Don't Be a Crypto Highlander

There is an old movie from 1986 about immortal swordsmen who wander the earth for centuries, hunting each other down, because of one very simple rule: there can be only one. Whoever’s left standing after enough decapitations wins “The Prize.” It’s a great movie. It is a terrible investment strategy.

And yet, if you’ve spent more than about four minutes on Crypto Twitter, you’ve met this guy. Maybe you are this guy. He doesn’t own a katana, but he might as well. He’s out there swinging his favorite coin like a blade at anyone who dares suggest another chain might also have a use case. He is, in the parlance of this blog, a Crypto Highlander: a person who has decided that their coin isn’t just a good investment, it is the final form of money, the last blockchain standing, the one true chain to rule them all, and everything else is basically already dead, it just hasn’t stopped twitching yet.

There can be only one. Except, in crypto, there will obviously never be only one, no matter how hard the Highlanders swing. Give the sword its due: enough relentless “it’s already dead” posting actually can kill a fragile coin. The derision becomes the death. Confidence craters, liquidity walks out the door, and the prophecy fulfills itself. But that’s the exception, not the rule. There are, at last count, something like twenty two thousand of these coins on CoinGecko’s list, and tens of millions of tokens if you count everything on chain, a few dozen of which are doing something genuinely useful, and no amount of dunking on them is putting those back in the ground. This is the joke. This is the whole joke. Let’s get into it.

A Brief History of the Immortal Maxi

Every cycle produces its own Highlanders. In the beginning there was the Bitcoin Maxi, the original immortal, who believes that anything invented after 2009 is a scam, a “shitcoin,” or, worst of all, a security. He will remind you, unprompted, that Bitcoin is “digital gold,” that Satoshi disappeared for a reason, and that your altcoin bags will hit zero, actually, eventually, definitely, any decade now.

And here’s a fun bit of etymology for you: the word “altcoin” has been drafted into Highlander service. It began in 2011 as plain shorthand for “alternative coin,” but it has since become a way to lump every other cryptocurrency into one dismissive bucket: alt, as in alternative, as in not the real thing, as in a footnote to the one coin that supposedly matters. It’s no longer a neutral technical term, whatever its users would have you believe. It’s a rhetorical sword, and it gets swung at anything with the audacity to exist alongside Bitcoin. Calling Ethereum, or Nano, or literally any other project an “altcoin” isn’t just shorthand: it can be a tiny act of Highlander warfare baked directly into the vocabulary, designed to make “there can be only one” sound like common sense instead of a marketing slogan.

Then came the Ethereum Maxi, who split off to fight his own duel, insisting smart contracts changed everything and that Bitcoin is basically a spreadsheet with a fan club. Since then, the field has only gotten more crowded: Solana Highlanders who measure their entire personality in transactions per second, XRP Highlanders who spent nearly five years waiting on a lawsuit and have not stopped talking about it since it ended, and, yes, we’ll say it, plenty of Nano Highlanders convinced that feeless, instant transactions mean the rest of the industry is just LARPing as money. (We contain multitudes here at Crypto Highlander. Self-awareness is part of the brand.)

Doesn’t matter which coin. The behavior is identical. Swap the logo, keep the sword.

Signs You Might Be a Crypto Highlander

You know a Crypto Highlander by his rituals. See if any of these hit close to home:

• You’ve unfollowed someone for holding two coins. Diversification, to a Highlander, isn’t a risk management strategy: it’s treason.
• You refer to every other project as “dead” while it is, checks price chart, up 40% this month. Immortals are notoriously bad at admitting anyone else is still breathing.
• Your entire personality fits on a profile banner. Laser eyes, rocket emojis, a coin’s logo where your face used to be. The mask has become the man.
• You’ve said the phrase “flippening” out loud, to another human, with a straight face.
• You believe the only reason your coin hasn’t “won” yet is a conspiracy: by regulators, by “legacy finance,” by whales, by the media, by your cousin who bought the other coin at Thanksgiving and won’t stop bringing it up.
• You’ve replied to a tweet with just “there can be only one.” Congratulations. You have fully transformed. There is no cure. There is only the Quickening.

Why “There Can Be Only One” Was Always Nonsense

Here’s the part the Highlanders skip: in the actual Highlander movie, the whole immortal death-duel premise is presented as a curse, not a lifestyle goal. Nobody in that film is having a good time. They’re tired. They’ve been doing this since the 1500s. The Prize, when someone finally wins it, turns out to be sort of underwhelming.

Crypto doesn’t even have that excuse, because it isn’t a zero-sum duel to begin with. Bitcoin can be a store of value and Ethereum can run smart contracts and Nano can move value with zero fees and TRON can quietly hold nearly half of all the USDT in circulation and none of them have to behead each other in a parking garage to do it. Different chains solve different problems, at different tradeoffs, for different people. That’s not a weakness of the space: it’s the entire point of having more than one experiment running at once. A world that settled on exactly one blockchain in 2018 would currently be stuck using whatever that blockchain looked like in 2018, forever, because nothing would exist to replace it.

The market, for what it’s worth, has never bought the “only one” thesis either. Every cycle, someone declares the flippening imminent, and every cycle, the market cap chart calmly continues to feature more than one bar on it.

How to Not Be a Crypto Highlander

You’re allowed to have a favorite. You’re allowed to think one project’s technology, team, or tokenomics are better than the rest: that’s just called having an opinion, and it’s fine. The Highlander problem isn’t conviction. It’s the sword. It’s the compulsion to treat every other project as an enemy combatant instead of, at worst, a competitor and, at best, a completely different tool doing a completely different job.

So here’s the pledge. Hold your bags. Love your chain. Just, please, put the sword away. Nobody is winning The Prize. There is no Prize. There are just several thousand blockchains, all coexisting, all still here, none of them dead yet no matter how many times you’ve announced otherwise on the timeline.

There can be only one? No. There can, will, and already are many. Don’t be a Crypto Highlander.