Bitcoin, Maytag, and The Mindshare Forks

Maytag washing machines just worked. Why ask for more? Nobody does, but it doesn’t work like that. Turns out, there’s a big downfall in doing a job so well. Every support call is a chance to upsell. It’s kind of a scam, but it’s the way folk are. They are easily captured by the latest gimmicks. In the 80s and 90s, crappier competitors such as Samsung and LG peddled their latest gimmicks, while Maytag fell further into the shadows. The Bitcoin community should take heed.

Invisibility Through Reliability

In theory, a tool should do its job well and quietly.

I have a server. It’s a Lenovo and it runs Ubuntu Linux. I don’t want to be thinking about it. Linux can be a bit of a pain sometimes. Overall, it’s low-maintenance. What a far cry from the Noughties, when I was a computer tech, and Windows Servers used to crash on a weekly basis.

It didn’t hurt market share. In practice— sadly— the dictum holds true: Any publicity is good publicity.

The middle child

Were you a middle child or did you have a middle-child friend? Middle children, sandwiched between the elder bossy-boots and the younger spoilt darling, take on a stratagem of peace-making. They tend to be quiet and reliable. They tend to be overlooked, relative to their siblings. The middle child takes this stratagem into the workplace and ends up being the person who does the most work for the least credit.

It sucks when quiet reliability becomes a liability.

When is quiet reliability good?

You might have an intuition that something is a bit off here because quiet reliability is praiseworthy and not a liability. The truth is: It just depends. It hangs on a couple of factors. Quiet reliability is fine unless the thing is a background service and is culturally dormant. Here’s the flow chart:

Let’s flesh out the flow chart with some examples.

Mercedes Benz cars

• Is it a background service? No.
• Driving is not in the background. You steer, you change the radio station, you turn on the windshield wipers, etc. Furthermore, the car is a blatant showing-off of your tastes and status.
• Hence, following the flow chart, quiet reliability is good.

Apple Pay

• Is it a background service? Yes.
• Paying is mostly unthinking. You point your smartphone at the P.O.S. terminal.
• Is it culturally vibrant? Yes.
• Apple is one of the World’s most famous brands. People take heed of their advertisements and product launches.
• Hence, following the flow chart, quiet reliability is good.

Mindshare

The flow chart might be summarized as a way to find out whether the thing is already vulnerable to being overlooked.

The two forks in the flow chart are, in essence, mindshare forks.

Mindshare beats performance. Was John Bonham the best Rock drummer of all time? Maybe, but it’s the fact of his being in Led Zeppelin which puts him in the discussion always.¹

Bitcoin’s sine qua non: reliability

With bitcoin (BTC), we’ve got to work backwards from conclusion to premiss.

Look at the flow chart. We’ve got to start with the outcome ‘quiet reliability is good’. This is a sine qua non for a monetary system. The vast majority of people will not abide even one mishap with their money. It’s not like with banks, whereby the bank manager can literally type in the missing amount in a database.

Backwards up the arrows then, we need to get to the blue boxes. We need a ‘no’ on the left or a ‘yes’ on the right. We need one or both these statements to be true:

• Bitcoin is culturally vibrant.
• Bitcoin is not a background service.

Bitcoin is culturally vibrant

Podcasts, chat on X/Twitter, friendly rivalry with ether (ETH) and monero (XMR)… all more important than Bitcoin Maxis think. I won’t dwell on this one. It’s the next one which is my main point.

Bitcoin is not a background service.

In a way it is a background service, because the average punter just wants to pay for things, like with Apple Pay or a debit card, and not really care that it’s BTC. Here is the crucial distinction nevertheless. It ties in with my post last time. Bitcoin Maxis should not metaphorically tuck their bitcoin under the mattress. They cannot expect to win with bitcoin being a background settlement layer to finance.

Bitcoin must be a background service brought to the foreground regularly. We must be reminded of bitcoin on a daily basis by using it.²

The Jack Dorsey Mistake

I am mainly trying to strike something I call the ‘Jack Dorsey idea of bitcoin’. Jack Dorsey likens bitcoin to the Internet itself. He thinks bitcoin is the monetary protocol which will beat all others and become the way money works on the Internet.

This is very much fits into the ‘background service’ category.

It won’t work that way. Mindshare beats performance. Sooner or later, a Samsung comes along. It offers bells and whistles and an on-point marketing campaign. Folk don’t think logically in this situation.

Yes, that works for forms of money too. Over the next few decades, cryptocurrencies will need to learn lessons from the art and science of marketing.