A friend of mine pejoratively referred to Bitcoin as a religion, which really bothered me for a while.
Religion requires faith. Fiat requires faith. Fiat is a religion.
Bitcoin is apolitical, areligious. It requires math, physics and game theory. It does not require faith.
Is Bitcoin monetary atheism?
gm
This is our holy book
I think it bothered (bothers?!) me because their are religious parallels, especially around Satoshi.
Wait, maybe it *is* a religion. 👀
I think it’s easy to reach this conclusion as an outsider looking in. If you are on Twitter for example, all you see is people repeating the bitcoin mantras over and over. To an outsider looking in it must look like “bitcoin people” are insane. Maybe there’s an element of “toxicity” or maybe not, but I bet we look to them as shitcoiners look to us. You just look at that and think “fken idiots…”
With little information about the thing, looking at a passionate base of people all seemingly obsessed with one thing does make it look like a cult or a religion. Of course, I doubt they gave 2 seconds thought to the actual definition of a religion or a cult, but that’s beside the point.
There is certainly a lot to get through as a noob.
Took me several attempts before I joined the cult! 😉
Aha, of course my friend #[3] has written about it.
Reading now with ☕.
#coffeechain
It tends to encourage a culture that appears as mysterious fanaticism to others. While the mechanics of religion I think doesn’t apply, the culture sure does.
This... is on religion from philosopher Ken Wilbur; Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality (Shambhala Publications, Inc.: 2000), 25-26
". . Religion itself has always performed two very important, but very different functions. One, it acts as a way of creating meaning for the separate self: it offers myths and stories and tales and narratives and rituals that, taken together, help the separate self make sense of, and endure, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. This function of religion does not usually or necessarily change the level of consciousness in a person; it does not deliver radical transformation. Nor does it deliver a shattering liberation from the separate self altogether. Rather, it consoles the self, fortifies the self, defends the self, promotes the self. As long as the separate self believes the myths, performs the rituals, mouths the prayers, or embraces the dogma, then the self, it is fervently believed, will be “saved”—either now in the glory of being God-saved or Goddess-favored, or in an afterlife that ensures eternal wonderment.
But two, religion has also served—in a usually very, very small minority—the function of radical transformation and liberation. This function of religion does not fortify the separate self, but utterly shatters it—not consolation but devastation, not entrenchment but emptiness, not complacency but explosion, not comfort but revolution—in short, not a conventional bolstering of consciousness but a radical transmutation and transformation at the deepest seat of consciousness itself."
I wonder, if there are parallels with Bitcoin to Wilbur's notion... perhaps to both functions of religion.
Only in modern times the meaning of religion became equivalent to faith. The Hebrew word for religion דת Dat originally meant “law”, i.e. the set of laws and commitments that someone takes upon himself.
Fun fact: the word originated from Persian, same as the word Data.
I can see a millenarian fervor among Nostr’s Bitcoin enthusiasts.
