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> That’s because I forgot one essential reason bitcoin has survived: > Because people really, really, really want it to. My impression is that Bitcoin (and cr

> That’s because I forgot one essential reason bitcoin has survived: > Because people really, really, really want it to. My impression is that Bitcoin (and crypto) is now a religion. It's tied to a lot of people's identities. That's to say, a group of people think of themselves as crypto people and are proud of it, just as someone might be a Christian and proud of it or a Golden State Warriors fan and proud of it. While I've personally used crypto and found it useful, it doesn't really matter what the environmental impacts are or how useful it is to a large swath of those interested in crypto. As long as there's a plausible argument for why crypto is good, it's enough for the believers to continue believing. Not only that, crypto is and will continue to be cool and rich. As long as people like Tom Brady and Fortune 500 companies are talking about buying and selling crypto, it's a religion that will continue growing. By acknowledging this, I realized that I should move past dismissing the religion, but rather think about how I should engage with it. Imagine I've never watched American football but a lot of people I know are really into it. I then need to think: Is it a cool community that I should join? Is it something that's not for me but that I should try to understand? Or is it something that's so bad that I should try to stigmatize it? I think the right response for me is closest to the second option, but I'm not sure yet. [edited to remove some earlier, more divisive comments that I didn't intend to make]

dools 5y ago
It’s also tied inextricably to Austro-libertarianism and I think that’s no accident. My wild conspiracy theory is that the founders of blockchain are cashed up libertarians who created it to promote libertarian economics (which overwhelmingly benefit the cashed up among us)
- wmf 5y ago
  Yeah, one side effect of Bitcoin is that it created 1000x more believers in crackpot Austrian economics. This may end up legitimizing some bad economics.
  - oceanghost 5y ago
    Austrian economics aren't crackpot, they're just outdated. Their view of the world was the correct when human labor was the most valued thing in the world. Austrian views on inflation have been proved several times over. Austrian views on the value of labor are a disaster. They're entirely unable to imagine our current labor market where a substantial amount of the work is done by machines. Human Action was written in 1949. Imagine how different the world must have been back then. My iPhone can recognize the contents of pictures such that I can search them-- in 1949 that would have required an office building some storage cabinets, logistics, and a personal secretary or two. Now nobody, not even Apple can tell you how that works.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      Austrian economics is crackpot by definition because it's based on "praxeology", which explicitly rejects the scientific method.
      - oceanghost 5y ago
        How do you define "praxeology"? My recollection from reading Human Action is it was only defined as "The study of human action."-- which could be scientific or might not be.
        int_19h 5y ago
        As used by the Austrian school, at least, it explicitly rejects empiricism, and uses deduction instead (from premises that are essentially taken for granted).
        oceanghost 5y ago
        I will accept that. But, I don't think it proves anything. The scientific method is not an exclusive means to seek truth. Science has only one job-- to make testable predictions. It does not inform us about anything else. You're essentially arguing "Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus" because of an inherently illogical belief that only science can arrive at truth.
clusterfish 5y ago
Religion + pyramind scheme. Most bitcoin evangelists are heavily invested in crypto, and stand to personally gain from their missionary work.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Only as long as more and more people buy in and price goes up so they can cash out, into fiat of course, their sworn enemy they seek to destroy. If price goes down, just tell everyone to buy the dip.
  - 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
    This is literally how fiat currency works. Sure a government can pass a law saying so and so is the official currency but as you see in many minor countries they still use USD or Euros. Without buy in from the population fiat currency can also be left ignored. The value of USD is also a pyramid scheme and entirely depends on demand from everyone to keep it's value. The federal reserve is only one small actor creating demand.
    - CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
      The value of USD depends on trust in the US government and economy, that is not a pyramid scheme.
      - 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
        It is until it isn't. The base demand for USD comes from the federal reserve. Bitcoin has a similar base for it's legit uses (like international currency transfer) so both have a demand floor. After that it's all dependent on use and further down market demand. I think when we all are dead future generations will see crypto as a basic value store like gold. No one will call it a pyramid scheme either cause it would have been around since before they were born.
        5y ago
koonsolo 5y ago
Why would you think money is not about belief? If people stopped believing in fiat, there would be a major bank run. So yes, the value of crypto, just as like the value of fiat, is based on belief.
- Aunche 5y ago
  It doesn't matter whether or not you believe fiat is valuable or not. I know that tomorrow, I can buy a Big Mac for $4, and McDonald's knows that the person who makes it will go to work for $10/hour. There are way too many transactions that take place for people to "believe" that fiat is worthless. The same cannot be said about cryptocurrency.
  - mellavora 5y ago
