Anthony Lusardi, the U.S. Director of the Ethereum Classic Cooperative, analyzes the factors that allow digital currencies to succeed in this op-ed:

If you’ve been in the Cryptocurrency space for any significant amount of time, you may have noticed some divides between communities that vary from minor contention to vicious arguments to utter insanity.

Most notably, you may see this when it comes to those who take a fundamental approach to Cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin Maximalists, and those with a more generalist approach, say Ethereum. If you’re familiar with the arguments, but not the history, then you may see a lot of this as heavy-handed conflict. And it is… sort of.

We have so much conflict because our social belief systems around Cryptocurrency are just starting to develop. However, our words sometimes betray our intent. Fundamentals are crucial because we need to scale socially. After all, Cryptocurrency is roughly the third and most viable attempt at creating a sound digital currency.

But social scaling is hard, it’s harder than tech scaling in many respects, and the only way to properly scale socially is to agree on a set of rules. Violating these rules is not just a disagreement, it is a threat to the underlying core of what makes Cryptocurrency work.

We need to agree on predetermined rules because, at its basic level, Cryptocurrency is designed so that as long as you agree to these rules you get:

A known monetary supply; no secret printing of money.

Counterfeit prevention; no one can make copies of money.

Freedom to transact wherever and whenever you want; no banks to freeze your money.

You don’t need to know how the system works, who created it, or much else. You just need to agree to the rules and you get these guarantees. If you break the rules, the guarantees start to break. They appear as surface cracks that steadily deepen over time.

If you break the monetary supply guarantee, you’re forever exposed to new issuance.

If you break freedom to transact, then a majority can vote against a minority and prevent them from accessing their money; even when the minority has done no wrong. Human history is full of examples of a majority financially oppressing a minority.

These cracks that appear in the social layer have the potential to erode the very foundation that Cryptocurrency is built on. If these cracks lead to fracture, our experiment will have been a failure; it will need to restart with a new generation that rediscovers the very same things. We don’t want this. This is much more important than the “dollar value of Bitcoin.” This is about the Bitcoin value of Bitcoin.

Disclaimer: This is an op-ed article. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and should not be viewed as an endorsement by SludgeFeed. This article is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. Always conduct your own due diligence before making investments.