“In my head it is just one more crisis. I keep buying bitcoin,” says Pau Ninja, internet entrepreneur and podcaster. Since spring, cryptocurrencies have lived in a so-called crypto winter. Bitcoin, the main cryptocurrency, has fallen to figures similar to those of 2018. The rest have fallen even more. Crypto-focused investors live these months between caution and fear. But there is a group that appears calm and highlights a schism within the crypto world: bitcoin is one thing and the rest is another.
Pau Ninja considers himself a “bitcoin maximalist”: he invests only in bitcoin, without wanting to know anything about the others. “Cryptocurrencies are a bubble, or better, many bubbles,” says the 31-year-old businessman, who goes by the stage name moniker. “This is like the dotcom crash on steroids. When the bubble burst, then the entire sector did not sink, the Internet did not disappear, but three, four, five companies remained, ”he adds. This is what he hopes will happen with bitcoin. His behavior has nothing to do, he says, with that of the so-called cryptobros.
This division is widespread in the sector, although it is not always shared. “A maximalist bitcoin is a person who has been educated a lot and understands bitcoin,” says Cristian Via, co-founder of the podcast and channel Hablando Crypto on YouTube. “The cryptobros, on the other hand, are looking for the gem, something that will make them rich. In crypto jargon it is said ‘this gem is going to make a per 100 or a per 1,000’. I have talked to a lot of crypto bros and they are looking for how to get rich real quick,” he adds.
Pau Ninja’s so-called maximalism comes from “having studied”: “I didn’t have a stage of crypto speculation, but I just put my toes in the pool and with the pandemic I jumped into bitcoin,” he explains. “What has helped me is to do the bird’s eye view, to look at it from the outside. I use many studies, but what tells me is common sense. I see clearly that bitcoin is the long-term winner,” he adds.
The “maximal bitcoin” claim that they base their investment on savings and not speculation. They have even adopted a specific word to indicate it: “hodl”, from the English hold, to keep, but popularized with a mythical typographical error: “Without hodl, a maximalist would become a cryptobro. A cryptobro who has bitcoin. Without hodl, any fundamental long-term perspective is lost”, says Pau Ninja. “The current volatility is temporary. If you’re a maximalist, who cares: I’m going 10 years, I don’t look at the current noise, ”he adds.
Another trait of maximalists is their contempt for the rest, says Raúl Marcos, founder of Carbono, a crypto-focused fund: “Bitcoin maximalists are people who strongly believe that Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that has meaning and value, and many times they call the others shitcoins, including ethereum. They are very aggressive against anything they see as an attack on bitcoin and are quite anti-change,” he describes.
Pau Ninja manages eight employees who help him with his podcast (which includes a paid community and has had a total of nearly 3 million downloads of 400 episodes), his YouTube channel and his related e-commerce projects. He made a lot of money a few years ago with affiliate pages: they are the ones that talk about a specific product, from irons to skateboards, and send traffic to Amazon, which then pays them a commission on the sales. Their success depends a lot on whether they come out first when someone Googles that product.
Pau Ninja Albert Garcia
All the money you save goes into bitcoin. And he assures that it is not about the alleged pyramid scheme of these digital currencies: “The pyramid scheme is pensions and the current monetary system. Of course, bitcoin gains value as more people enter, like the Internet. It is the network effect. But there is no one above who gets rich, ”he explains.
His confidence is total, except for one small detail: that someone appears. Bitcoin was created by a person or entity named Satoshi Nakamoto, until today anonymous. There is a purse that supposedly belongs to him that no one has touched or moved since its founding. That person would be a millionaire if he showed up. Pau Ninja’s fear is that suddenly the money in that wallet will move. That would unleash a global fury to find out who is really behind bitcoin: “If there was a single movement in that portfolio, it would mean that something has happened, that there has been movement there. We seek that neutrality, that there is no visible face, ”he says.
Multipotential like Da Vinci
The studies that Pau Ninja analyzes to discover which investment is the best with common sense also bring him closer to other areas; some more linked to financial decisions, such as living in Estonia to avoid paying so many taxes. But from there he has gone on to reflect on diets, exercise, how to flirt, sunbathe or watch porn. One of the reasons is because, he says, it is “multipotential”: “There are many people who are not multipotential until you define it for them. Society, since we are little, tells us that we must specialize. It makes perfect sense. But there are other people, like me, who have changed studies a thousand times. It is not because of indecision, but because you want to do everything at once. I discovered this French concept, it is the opposite of a specialist.
The ultimate goal of a multipotential being is to become a polymath, he says: “He is a master of various areas. Leonardo da Vinci was a master of a lot of things. I will want to be a polymath in the areas that interest me, but it is not you who decides it”.
This ability to be convinced by theories from such specialized disciplines may be related to the security that the crypto world exudes, something that happens with both maximalists and cryptobros. “Perhaps there is a profile that the anti-establishment is looking for,” says Cristian Via. “When you understand cryptocurrencies well, what they can solve, and you see the ignorance and misinformation in some media, you wonder if perhaps they have taken more things out of context. It’s critical thinking,” he adds.
This mixture of subversion, internet and rediscovery of the world brings together the most sociological and least economic vision of the crypto world: “They are united by the desire to go against the system,” says Raúl Marcos. “Both maximalists and cryptobros will talk about financial freedom, that crypto is not controlled by governments, that with crypto you can live wherever you want without limits. With what crypto has grown in recent years, there is already everything, but I would say that people with a libertarian vision continue to predominate, ”he adds.
The recent titles of Pau Ninja’s successful podcast show his desire to vary and his conviction: “You are addicted to porn (and you know it)”, “Eleusinian Mysteries: the Bible (did not) lie… it was misunderstood”, “The value of a man is determined by his values”, “Men with style: dressing well does not mean being fashionable”, “Suffering on purpose: why live in search of pain”, “Testosterone: home secrets to increase it”. All of these titles are just a few from August and September. The variety is much greater.
“Since I am interested in so many things, I try to be efficient and hack the system of each area that interests you. If you are interested in nutrition you do not try to read all the nutrition books because you know that later on you will not be interested. You try to take the seeds, you are not looking for generalized information, but to see where the key to everything is. That takes a lot of information and experimentation. For 6 years I was on vegetarian diets. Later I saw that they didn’t work,” she says. Now he defends that eating meat is the best.
The audience of these podcasts and of this world is male. There are hardly any “cryptosisters”. Pau Ninja knows it: “I know what it’s like to get into a big puddle. It’s not that I’m only targeting men, but now I’m starting to do it because for hundreds of episodes my audience has been men. It is natural, because we are a different balance of hormones. Saying you don’t believe in the effects of testosterone is like saying you don’t believe in the effects of insulin,” he says.
He knows that they accuse him of ideologies or of voting for parties that he does not feel as his own, but he does not hesitate to point out that men today are “threatened”. “I’m not afraid in any way that they think I’m some kind of anti-feminist. Those who are highly attacked are men. It is the grace of having a platform, that you can encapsulate your thoughts, it is a sign that I have lived and come to my own conclusions, ”she explains. He recently bought the masculinity . Com page for 1,000 dollars, “the blog to be more masculine”. There is a niche, apparently, to be exploited and, as an expert in cryptocurrencies and “bitcoin maximalist”, he has part of the way done.