“Love me a good manifesto.” Actually, we’re struck by how many altcoins HAVE manifestos – and why they feel the need AND they choose the word “manifesto” in the first place.

Corporations have Mission Statements, Vision Statements, Core Values – and they normally put these things in initial caps and plaster them on walls throughout their organization. The thinking is that you get your morning coffee, I guess, and you walk by and read these statements, maybe genuflect, then get on with your day; but they’re always on your mind as you go forth and conquer the business world (likely for the benefit of the owners or shareholders of the company that just gave you your free morning coffee). (What if that coffee ISN’T free? I guess that’s a subject for another day.)

The Manifesto – beware, initial caps about to permeate this article – is an Italian term, and it appears the first Manifesto of note was written in Baghdad in the 11th Century. I, for one, always think of “The Communist Manifesto” as the most dominant manifesto to use “Manifesto” in the title – though it appears that a whole host of other documents – like the Declaration of Independence – can be called “manifestos.”

It sounds like there’s a reason, though, for these documents: you get fed up, or you don’t like the way things are going, or you’re just looking to make some changes and get others on board. So you write a manifesto, nail it to the wall somewhere, and you’re off to the races.

The Bitcoin Manifesto

The cryptocurrency movement started with Satoshi Nakamoto’s original paper, “Bitcoin, a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” which is considered required reading for those who want to understand how Bitcoin works (and, in turn, how all of these other follow-on currencies work).

It’s a simple abstract (if you speak a little bit of programming language). And it started us down this path.

Why do you need a manifesto?

When we Googled “Bitcoin Manifesto,” the above popped up – even though it doesn’t have “manifesto” in the title. And then we Googled “Ethereum Manifesto” and this is what we got: Vitalik Buterin’s white paper, or write-up, or whatever…it, too, is not called a “manifesto.”

What’s interesting here, and what actually prompted this article, is the following chain of events:

April 30, 2016. Ethereum launches its DAO – “Distributed Autonomous Organization” – and it takes off “like a runaway train” (as we learn in this awesome article on Quartz);
June 17, 2016. The DAO is hacked, to the tune of $50m USD in Ether.
July 2016. A “hard fork” is announced; this and subsequent hard fork in November 2016 are actually the third and fourth hard forks.

But somewhere in there, the old school and new school Ether disagreed: thus ETH and ETC. It was the DAO that got folks disagreeing: should it be altered? Should it be left untouched?

Enter PIVX and its manifesto

Honestly, we had heard about PIVX and we had seen a little bit of ticker-symbol chatter on Poloniex. However, since it’s not traded on Poloniex, we weren’t all that familiar with it.

But their manifesto tells us quite a bit about how they feel about the DAO.

“The DAOS are untouchable.” (It should be “DAOs” but we’ll cut them some slack.)

PIVX also feels rather strongly about privacy, it seems. Take a look here at their “tale of the tape,” as they compare their coin to Dash:

Altcoin Manifesto Theatre

Let’s be honest here: we could probably spend all day talking about all sorts of coin manifestos – in fact, someone else did that here and why not just link to their post? – but the point of our post is that PIVX appears to want to hang its hat on a couple key themes: “Privacy” and “Governance” seem to be the two biggies (assuming you use “DAO” and “Governance” interchangeably).

Bringing us to the point of this article, and the key takeaway for you: “What does your coin stand for?” In other words, are you a “me, too” coin, created to take advantage of the fact that this is still the wild West and you can pretty much get funding for just about anything these days? Or are you putting a stake in the ground and saying “this is what we’re about.”

And I guess if you’re the latter…put it in a manifesto.