Andreas Antonopoulos has caught the ire of numerous bitcoin maximalists following an announcement he is to hold a livestream on ethereum 2.0.
“More than 1500 people voted for me to answer questions about ETH2.0 this month. Thanks for the simple, non-controversial subject,” Antonopoulos said, further adding:
“I’ll be answering questions about POS, sharding, epocs, phases, & more” at 5PM UTC later today.
That’s all it took to trigger whatever pretend bitcoin maxis are left, with Pierre Rochard stating “let’s be clear about who started this: Andreas.”
Apparently talking about ethereum 2.0 is “attempting to bring down maximalists” with Antonopoulos stating:
“I’ve had my book co-authors told to stop working with me to avoid negative affects on their career… it is a very real campaign of harassment from where I stand.”
None other than Adam Back, the el presidente das Blockstream, replied to implicitly threaten with the divorce papers, stating:
“If I do something inadvisable I want people to tell me to think and stop. Critique is good.”
Critique. Apparently Mastering Ethereum was a “bad idea” because it somehow amounts to shilling.
“Not sure it’s an attack to say you were shilling eth, it did kinda look that way,” Back said, to then slightly backtrack but still scolding: “I don’t expect you directly shilled it, but legitimising is indirect.”
Antonopoulos and maxis never really quite got along, but the latter like his generally over the top statements on bitcoin, yet also know Antonopoulos is kind of reliant on maxis, although he says otherwise:
“The only reason I can speak my mind is because I am self-employed and independently financed by donations. Otherwise, they’d be after my employer or sponsors to cancel me, just like they tried with my book co-authors.”
Financed by donations is a bit of a fragile revenue source, with such ‘donations’ very publicly raised once on r/bitcoin.
That sub as you may know is probably under the control of Blockstream, so Adam Back showing his face might be making Antonopoulos squirm a bit.
As you may know, back when the general mood was for more bitcoin capacity through increasing the blocksize, Antonopoulos kind of came out in favor of it.
As it happened, all the other actors in the bitcoin ecosystem didn’t have as much a vital interest in bitcoin’s blocksize as Blockstream. So these other actors made a statement here and there, while Blockstream hired a marketing team and flew across the world to speak one on one with many of these actors.
So Antonopoulos changed his tune in regards to capacity and effectively adopted the Blockstream book.
There, the other side didn’t quite have a Blockstream or control over many social media outlets and eventually didn’t gain as big and as an experienced coding team as Blockstream which hired many of the bitcoin coders. So for someone like Antonopoulos, there probably wasn’t much of a choice.
Ethereum however started off with numerous very skilled coders who ended up inventing something quite new, smart contracts, which are now bringing to reality all the things we’ve talked about for years.
It is also a fairly rich ecosystem, with its own maxis, and attracts its own audience even outside of bitcoin.
So the eth ecosystem might be very tempting for someone like Antonopoulos who gets paid to talk at conferences about how great bitcoin is or, if he manages to withstand the bitcoin maxis, how great eth is.
People like Antonopoulos is however all bitcoin maxis have left in some ways, hence why they made an example of Tuur Demeester.
Both these two have a mainly bitcoin audience, so could potentially introduce some of their audience to eth, but as shown by the $1 billion bitcoin running on eth, it’s not very clear whether there are many bitcoiners left, or new cryptonians, who don’t know eth.
That said the name ethereum is still almost completely unknown down the street while nowadays it sounds like there isn’t a person on earth who has not heard the word bitcoin.
So you can’t blame the maxis too much for trying to keep in line the few talking heads, but obviously it’s a sign of which way things are going.
