[ mslm dvlpmnt ]

I am increasingly reading criticisms from old Bitcoiners who complain that the scene, now that it is gaining more and more attention from the mainstream public, is being misrepresented by the wrong people. Specifically, by writers and influencers, not the old core developers and those who actually contributed to the development and the outcome we have today.

Honestly, I understand this, better than you may think. Because we’ve had the same development on the Internet before.

The pioneers do the dirty work, and the talkers reap the harvest. And that stings, I know. But that’s how it’s going to go. The sooner you realize that, the better.

Because it’s only due to one thing: We, as a society, with our messed-up values, give more value to charismatic speakers than to diligent, visionary, hard-working workers. Yes, we are messed up; we have to admit that. There’s no way around it.

We had the same phenomenon in the early days of the World Wide Web. When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and HTTP. When the World Wide Web Consortium, founded by him, had something to say about the development of web language specifications. And when the inventor personally witnessed everything going downhill, leading us to live in gated communities bombarded with ads, letting our privacy be stolen and sold, and being as easily manipulated as a bunch of lemmings in a crappy 80s computer game. Honestly, we collectively messed it up. Because, as I said, we value a few rhetorically skilled, charismatic talkers more than visionaries and hard workers.

Mr. Berners-Lee had a pretty good roadmap for the WWW and HTML back then. He wanted to move towards the Semantic Web. He worked hard on markup languages that should make it effortlessly easy for search engines and other aggregators to determine whether the number 2000 on a webpage represents a price, the model year of a car, or the number of votes in a club election. Human and all other network-like relationships could be represented quite simply through an RDF dialect (Resource Description Framework). These are all real precursors to AI. It’s about machine understanding. Represented through simple authoring markup. Because understanding comes before inference. And on a broad level, not just, as it is today, reserved for a few selected AI Big Tech companies.

A necessary intermediate step for this was the transition from XHTML 1.1 to XHTML2, a strict but semantically reliable markup language. Nothing for idiot WYSIWYG editor users, like we have in abundance today (Webflow, WordPress Elementor, etc.). But for real developers. Well, back then, only a fraction of frontend developers were even capable of writing valid (i.e., error-free) XHTML 1.1. And since we live under the rule of the undemanding ignorant, the majority of mediocre front-end developers naturally saw their professional existence threatened if XHTML2, while more powerful, became stricter.

In the war between XHTML2 and HTML5, HTML5 won. And do you know why? Because HTML5 had audio and video players as elements that no one uses today. All professional players are still built with JavaScript today, not with HTML alone. And it was less strict. You can even omit a closing tag in HTML5. No validator would complain. And we don’t use HTML validators anyway today. They’re useless, because HTML5 is too loose. But the main reason was that the majority of mediocre frontend developers were scared shitless of the new strictness and complexity of the new markup language, which could be extended modularly through its own XML and RDF namespaces. At that time, a few “influencers” from the midst of this majority, supported by a few big tech companies who naturally feared having to pay HTML developers more in the future because they would become rarer, all campaigned for a laxer HTML but with a video player. And the lemmings chose this crap.

The inventor of HTTP and HTML was not heard. His vision of the Semantic Web was over.

And instead of search engines that are easily manipulable by content publishers who truly understand what’s happening on our websites, we sit like idiots behind the signups of just a dozen rich big tech moguls who can’t even write HTML5. Well done, humanity.

In the Bitcoin scene, similarly, we will be witnessing more and more paid and unpaid (because simply foolish but eloquent) propagandists from centralized exchange platforms (but hey! cleverly combined with the profiles of traders and investors whom you can follow and like their buys and sells!!), legally tightly regulated on/off-ramps, the slow death of P2P and self-custodied wallets, and the failure to establish a genuine circular Bitcoin economy. Because you can’t do Bitcoin with a fiat mindset.

And dear deserving Bitcoin pioneers: Thanks for your contributions, you’ve done great work that many others can and will reap from. But now it’s time for you to step aside and let the right guys in ties eat the cake. Just so you know.