    > McDonald's knows that the person who makes it will go to work for $10/hour vs "A Florida McDonald's is paying people $50 just to show up for a job interview, and it's still struggling to find applicants" https://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-pays-50-for-job-interviews-highlighting-hiring-struggles-2021-4?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-pays-50-for-job-in... Entry-level employees will be making $11 to $17 per hour, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/13/mcdonalds-raises-hourly-wages-for-company-owned-restaurants.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/13/mcdonalds-raises-hourly-wage... (with apologies for the scammy links, these were the first google hits I found)
    - Aunche 5y ago
      Yes, inflation is a thing. The numbers aren't important to my argument. My point is that the value of fiat is baked into virtually every transaction. As such, even if you don't believe in fiat, so long as you want to participate in the economy, you'll still use it all the same.
  - gringo_flamingo 5y ago
    This is most likely one of the most unintelligent statements I have ever heard. Value is subjective, period. End of story. The US dollar literally only has value if people have confidence in it. Because we are still bartering and trading, the US dollar is simply a standardization of value. Again, value will always differ from person to person. In fact, I think commodity based tokens would be interesting. Cryptocurrency, as it is, has no value to me. The dollar bill is a standard that will certainly change. Hopefully we can have a utility/commodity based currency in the future. We used to have that when the Dollar was actually backed by bars of gold. LOL
errantmind 5y ago
I'm not really seeing the parallels. People having strongly held beliefs that they advocate for does not make something a 'religion'. This seems more like an ad-hominem non-argument.
- igorkraw 5y ago
  -religion /rɪˈlɪdʒ(ə)n/ noun the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods. Scratch the last bit, since it's a tautology. How many people in the crypto space proclaim that "decentralisation" or "smart contracts" or "hard" (i.e. deflationary) currency will fix everything and make bitcoin the new world currency and grant its loyal hodlers everlasting wealth? What percentage of them actually had a concrete idea on how that will happen? We've had schisms (BTC), there's a mythological originator (Satoshi) and a possible historical counterpart (Hal Finney if I remember the name correctly?) as well as anointed saints and "first disciples". There's even new prophets (ethereum founder) proclaiming the last interpretation wasn't wrong but incomplete. I've got to say, I see it rhyme. While I wouldn't say that everyone in the space treats crypto like a religion (probably), I'd wager for decent amount of people that description is a useful model
- moduspol 5y ago
  To be honest, I'm seeing parallels in the opposite direction. There's a reason we don't have anti-golfers, or threads over and over again rehashing how dumb it is to have 18 holes, or about the number of senseless injuries sustained while golfing, or how it's too expensive to golf. It's because people who aren't interested in golf don't feel a need to prove to others how bad it is, or to force golfers into justifying how good it is. People who don't golf just kind of focus on other things. But Bitcoin and cryptocurrency seem to be different.
nubb 5y ago
Hn hates crypto so much the top comment just has to compare Tom Brady to Tom cruise and u get all the upvotes. So much salt from a sad community. Can we just ban crypto discussions from hn so the circus can finally close?
- questionto 5y ago
  crypto is a techincal monetary system yet the most techical people does not like it.. something to think about.
  - petermelias 5y ago
    I've thought about this a lot because my less technical friends are often surprised when I tell them I am not "super into" BTC. I wonder if it is because I am used to dealing with the fragility of digital systems (not to unfairly discount their strengths either) -- so then paper money almost feels like a relief to hold in my hand and just slap on the counter and smell that fresh legal tender.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      It is easiest to trick people by saying "other people love this!". Engineers believe in crypto currency, so HODL! Or, the kids today view NFT's as hockey cards, they gonna soar like crazy! You might not see the value in this, but others do and that will make you rich! Basically it is a way to make people turn off their sanity checker "Oh yeah, I don't see the value, I guess I just don't understand, but I still want in on this opportunity!".
      - questionto 5y ago
        oh if we are on that kind of position then crypto is ok for anybody.. anyone can try to create value from nothing and make people believe... actually they did already ... someone created facebook make people believe that it worths billions... but if someone claims that this is a revolutionary monetary system then I'd become suspicious..
petermelias 5y ago
I think it is also kind of a collectors' item. Like owning a piece of a rare set of baseball cards or cars. There are definitely religious zealots out there but in terms of passive ownership -- it could be viewed as a scarce collectors item with theoretically infinite appreciation right? For example, if a rare painting could not be effected by environmental degradation. Would it not appreciate forever until people stopped caring about paintings or suddenly rare paintings could be atomized into existence by a replicator?
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Related article on the take that bitcoin is art, https://www.epsilontheory.com/in-praise-of-bitcoin/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/in-praise-of-bitcoin/ I think it would be more accurate to compare it a monument or artifact, specifically because of the amount of real world energy that has gone into creating it. It's currently a half terabyte immutable linked list filled with a rich history of transactions and hidden messages/graffiti that can't be copied or changed without an commitment of energy and computation resources equal to the sum of what's gone into it for these 11 years. That's something that starts to rival the Great Pyramids (pun intended).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - boc 5y ago
    I'm very glad we're all collectively killing the planet so that we can keep a massive ball of digital detritus alive. Crypto has gone from "It's a currency!" to "It's a commodity!" to "It's a battery!" to "It's art!" in under 10 years. Early days it was fun to watch. Now that it's destroying the environment, I'm ready for it to end.
