponizes it: "the world needs many chains" slides very easily into "therefore my chain is needed," and suddenly every zombie ledger has a mission statement. No. Multi-chain is a statement about roles, not a ticket for every project with a community. The test per chain is the same one we just ran on Bitcoin and Kaspa: which premium is it competing for, and does it hold a mechanism advantage there — or just a fanbase?
Bitcoin Cash is the cleanest natural experiment crypto has ever run — and the tribal reading of it is lazy in both directions. As engineering, it delivers exactly what it promised and keeps shipping: sub-cent fees, working peer-to-peer cash today, CashTokens bringing native tokens and covenants to a UTXO chain without bolting on a VM, and an adaptive block size algorithm that quietly solved the very debate it was born from. The metal is fine. What it lost was the monetary premium contest: the Schelling point didn't move an inch, because Schelling points don't take roommates — and the price chart records a demonetization, not a technical failure. BCH is the literal silver of the earlier analogy: demoted from money to metal, worth a fraction, still perfectly functional. Its genuine contribution was settling the big-block question empirically — with real capital and real code instead of forum wars. The whole industry builds on that answer now. It was paid for by the people who believed in it, and they're owed the acknowledgment, not a victory lap.
Litecoin survives for the opposite reason — it stopped competing for the throne. Staging ground (SegWit activated there before Bitcoin), the only major PoW chain that actually shipped optional privacy (MWEB) while everyone else was still debating it, consistently near the top of real merchant payment rankings, fourteen years of uptime nobody tweets about. There's a quiet dignity in a chain that knows exactly what it is and has delivered it without drama for a decade and a half — most of this industry could learn from that.
Ethereum earned a seat by asking a genuinely different question — programmable settlement — and the composability moat is real. It has its own unpaid bills (L2 value capture, complexity as attack surface), but "Ethereum must die" is tribal noise: the stablecoin economy alone falsifies it daily.
Cardano is the honest hard case. Credit where due: Ouroboros is genuinely cited consensus research, the stake pool set is among the most decentralized in all of proof-of-stake, and it built actual on-chain governance while most of the industry runs foundations with extra steps. The differentiator is real — formal methods, peer review, slow correctness. But after nearly nine years the usage numbers don't validate the thesis. Not stupid, just unconfirmed. Whether nine years is patience or denial is exactly the kind of question the numbers should settle — not the fandoms, on either side.
And here the capacity math from the top of this post comes back around, and it cuts against the "these chains must die" crowd harder than anything else. World payments are ~185,000 TPS. Now take the best-engineered payments chain in the space and max it out on paper: Kaspa at 10 bps does a real ~2,400–3,000 TPS today — about 1.5% of the world. The 32 bps roadmap gets you to roughly 5%. The full 100 bps endgame, everything on the roadmap shipped and working, lands around 25–30,000 TPS — call it 15%, and that's before node costs at that speed thin out who can participate. Read that again: the ceiling of the most serious scaling attempt in PoW is one-seventh of current demand. You would need six fully maxed-out Kaspas running flat out to cover today's volume — and volume grows. No single ledger, no single architecture, carries the world. Plurality isn't ideology; it's arithmetic.
And read the ladder honestly: 15% is a ceiling, on paper, with every roadmap item shipped and working. Real numbers land below ceilings — they always do, that's what makes them ceilings. Which leaves something like 85% of the world's payment volume as unclaimed territory even in the optimistic case. That gap is the actual frontier in crypto, and here's the uncomfortable part: it will get filled either way, because demand doesn't wait for quality — flow routes through whatever exists. So the only real question is what fills it. Secured, purpose-built rails — honest tradeoff engineering, priced externalities, decentralization that survives contact with success — or degeneracy: the thousandth EVM clone with twenty validators, memecoin casinos cosplaying as infrastructure, TPS numbers measured on empty testnets. The gap doesn't judge; it just fills. Which means the quality bar for what gets built into that 85% isn't aesthetics — it decides whether the crypto standard arrives as infrastructure or as a carnival with a ticker.
It's also how payments already work everywhere else: Visa, UnionPay, Pix, UPI and SEPA have coexisted for decades, segmented by geography, jurisdiction and use case, and nobody writes manifestos demanding that most of them die. Redundant rails aren't waste — they're resilience, and in a world where the exchange layer is the capture vector, they're censorship resistance too.
