Over the weekend I had a surprisingly refreshing and constructive debate on Twitter with Lyn Alden - a macroeconomic analyst from the traditional finance world who also focuses on Bitcoin. If you want to read the full debate you can click here but in today’s piece I won’t be discussing the debate itself - rather, I wanted to discuss why debates like this are very rare in the crypto community.

sassal.eth 🦇🔊🐼 @sassal0x

Just wait until people start breaking Bitcoin once the block subsidy gets too low and the network can't pay for security since fee revenue isn't growing to fill the hole

Lyn Alden @LynAldenContact

Imagine making an iPhone, and then twenty thousand imitators make a buggy knock-off fake iPhone with a glued-on Apple symbol, that doesn't work properly. That's "Bitcoin vs crypto". Test everything. Break everything that can be broken. https://t.co/Mi6nkjWWUY

May 15th 2022

29 Retweets381 Likes

It’s obviously no secret that there is extreme tribalism in crypto between pretty much every “camp” - no matter if its between layer 1, DeFi or NFT communities - a lot of people are tribal and there is a lot of bias (usually dictated by what investments people hold). This naturally means that having any sort of constructive debate is near impossible and usually results in people being blind to the other sides viewpoints simply because they feel like accepting those points would be bad for their investments (and in some cases - bad for their ideologies).

My experience with debating people on Twitter has mostly been a poor one - especially since Twitter is possibly the worst platform for debate in history. You can’t have a constructive conversation because there’s no room for nuance, random people join the thread and usually spout bullshit and there’s no moderator to keep the debate in check. So what ends up happening is that the debate forks off into a million different threads, everyone has an opinion on it very publicly, and then people forget about it shortly after - literally leading to a waste of energy for everyone.

In saying that, there are some positive outcomes that come from these debates - one of those being that onlookers are educated. There is a “silent majority” on Twitter that doesn’t interact with tweets or make their presence known at all - but they are always watching (“lurking” if you will). These are the people that I think it’s important to reach as they can learn valuable things from these debates even if the debate itself isn’t constructive. They also become more informed on who is an honest person in this ecosystem and who is not - this is actually a really big deal!

I’m not expecting these crypto holy wars to die down any time soon - in fact, I’m expecting them to only get worse over time. I mean, tribalism is obviously not unique to crypto and is an inherently human trait, but throw in monetary incentives & ideologies and you’ve got yourself the perfect storm for monkey-style poop throwing. The best we can hope for is that the market continues to flush out all of the bad projects over the long-term and the cream continues to rise to the top - but maybe this is wishful thinking.

Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano

Enjoyed today’s piece? I send out a fresh one every week day - be sure to subscribe to receive it in your inbox!

Join the Daily Gwei Ecosystem

• Twitter

• YouTube

• Discord

All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.