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      No. Let's do a fucking carbon tax and actually solve the problem, rather than just scapegoating an easy target and wasting political capital on attacking something many people value that doesn't directly or necessarily contribute any more to the problem than anything else.
anonporridge 5y ago
The United States itself is also a kind of religion. We have our gods (founding fathers, dead presidents) and demigods (American folk heros, war heros). We have our sacred texts (Constitution, Declaration, etc) and our genesis story (War for Independence). We have our temples (capitals, court houses). We have our core beliefs (representative democracy is good, all men are created equal, the peaceful transition of power). Citizens of this country worship at the alter of Americanism, and many of us work hard to make the religion successful and dominant throughout the world. Like other religions, we've even engaged in genocides and wars to spread our beliefs and convert or destroy the unbelievers. The United States succeeds only because a critical mass of us choose to believe in this religion and really want it to succeed. Is it really that much different from Bitcoin?
- rxhernandez 5y ago
  > We have our gods (founding fathers, dead presidents) and demigods (American folk heros, war heros). > We have our sacred texts (Constitution, Declaration, etc) and our genesis story (War for Independence). > We have our temples (capitals, court houses). > We have our core beliefs (representative democracy is good, all men are created equal). I'd be willing to bet a month's worth of my income that a majority of the population doesn't view it this way. The only people I know who view things this way are very far to the right (and this group is not the majority on the far right by any means). The only part I'd be willing to bet is shared by more than 50% of the population is that all men are created equal (in theory at least; there are plenty of people with disabilities who would disagree that they are viewed as equals in practice; you needn't think too far beyond who would be sacrificed on a deserted island first and without much conflict).
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    I don't think I agree. The different political alignments are really just different sects of the nationalism/religion. Liberals simply idealize a different subset of the core tenants, and maybe are more tempered in their zealotry. But they are nationalist to their core nonetheless. Having said that, there certainly are other groups that don't prescribe to Americanism, and are loyal to other 'religions' be it globalism or some other political ideology that's incompatible with American ideals. I would even argue that Bitcoin is itself a flavor of globalism, albeit one that the establishment global elite aren't cool with, because they missed the boat on being early adopters and their power would be radically diminished if it wins.
DavidKarlas 5y ago
Nice example of American football, since players have brain injuries, should we ban it too?
- lanternfish 5y ago
  While there is a legitimate argument to be made in favor of either restructuring or banning American football, it's clear that the moral culpability relating to these systems aren't comparable. A fundamentally very small population is vulnerable to the TBI risk of American football, and the vast majority of that population willfully decides to engage in that risk with knowledge of it. However, the environmental and economic (supply chain) externalities of Cryptocurrency are imposed upon those who don't opt into the system, and also operate entire orders of magnitude higher in scope.
- oblio 5y ago
  Ideally, reform it. We had gladiators for centuries because we were ok with some dying or getting injured for the entertainment of many others. That didn't make it right.
dclowd9901 5y ago
It actually reminds me a bit of consumer credit. It’s bad in every conceivable way for society, but good luck explaining that to people who can now buy things they can’t afford because of it. You can’t fight a hurricane, so I have a card I use for travel points. When in Rome, or this trash fire world we live in…
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Consumer credit is good for society in some areas. Used properly, it allows someone to smooth their lifetime consumption and production. When you’re first starting out, you have a vast well of future production capacity but also vast current, unmet needs. Expecting people to “just save up” for things that they need is not optimal, especially if that thing they need to save up for is part of what they need to get/keep their first job.
  - vaylian 5y ago
    > but also vast current, unmet needs. Citation needed. Yes, people have needs. But vast unmet needs?
    - oblio 5y ago
      When the average person is starting out, unless their parents are rich and help them, they start from scratch from a material point of view. That sounds like they're missing a lot :-)
      - vaylian 5y ago
        If you think I am missing a lot, why am I happy?
        oblio 5y ago
        Replace "you" in my previous comment with "the average person ". Edited the comment for clarity.
caffeine 5y ago
“It’s a religion/identity” is true of just about everything these days (sports, political movements, subreddits, whatever). It’s not specific to crypto. It’s a symptom of the lack of meaningful identities for people to adopt, and the social media push toward outlier-ism (nobody follows a boring father of 2 with a reliable job and a stable marriage) - so they choose trivial things like crypto or wokeness or Q to identify with and be extreme about.
- te_chris 5y ago
  You’d be surprised how many boring/conventional influencers there are out there with huge followings. People who literally are just doing up a house or something incredibly benign.
- beebmam 5y ago
  I'd imagine that religion/politics are kinda fundamental to most people's meaning in life, and mostly always has been.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    Politics wasn't fundamental to most people in identity sense for most of humanity's history, for the simple reason that most of them didn't have any political power to speak of, even notionally. Which, to be fair, is still true - but we've got better at pretending otherwise.
    - presentation 5y ago
