I was scrolling through Twitter (or X) when I came across a post from 2022 that I had saved. The content itself wasn’t surprising — a sharp critique of any project that wasn’t Bitcoin, laced with a certain sense of pride. But what caught my attention was precisely that performance of uncompromising purity. Not because it was new, but because it recurs with an almost ritualistic regularity. That was the moment I realized: Bitcoin maximalism is not merely a technical or strategic stance — it is an orthodoxy in the making. This text emerges from that impression.
In the crypto world, few discourses carry the symbolic weight — and normative rigor — of Bitcoin maximalism. This is not merely a matter of technological preference, but a specific way of seeing money, the State, innovation, and even economic morality. Maximalists do not simply defend Bitcoin as the best digital asset; they reject everything that is not Bitcoin as heresy, illusion, or fraud. The intensity of this rejection cannot be explained solely by technical or strategic arguments. What is at stake here is the construction of an orthodoxy.
Like any orthodoxy, maximalism operates as an ideology. In the most productive sense of the term, ideology here is not deception, but a way of organizing the social world through narratives, values, and symbolic boundaries. In this imaginary, Bitcoin is not merely a technological invention — it is the first “truly free” money, a rupture with centuries of monetary centralization and a step toward a “natural” economic order, unimpeded by politics.
This vision resonates with ideas from the Austrian School of Economics, especially through authors like Hayek and Menger, but it also draws from a more recent ethos: that of cyberlibertarianism. As David Golumbia has shown, many crypto enthusiasts see Bitcoin as a bulwark against the “state monopoly on money,” but in doing so, they end up reinforcing a new form of orthodoxy — less statist, but by no means less authoritarian.
Within this context, the maximalist community constructs a narrative rooted in purity, vigilance, and exclusion. The religious metaphor is no accident: Satoshi’s white paper functions as a foundational scripture, and anything that deviates from its doctrine is treated as apostasy. Altcoins, experimental blockchains, and interoperable proposals are not seen as legitimate alternatives, but as moral deviations and existential threats. This logic of exclusion is not new: as Pierre Bourdieu has shown, every orthodoxy is built by defining its heresies — and what is at stake here is the monopoly over the legitimate discourse about what constitutes “real money.”
This symbolic vigilance becomes more intense in what has come to be called toxic maximalism, a term that initially emerged as a critique but has, tellingly, been embraced with pride by certain sectors of the community — often accompanied by the hashtag #ToxicMaximalist. Toxicity, in this context, is claimed as a combative virtue: a sign of uncompromising loyalty to the “truth of Bitcoin.” It is not merely about defending a technical thesis, but about policing the boundaries of legitimate discourse and sanctioning — through sarcasm or hostility — any attempt at deviation. This behavior, reiterated on social media and amplified by algorithms, functions as a disciplinary mechanism. It reaffirms orthodoxy not just through logic, but through public shaming, openly discouraging a plurality of perspectives. What is at stake here is not merely the purity of the code, but the purity of the community.
There is also a more concrete political-economic component. Maximalism tends to naturalize certain positions of power within the ecosystem itself. Large Bitcoin holders, miners, and influencers have clear material interests in maintaining the idea that there is no alternative. The discourse of scarcity (the 21 million), of predictability, and of absolute decentralization serves simultaneously as a belief system and as a rationalization of privileged positions. At this point, Polanyi’s critique is worth recalling: markets — and currencies — are never purely self-regulating, even when they appear to be. What maximalism does is to mask new forms of centralization and influence under the rhetoric of technical purity.
For this very reason, the projects that most disturb maximalism are not necessarily those furthest from Bitcoin, but those that suggest a different kind of monetary future — more modular, interoperable, adaptive. Ethereum, Cosmos, Polkadot, as well as programmable currency projects and decentralized finance initiatives, propose a monetary order based not on rigidity, but on plasticity. And here the clash becomes paradigmatic: maximalism, in this scenario, behaves as a conservative force. It does not oppose innovation in the abstract, but rather the kind of innovation that challenges its founding assumptions.
This clash may be read as a dispute between different regimes of justification, in the terms proposed by Boltanski and Thévenot. Maximalism justifies its vision based on principles of moral worth (purity, honesty, resistance to censorship), while other projects rely on pragmatic justifications (functionality, efficiency, scalability). No consensus is possible, because the criteria for legitimacy differ.
In the end, Bitcoin maximalism is not merely a technical phenomenon, nor solely an economic one. It is, above all, a sociological phenomenon: the attempt to consolidate a regime of truth and authority in a new, fluid, and still-contested field. Every successful ideology does this — it turns a technology into destiny, and a choice into dogma.
