Maxwell’s post is unsparing about both the substance and tone of the current push to constrain on-chain activity. “The knots vision of Bitcoin seems to be a system (in)secured by altruistic hope and populist theocracy—by cancel culture and paper straw bans,” he writes, adding that such campaigns “are really popular on social media and (I expect) a big fail in the real world.”
The through-line of Maxwell’s argument is that the project must not bend to “would-be censors” merely because they are “loud and obnoxious,” deploy legal threats, or invite government action. Instead, contributors will “route around them by using and improving Bitcoin just as they would with the weapons of any other attacker.”
He emphasizes that Bitcoin Core is not a vendor optimizing for customers, but a group building a network they themselves want to use: “The people who work on Bitcoin do so for themselves— to create and protect a system they want to use. They’re not making a product for customers… Everyone is invited to share in the benefits of their work if you want what they’ve created, sure. But they’re not going to work against their own interest in a open system secured by economics and resistant to human influence because of popular outcry.”
That “not a product for customers” line quickly became a flashpoint. “Everyone who runs Core IS a customer. This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read,” X user BaconBitz objected. Buterin, who had elevated the exchange earlier, pushed back on that framing with a terse aesthetic defense: “No, it’s a paragraph written by someone who understands that a good protocol is a work of art.”
In a characteristically caustic turn, he suggests that advocacy recently “picked up a little traction” not just because of sentiment shifts but also funding dynamics, alleging “he got handed millions in charity investment after becoming an involuntary no-coiner, and now can pay people to work with him and promote his positions since few would previously do it voluntarily.”
“It’s nothing new that there is a sizable portion of the population that understand ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’ and a sizable (and vocal!) portion that don’t understand it or don’t agree with it.” In that spirit, he warns against meeting censors “half way” and rejects the idea that threats of state action should steer protocol stewardship.
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $111,567.