      It's striking to me how all my friends in the USA talk about politics nonstop, but now that I moved to Japan practically nobody under the age of 40 seems to care.
- m_fayer 5y ago
  +1 It's striking that although there's a lack of meaningful identities to adopt, the number of shallow identities to choose from is mushrooming. Pursuits that used to be "interests" or "hobbies" (gaming, fandoms, sexual preferences) are converting into identities. What's concerning is that people will aggressively defend identities and turn them into causes, not something we need more of right now.
jpswade 5y ago
Is this really so different from the rest of capitalism?
devnull3 5y ago
> Because people really, really, really want it to. Reminds me of a dialogue from GoT: Power resides where men believe it resides.
cblconfederate 5y ago
everything on earth has a religion around it. Doesnt tesla or apple have religiously devoted investors? You only hear the loudest voices, not the millions of people who keep their coins somewhere and go about their lives.
ur-whale 5y ago
> My impression is that Bitcoin (and crypto) is now a religion. I don't agree with this characterization, but let's assume for a second that you're correct. You need to look at the fact that every religion I'm aware of exists and thrives because it fulfills a human need. You are therefore implying that Bitcoin does fulfill a human need, hence the current demand for it. The fact that some people, much like with religion, will take it to extremes and/or gobble it up without questioning it and/or not believe a word of it yet use it to manipulate others to their own advantage does not seem to have any incidence on the fact that large swath of the planet's population are still religious.
ignoramous 5y ago
> My impression is that Bitcoin (and crypto) is now a religion. Whilst this looks valid on the face of it, the best explanation I've seen is that crypto-currencies, DAOs, NFTs, what-have-you are counter-intuitive to most people, even the ones hodling it, because most of these decentralized products are just not the same thing and shouldn't be all lumped up in one giant straw-man. For one, I am really bullish about payment networks like Facebook's Diem, Celo.org, Coinbase/Circle's USDC, and Stellar. These absolutely should disrupt international payments. There's a lack of coherent understanding but just as apenwarr pointed out, eventually something good will come of it, and then everyone that is/was on the blockchain train would claim, "I told you so". At this point, there are so many smart people working on it, that I don't see it failing in my lifetime. The key, I guess, is to pay attention to whoever is out there toiling away to make the ecosystem better and listen to their whats, whys, and hows.
- dmingod666 5y ago
  Isn't 'solving' international payments messing with the US govt? If you bypass the swift system then they can no longer track international transactions and more importantly enforce sanctions.
  - 4ggr0 5y ago
    As someone who's not from the US, good.
    - oblio 5y ago
      You're probably working under the assumption that whatever replaces the US system is better. You have no way of knowing that and most US geopolitical alternatives are awful. Except for maybe the EU if you include it.
      - 4ggr0 5y ago
        > that whatever replaces the US system I'm just generally opposed to a system being pushed by a single country. Don't care if that's the US, China, Russia or Nepal. It's not because I don't like the US, I just wish that we all would get to say how that system is supposed to work, instead of the US thinking it knows what's best for "us". Similar to how it's for whatever reason okay that the US has it's military bases littered all over the world. I've got nothing against y'all as people, but your government and military for sure grind my gears.
jollybean 5y ago
Not Religion, Pyramid Scheme. The key point about BTC is money and the 'believers' area all holding at least some BTC and they promote it with zealotry for that reason. It's the money and the dream of fabulous riches. Religion generally doesn't really go there in any serious way. It's a really, really good example of bias, and how it works. Someone holds a few magic numbers and it really distorts their worldview. Religion would be far more popular of people thought they could get rich by attending service.
enord 5y ago
Some sibling comments argue that the USA is a religion in the same sense, which is a nice thought experiment and a fair comparison. However, I think it's incumbent on us compare bitcoin as a religion to the prevailing mode of social organization (or religion, as it were) where money is concerned: The Rule of Law and it's missionary arm International Trade Relations Except for this, whatever one realizes from bitcoin holdings (read: exchange ledger holdings for legal tender) is just numbers on paper. I just don't see how bitcoin can fulfill any of it's purported roles (asset, currency, value-store) outside the rule of law, and yet flouting the established legal ways of settling transactions, asserting ownership and saving for the future were all part of the elevator pitch. This begs the question: What effect will bitcoin have on the rule of law? I fear that, on net, it may serve to undermine our legal, liberal traditions by antagonizing proponents to the regular economy and pursuant democratic processes for improving its shortcomings. More directly, the unregulated nature of the bitcoin economy leaves affected societies knee-capped in managing externalities and second order effects right where the incentives are the most perverse (on the ledger), forcing heavy-handed and perhaps illiberal responses from regulators. Success on it's own terms will spell bitcoins demise so long as belief in the rule of law remains stronger than in crypto-utopia (I will take that bet).
Borrible 5y ago
The homology of God and Mammon is long known. They are both, at least for a lot of people, transcendend and abstract forces dictating human life. Over which they have no influence. And not just in our era [0] as Heinrich Heine did put it. [0] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/heine/lutece/ch31.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/heine/lutece/ch31... Both give hope of redemption from the burdens of life. Have to revisit Georg Simmels, Philosophy of Money. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Money
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dools 5y ago

