Divides grow among the ever-increasing numbers of Bitcoin supporters. These schisms have existed since the very early days of the technology. Yet people were compelled historically by a common vision to band together and push forward as a united movement.

Bitcoiners hold a wide range of views about why Bitcoin specifically, and crypto-currencies generally, excite them. Initially, supporters supressed their divergent opinions in favor of universal goals, but as the Bitcoin ecosystem has matured, the bond between supporters has weakened.



In the Beginning Were Techies First were the technophiles. Satoshi and his contemporaries held lofty discussions about how to make digital-currency technology work. For example, how to create a system such as hashcash or bit gold without the double-spend problem. It is not clear whether even they realized the import of the results of their discussions. Techies continue to be fascinated by new algorithms for securing the network, experimenting with side chains and tree chains, metaprotocols using Bitcoin’s blockchain as a substrate, new approaches to anonymity, next-generation 2.0 metachains , and all the new and shiny advances that follow. So the techies came first. Who else could understand why Bitcoin would work where previous iterations had not? Who else would set up machines to "mine" these worthless digital things? Technologists create; if their creations have value, others follow. Geeks soon began to realize that this weird idea of a blockchain as a mechanism to achieve consensus across a distributed network had merit. It was not simply an inefficient, sloppy way to store data. It was, in fact, a solution to a classic problem in computer science, ensuring data integrity on a network, without requiring trust in any specific node. People quickly began to think of other applications, such as decentralized domain-name systems, and more. Many people began mining what would eventually become fortunes. This led to the inevitable first exchange of value involving Bitcoin, the famous 10,000 BTC pizzas , a story that has since become a cherished part of Bitcoin history Then Came Progressives

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