SiggeB
Active Pivian
Kindness in this community is a decision, made again every day.
Picture someone’s first day in a crypto Discord. They ask a basic question, the kind everyone asked once. In plenty of places, the answer is an eye-roll, a link, or a joke at their expense. Here, someone answers. Politely, and usually with more detail than was asked for.
Nobody handed PIVX that tone. It isn’t in the code. It isn’t in the whitepaper. It exists because a lot of people, over a lot of years, kept choosing it.
Grown first, written down later
The tone came first. For years, long before there was any rulebook, it grew the way the PIVX community DAO itself grew: organically, one interaction at a time, because enough people kept behaving that way.
The guidelines are much younger than the culture itself. They were written down in 2022, after some hard discussions, when people repeatedly crossed the line and the community had to decide whether this culture was something it was willing to defend.
The community decided to defend it. A clear majority agreed, the guidelines went up, and the reason was plain: a privacy coin for everyone has to be a place where a newcomer isn’t scared off by rude or sexist comments before they ever reach the technology.
That sequence matters. A culture imposed from above is just a rule. A culture that grows on its own, gets tested, and is then written down by the people who live in it is a choice, made twice: once by habit, and once on purpose.
It was never the easy choice either. The default tone in crypto tends to run loud and abrasive, and choosing otherwise costs effort, patience, and sometimes a thick skin. This community has paid that cost knowingly, for years.
The mosaic
In the previous article, the subject was votes and comments: every proposal vote, every forum reply, every small decision is a tile in a mosaic. Tone works the same way. Each answer to a newcomer is a tile. Each calm reply to a heated post is a tile. So is each sneer, which is why the sneers matter too.
Step back and the tiles add up to a picture, and the picture does something. It decides who walks in and who walks out. A community that treats newcomers well attracts people who want to build, teach, and stay. A community that treats them with contempt attracts an audience for the contempt, and loses the people who might have built something. Nobody designs that filter. Everybody’s behavior operates it.
The other idea
Lately, some voices in our own community have argued that kindness is weakness: that friendliness is naivety, and empathy a vulnerability waiting to be exploited. Take that idea seriously, because it isn’t new, and it isn’t entirely foolish.
It reached a wide audience in early 2025, when Elon Musk said on the Joe Rogan podcast that the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. He credited the idea to Gad Saad, who coined the phrase “suicidal empathy” and has since made it the title of a book arguing that kindness can be misdirected until it harms the people practicing it. Both men hedge. Saad says empathy is a virtue and the problem is too much of it, misdirected. Musk said he believes in empathy, but that it gets weaponized.
Here’s the kernel of truth: kindness can be exploited. A community with no boundaries ends up run by its worst-behaved members. Anyone who has watched a forum decay knows it.
Now look at the conclusion. If kindness can be exploited, the answer is boundaries. Firmness and friendliness aren’t opposites. You can say no clearly, give your reasons, and hold the line without insulting anyone. Contempt is cheap, and it gets mistaken for strength because it’s loud.
And there’s the long view. Darwin argued that natural selection would favor sympathy, because communities with the most sympathetic members would flourish best and raise the most offspring. Peter Kropotkin, a Russian naturalist, took the point further in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). Drawing on his expeditions in Siberia, he argued that the competition-only reading of Darwin misses half the story: species that practice mutual aid are often among the most successful and numerous, and cooperation matters as much to survival as competition does. Humans survived as a species by cooperating and caring for each other, above all the young and the vulnerable. A trait that central isn’t a bug in the system. It’s the system.
Communities that chose
History keeps showing the same pattern, and it’s usually collective.
In the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, during the Second World War, villagers sheltered Jewish refugees, many of them children, at real risk to themselves. Estimates run to several thousand people. Pastors André Trocmé and Édouard Theis and Magda Trocmé led the way, but it took household after household saying yes, and Yad Vashem later honored the village as a whole.
In October 1943, when Nazi authorities moved to round up Denmark’s Jews, ordinary Danes ferried more than 7,000 of them across the water to neutral Sweden. The great majority of the country’s Jews survived the war.
In the months before the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, students spent hours in workshops rehearsing how to take abuse without returning it. That was discipline, a shared decision to answer hostility with composure, practiced until it held.
None of these people were naive. They were organized, brave, and clear about their lines. Their empathy came with spine. Friendly and firm is the combination to borrow.
Firm and friendly, in practice
A collective choice isn’t unanimity. Some will push back on the guidelines or test where the lines sit. Some argue that being asked to be respectful limits their freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech matters, and nothing in the guidelines asks anyone to give it up. It protects your right to say what you think without being silenced for it. It doesn’t license you to insult the person you’re talking to, and it doesn’t oblige a community to host the insult. Speaking your mind and being rude are different acts, and anyone can do the first without the second.
The answer to all of it is the one a community gives anyone: the same standard for everybody, applied calmly. Say what the line is, say why, and don’t make it personal. Disagreement is welcome. Insults are where the guidelines draw the line.
Proud
I’ve been part of this community since 2019, and what I’m proudest of is neither a feature nor a price. It’s the choice. A lot of people, none of them required to, decided this would be a place where a stranger gets a straight answer and a kind tone, and where a hard disagreement can still end in a handshake. When voices said kindness was weakness, the community answered the way it always has: by continuing to be kind, and by holding its lines without raising its voice.
That’s what standing your ground looks like here.
Every message you post is a tile. So is every reply you decide not to post in anger. Choose the picture you want to see.