It’s also tied inextricably to Austro-libertarianism and I think that’s no accident. My wild conspiracy theory is that the founders of blockchain are cashed up libertarians who created it to promote libertarian economics (which overwhelmingly benefit the cashed up among us)

wmf 5y ago
Yeah, one side effect of Bitcoin is that it created 1000x more believers in crackpot Austrian economics. This may end up legitimizing some bad economics.
- oceanghost 5y ago
  Austrian economics aren't crackpot, they're just outdated. Their view of the world was the correct when human labor was the most valued thing in the world. Austrian views on inflation have been proved several times over. Austrian views on the value of labor are a disaster. They're entirely unable to imagine our current labor market where a substantial amount of the work is done by machines. Human Action was written in 1949. Imagine how different the world must have been back then. My iPhone can recognize the contents of pictures such that I can search them-- in 1949 that would have required an office building some storage cabinets, logistics, and a personal secretary or two. Now nobody, not even Apple can tell you how that works.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    Austrian economics is crackpot by definition because it's based on "praxeology", which explicitly rejects the scientific method.
    - oceanghost 5y ago
      How do you define "praxeology"? My recollection from reading Human Action is it was only defined as "The study of human action."-- which could be scientific or might not be.
      - int_19h 5y ago
        As used by the Austrian school, at least, it explicitly rejects empiricism, and uses deduction instead (from premises that are essentially taken for granted).
        oceanghost 5y ago
        I will accept that. But, I don't think it proves anything. The scientific method is not an exclusive means to seek truth. Science has only one job-- to make testable predictions. It does not inform us about anything else. You're essentially arguing "Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus" because of an inherently illogical belief that only science can arrive at truth.

