Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox appears to be confident that Bitcoin’s closed-minded community culture will eventually cause its downfall.
In a recent social media post, he cited the famous business adage, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast."
Even if Bitcoin has a superior technical strategy or market position, a dysfunctional community ("culture") will ultimately undermine it, which is why Wilcox is bearish on the leading coin.
Zooko believes the Bitcoin community has become hostile toward innovation and developers. He contrasts this with his desire for Zcash to maintain "high openness" and allow for evolution.
"I guess we just do our best to retain high openness as a personality trait/practice. Maybe we can engineer Zcash so that a minority of users who want to evolve it can do so successfully against the wishes of the majority," he said.
The feud with a Bitcoin maximalist
Zooko’s comment was a reaction to a recent feud between Alex Pruden (CEO of Aleo) and a Bitcoin maximalist "Coinjoined Chris," who is also known as the co-founder and CEO of Seedor.
Pruden claimed his team released a tool to help protect Bitcoin against future quantum computing threats.
However, "Coinjoined Chris" mocked the effort, calling it a "scam," and acting dismissive.
Pruden lamented that the "Bitcoin high priest community" is toxic and scares away serious developers who actually want to fix Bitcoin's problems.
If the culture rejects developers and new solutions (like post-quantum security), Bitcoin will eventually fail to adapt to existential threats, regardless of how strong its current price or strategy is.
However, as reported by U.Today, Strategy's Saylor recently opined that Bitcoin developers would eventually adopt a fix for countering the quantum threats, dismissing the concerns about the high level of decentralization within the community potentially making the process too protracted.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team