Say the conclusion out loud, because it's the whole post in one line: the destination is a crypto standard, not a Bitcoin standard. "The Bitcoin Standard" works as a book title and fails as an infrastructure plan — a chain covering 0.003% of world payments can anchor the system's value, but it cannot be the system. A monetary standard is a full stack: a settlement asset nobody can touch, multiple secured high-throughput rails moving value at the speed of life, and independent exchange paths between all of it. And "secured" is load-bearing in that sentence — a monetary standard needs rails that no small group can pause, censor or reprice, any more than it can run on seven transactions per second. Strip any layer and the whole thing collapses back into either fiat with extra steps or a vault with no doors. Insisting it must all happen on one ledger isn't conviction. It's tribalism with a reading list.
So no — the goal is not for chains to die, and cheering for deaths is just tribalism with a body count. But the correction cuts both ways: a chain adds capacity to the world's problem only if flow actually runs through it. Empty blocks contribute zero TPS, whatever the whitepaper promises. The filter isn't differentiation, it isn't ideology, and it certainly isn't team — it's utilization. Tron passes it while being universally despised: it carries roughly half of all USDT in existence — $90 billion, moving trillions of dollars a year, the largest real payment flow crypto has ever produced — because it did the unglamorous things right: three-second confirmations, fees measured in fractions of a cent, and years of just working in the markets that need dollars most. A chain no ideology respects, and every user with actual fees to pay keeps choosing. BCH fails the same filter despite working exactly as designed — because the filter measures flow, not merit. Some chains will fade into zombies anyway, because blockchains don't liquidate — and that needs neither cheering nor mourning. Flow decides. Everything else is commentary.
Where the actual war moved
If the future is multiple networks doing different jobs — and the arithmetic says it is — then nobody needs to capture a protocol anymore. They need to capture the points where value moves between them. Gold, again: vault and paper, not atoms.
Look at where regulation actually aims. MiCA doesn't write consensus rules. It licenses venues. Nobody in Brussels is editing a whitepaper; they're deciding who's allowed to route your euro into sats. The multi-network thesis is incomplete without its second half: multiple independent classes of paths between networks. Centralized exchanges for depth and fiat rails — regulatory chokepoints by construction. Genuine atomic swaps for sovereignty — HTLCs, no custody, no wrapped IOUs (a bridge is not a swap; wrapped tokens are paper bitcoin with a different ticket, and bridges are the industry's hack graveyard). Self-custody rails for the bad day. The system is as sovereign as its worst exit path, and not a gram more.
Networks are the organs. Exchange is the circulation. Historically, the embolism is always in the circulation.
The checklist
Tribalism has a smell, and you can test yourself for it. Does your position contain a number? Can you state what would change your mind? Can you name the cost of the thing you support — not just the thing you oppose? Have you ever conceded a point to the other camp in public? Do you own the asset you're defending, and did you disclose it?
Mine, for the record: Bitcoin should ossify — fixes, quantum resistance, nothing else — and that position has two unpaid bills I know about (the post-subsidy security budget, and the fact that quantum migration will be the largest, most contentious change ever, arriving exactly when the muscle for coordinated change has atrophied). Kaspa is the most serious PoW attempt at the payments problem, currently at ~1.5% of world payment volume and targeting roughly 15% at the full 100 bps endgame — an engineering path with a visible ceiling, versus Bitcoin's 0.003% with a consensus wall — and its own open questions are node cost per bps and a fee market nobody has seen under real load.
No killers. No messiahs. Two different questions the world actually needs answered — where value sits so nobody can touch it, and how value moves at the speed of life — and a network is exactly as good as its refusal to do the other one's job.
And the point was never to cheer less — crypto without conviction is just fintech with worse UX. The point is that the cheers and the spit both have to be earned, per claim, per chain, per number. Boo what actually deserves booing. Celebrate what actually deserves celebrating. Count first — the numbers will tell you which is which, and they don't care what's in your bag.
Because when you add up everything the counting says, it comes out to one sentence: the way out of fiat is a crypto standard, not a Bitcoin standard. One chain anchors the value. Many secured chains carry the world. Independent paths connect them. Anything narrower isn't a monetary system — it's a fandom with a treasury.
One apology before the disclaimer, owed first to myself and then to everyone who's read me over the years: I should have been cutting in both directions much earlier. It costs less than it looks — the only thing you lose is a team. And to everyone this piece made butthurt: I'm sorry too, in the way numbers are sorry. They're not. Neither am I.
Not financial advice. DYOR — and by "research" I mean the kind with numbers in it, not the kind with a laser-eyed avatar. I hold some of the assets mentioned, which is exactly why you shouldn't take my word for any of this. Everything above is falsifiable on purpose; if the math is wrong, the comments are open.