clusterfish 5y ago

Religion + pyramind scheme. Most bitcoin evangelists are heavily invested in crypto, and stand to personally gain from their missionary work.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Only as long as more and more people buy in and price goes up so they can cash out, into fiat of course, their sworn enemy they seek to destroy. If price goes down, just tell everyone to buy the dip.
- 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
  This is literally how fiat currency works. Sure a government can pass a law saying so and so is the official currency but as you see in many minor countries they still use USD or Euros. Without buy in from the population fiat currency can also be left ignored. The value of USD is also a pyramid scheme and entirely depends on demand from everyone to keep it's value. The federal reserve is only one small actor creating demand.
  - CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
    The value of USD depends on trust in the US government and economy, that is not a pyramid scheme.
    - 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
      It is until it isn't. The base demand for USD comes from the federal reserve. Bitcoin has a similar base for it's legit uses (like international currency transfer) so both have a demand floor. After that it's all dependent on use and further down market demand. I think when we all are dead future generations will see crypto as a basic value store like gold. No one will call it a pyramid scheme either cause it would have been around since before they were born.
      - 5y ago

koonsolo 5y ago

Why would you think money is not about belief? If people stopped believing in fiat, there would be a major bank run. So yes, the value of crypto, just as like the value of fiat, is based on belief.

Aunche 5y ago
It doesn't matter whether or not you believe fiat is valuable or not. I know that tomorrow, I can buy a Big Mac for $4, and McDonald's knows that the person who makes it will go to work for $10/hour. There are way too many transactions that take place for people to "believe" that fiat is worthless. The same cannot be said about cryptocurrency.
- mellavora 5y ago
  > McDonald's knows that the person who makes it will go to work for $10/hour vs "A Florida McDonald's is paying people $50 just to show up for a job interview, and it's still struggling to find applicants" https://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-pays-50-for-job-interviews-highlighting-hiring-struggles-2021-4?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-pays-50-for-job-in... Entry-level employees will be making $11 to $17 per hour, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/13/mcdonalds-raises-hourly-wages-for-company-owned-restaurants.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/13/mcdonalds-raises-hourly-wage... (with apologies for the scammy links, these were the first google hits I found)
  - Aunche 5y ago
    Yes, inflation is a thing. The numbers aren't important to my argument. My point is that the value of fiat is baked into virtually every transaction. As such, even if you don't believe in fiat, so long as you want to participate in the economy, you'll still use it all the same.
- gringo_flamingo 5y ago
  This is most likely one of the most unintelligent statements I have ever heard. Value is subjective, period. End of story. The US dollar literally only has value if people have confidence in it. Because we are still bartering and trading, the US dollar is simply a standardization of value. Again, value will always differ from person to person. In fact, I think commodity based tokens would be interesting. Cryptocurrency, as it is, has no value to me. The dollar bill is a standard that will certainly change. Hopefully we can have a utility/commodity based currency in the future. We used to have that when the Dollar was actually backed by bars of gold. LOL

errantmind 5y ago

I'm not really seeing the parallels. People having strongly held beliefs that they advocate for does not make something a 'religion'. This seems more like an ad-hominem non-argument.

igorkraw 5y ago
-religion /rɪˈlɪdʒ(ə)n/ noun the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods. Scratch the last bit, since it's a tautology. How many people in the crypto space proclaim that "decentralisation" or "smart contracts" or "hard" (i.e. deflationary) currency will fix everything and make bitcoin the new world currency and grant its loyal hodlers everlasting wealth? What percentage of them actually had a concrete idea on how that will happen? We've had schisms (BTC), there's a mythological originator (Satoshi) and a possible historical counterpart (Hal Finney if I remember the name correctly?) as well as anointed saints and "first disciples". There's even new prophets (ethereum founder) proclaiming the last interpretation wasn't wrong but incomplete. I've got to say, I see it rhyme. While I wouldn't say that everyone in the space treats crypto like a religion (probably), I'd wager for decent amount of people that description is a useful model
moduspol 5y ago
To be honest, I'm seeing parallels in the opposite direction. There's a reason we don't have anti-golfers, or threads over and over again rehashing how dumb it is to have 18 holes, or about the number of senseless injuries sustained while golfing, or how it's too expensive to golf. It's because people who aren't interested in golf don't feel a need to prove to others how bad it is, or to force golfers into justifying how good it is. People who don't golf just kind of focus on other things. But Bitcoin and cryptocurrency seem to be different.

nubb 5y ago

Hn hates crypto so much the top comment just has to compare Tom Brady to Tom cruise and u get all the upvotes. So much salt from a sad community. Can we just ban crypto discussions from hn so the circus can finally close?

