Let me explain Bitcoin Maximalism for those who are critics of it. Bitcoin offers the same service as every single token on the market. Bitcoin offers the same hooks into the system as all other tokens on the market. The question of blockchains is what do they represent?

Bitcoins are the exhaust of millions of miners on the network burning energy. You might call them a energy burning receipt. You burn energy, you get a receipt. This process is a perfectly competitive process. Very simply, profits for mining will trend toward $0.

So the important question is which blockchain most purely represents the risk model of burning energy. The systematic risk of creating bitcoins is squarely on the miners. Thus, they are entitled to the exhaust in its entirety.

The easiest, cheapest, fairest way to calculate who gets the next block is to reward it based on a global hash receipt that indicates whether you burned enough energy to earn the reward. This allows private contracts to form that let's mining pools distribute combined earnings.

Every complication that is added between mining and getting coins is a cost. Rewarding the developers comes at a cost to the people whose money is most at risk (the miners). Adding round robins to your chain to have miners selected is a risk. Risks are costs.

Costs on mining are costs to miners. So here's the thing, as mining moves forward, miners will mine whatever is most profitable. The nature of blockchain is that this can be programatic. But the closer each chain gets to net $0 profits, the more obvious these costs become.

Perhaps ETH's proof of stake costs the miners 1% of their earnings. Well, that will be hard to calculate right now. But if ETH and Bitcoin are both perfectly competitive, it will mean that ETH is -1% profitable in a world where mining profits are 0.

That means, if you give your developers a 15% cut of the earnings, that's all good and well today. But that means that as Bitcoin trends toward $0 profits on mining, your chain will become -15% profitable.

Unless a blockchain does something different from Bitcoin, there is, very obviously, a necessary natural Monopoly effect that MUST occur. So let me set out for you how this all matters.

1) Money is more useful, the more people that use it. (network effect) 2) Private money that is created at $0 profit, is better than money that is created at negative profits, unless you believe the printers ought to go bankrupt regularly. 3) Energy is a zero-sum game.

If it is burned by a miner, it can't be burned by anyone else. There is a maximum amount of it in any place. Miners will monopolize these energy sources, maximizing returns.

5) Despite what you think, all blockchains are competing for the same gas - energy. There are no "features" you can add to mining that make it more interesting than a simple SHA256 hash. Complication adds risk. Risks add cost. Some complication is necessary.

All complication that is not necessary should be excized. 4) The money that is cheapest to make (least obfuscated profits) will be the most secure. One coin will win the Monopolization of energy mining in each given area.

If there is a subsidy, that subsidy will be sucked out of an area with the most efficient coin to mine. 4) The money that is cheapest to make will eventually win all the miners. To them, the cheapest coin to make will simply reflect their risk most closely.

Miners have no incentive to hold the coin. They want to hold the profits. They are not set up to earn their bones on volatility. That's a different business.

5) As effects of perfect competition sets in, the profit-stealing complications of other blockchains will become obvious. This will cause chains to see sudden collapses, similar to computer-based stock market collapses.

Computers will be chugging along calculating which chain is most profitable, then, once you cross into that frontier where Bitcoin mining profits are tenths of a percent, moving asymptotically toward 0%, other chains will drop below 0% profitability.

These chains will fade suddenly into the night as every miner switches their machine off at the same time. You won't see it coming. You won't understand what happened. We'll be analyzing why a chain failed post mortem. And Andreas, and your other heroes will just be perplexed.

Oh and don't forget this important fact: those that profit from volatility are not the ones profiting from mining. Volatility traders can make money up and until the moment miners cease to make money. Then it all crashes. Traders are downstream from mining profits.