questionto 5y ago
crypto is a techincal monetary system yet the most techical people does not like it.. something to think about.
- petermelias 5y ago
  I've thought about this a lot because my less technical friends are often surprised when I tell them I am not "super into" BTC. I wonder if it is because I am used to dealing with the fragility of digital systems (not to unfairly discount their strengths either) -- so then paper money almost feels like a relief to hold in my hand and just slap on the counter and smell that fresh legal tender.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    It is easiest to trick people by saying "other people love this!". Engineers believe in crypto currency, so HODL! Or, the kids today view NFT's as hockey cards, they gonna soar like crazy! You might not see the value in this, but others do and that will make you rich! Basically it is a way to make people turn off their sanity checker "Oh yeah, I don't see the value, I guess I just don't understand, but I still want in on this opportunity!".
    - questionto 5y ago
      oh if we are on that kind of position then crypto is ok for anybody.. anyone can try to create value from nothing and make people believe... actually they did already ... someone created facebook make people believe that it worths billions... but if someone claims that this is a revolutionary monetary system then I'd become suspicious..

petermelias 5y ago

I think it is also kind of a collectors' item. Like owning a piece of a rare set of baseball cards or cars. There are definitely religious zealots out there but in terms of passive ownership -- it could be viewed as a scarce collectors item with theoretically infinite appreciation right? For example, if a rare painting could not be effected by environmental degradation. Would it not appreciate forever until people stopped caring about paintings or suddenly rare paintings could be atomized into existence by a replicator?

anonporridge 5y ago
Related article on the take that bitcoin is art, https://www.epsilontheory.com/in-praise-of-bitcoin/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/in-praise-of-bitcoin/ I think it would be more accurate to compare it a monument or artifact, specifically because of the amount of real world energy that has gone into creating it. It's currently a half terabyte immutable linked list filled with a rich history of transactions and hidden messages/graffiti that can't be copied or changed without an commitment of energy and computation resources equal to the sum of what's gone into it for these 11 years. That's something that starts to rival the Great Pyramids (pun intended).
- deleted 5y ago
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- boc 5y ago
  I'm very glad we're all collectively killing the planet so that we can keep a massive ball of digital detritus alive. Crypto has gone from "It's a currency!" to "It's a commodity!" to "It's a battery!" to "It's art!" in under 10 years. Early days it was fun to watch. Now that it's destroying the environment, I'm ready for it to end.
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    No. Let's do a fucking carbon tax and actually solve the problem, rather than just scapegoating an easy target and wasting political capital on attacking something many people value that doesn't directly or necessarily contribute any more to the problem than anything else.

anonporridge 5y ago

The United States itself is also a kind of religion. We have our gods (founding fathers, dead presidents) and demigods (American folk heros, war heros). We have our sacred texts (Constitution, Declaration, etc) and our genesis story (War for Independence). We have our temples (capitals, court houses). We have our core beliefs (representative democracy is good, all men are created equal, the peaceful transition of power). Citizens of this country worship at the alter of Americanism, and many of us work hard to make the religion successful and dominant throughout the world. Like other religions, we've even engaged in genocides and wars to spread our beliefs and convert or destroy the unbelievers. The United States succeeds only because a critical mass of us choose to believe in this religion and really want it to succeed. Is it really that much different from Bitcoin?

rxhernandez 5y ago
> We have our gods (founding fathers, dead presidents) and demigods (American folk heros, war heros). > We have our sacred texts (Constitution, Declaration, etc) and our genesis story (War for Independence). > We have our temples (capitals, court houses). > We have our core beliefs (representative democracy is good, all men are created equal). I'd be willing to bet a month's worth of my income that a majority of the population doesn't view it this way. The only people I know who view things this way are very far to the right (and this group is not the majority on the far right by any means). The only part I'd be willing to bet is shared by more than 50% of the population is that all men are created equal (in theory at least; there are plenty of people with disabilities who would disagree that they are viewed as equals in practice; you needn't think too far beyond who would be sacrificed on a deserted island first and without much conflict).
- anonporridge 5y ago
  I don't think I agree. The different political alignments are really just different sects of the nationalism/religion. Liberals simply idealize a different subset of the core tenants, and maybe are more tempered in their zealotry. But they are nationalist to their core nonetheless. Having said that, there certainly are other groups that don't prescribe to Americanism, and are loyal to other 'religions' be it globalism or some other political ideology that's incompatible with American ideals. I would even argue that Bitcoin is itself a flavor of globalism, albeit one that the establishment global elite aren't cool with, because they missed the boat on being early adopters and their power would be radically diminished if it wins.

DavidKarlas 5y ago

Nice example of American football, since players have brain injuries, should we ban it too?

lanternfish 5y ago
While there is a legitimate argument to be made in favor of either restructuring or banning American football, it's clear that the moral culpability relating to these systems aren't comparable. A fundamentally very small population is vulnerable to the TBI risk of American football, and the vast majority of that population willfully decides to engage in that risk with knowledge of it. However, the environmental and economic (supply chain) externalities of Cryptocurrency are imposed upon those who don't opt into the system, and also operate entire orders of magnitude higher in scope.
oblio 5y ago
Ideally, reform it. We had gladiators for centuries because we were ok with some dying or getting injured for the entertainment of many others. That didn't make it right.

dclowd9901 5y ago

It actually reminds me a bit of consumer credit. It’s bad in every conceivable way for society, but good luck explaining that to people who can now buy things they can’t afford because of it. You can’t fight a hurricane, so I have a card I use for travel points. When in Rome, or this trash fire world we live in…

sokoloff 5y ago
Consumer credit is good for society in some areas. Used properly, it allows someone to smooth their lifetime consumption and production. When you’re first starting out, you have a vast well of future production capacity but also vast current, unmet needs. Expecting people to “just save up” for things that they need is not optimal, especially if that thing they need to save up for is part of what they need to get/keep their first job.
- vaylian 5y ago
  > but also vast current, unmet needs. Citation needed. Yes, people have needs. But vast unmet needs?
  - oblio 5y ago
    When the average person is starting out, unless their parents are rich and help them, they start from scratch from a material point of view. That sounds like they're missing a lot :-)
    - vaylian 5y ago
      If you think I am missing a lot, why am I happy?
      - oblio 5y ago
        Replace "you" in my previous comment with "the average person ". Edited the comment for clarity.

caffeine 5y ago

“It’s a religion/identity” is true of just about everything these days (sports, political movements, subreddits, whatever). It’s not specific to crypto. It’s a symptom of the lack of meaningful identities for people to adopt, and the social media push toward outlier-ism (nobody follows a boring father of 2 with a reliable job and a stable marriage) - so they choose trivial things like crypto or wokeness or Q to identify with and be extreme about.

te_chris 5y ago
You’d be surprised how many boring/conventional influencers there are out there with huge followings. People who literally are just doing up a house or something incredibly benign.
beebmam 5y ago
I'd imagine that religion/politics are kinda fundamental to most people's meaning in life, and mostly always has been.
- int_19h 5y ago
  Politics wasn't fundamental to most people in identity sense for most of humanity's history, for the simple reason that most of them didn't have any political power to speak of, even notionally. Which, to be fair, is still true - but we've got better at pretending otherwise.
  - presentation 5y ago
    It's striking to me how all my friends in the USA talk about politics nonstop, but now that I moved to Japan practically nobody under the age of 40 seems to care.
m_fayer 5y ago
+1 It's striking that although there's a lack of meaningful identities to adopt, the number of shallow identities to choose from is mushrooming. Pursuits that used to be "interests" or "hobbies" (gaming, fandoms, sexual preferences) are converting into identities. What's concerning is that people will aggressively defend identities and turn them into causes, not something we need more of right now.

jpswade 5y ago

Is this really so different from the rest of capitalism?

devnull3 5y ago

> Because people really, really, really want it to. Reminds me of a dialogue from GoT: Power resides where men believe it resides.

cblconfederate 5y ago

everything on earth has a religion around it. Doesnt tesla or apple have religiously devoted investors? You only hear the loudest voices, not the millions of people who keep their coins somewhere and go about their lives.

ur-whale 5y ago

> My impression is that Bitcoin (and crypto) is now a religion. I don't agree with this characterization, but let's assume for a second that you're correct. You need to look at the fact that every religion I'm aware of exists and thrives because it fulfills a human need. You are therefore implying that Bitcoin does fulfill a human need, hence the current demand for it. The fact that some people, much like with religion, will take it to extremes and/or gobble it up without questioning it and/or not believe a word of it yet use it to manipulate others to their own advantage does not seem to have any incidence on the fact that large swath of the planet's population are still religious.

ignoramous 5y ago

> My impression is that Bitcoin (and crypto) is now a religion. Whilst this looks valid on the face of it, the best explanation I've seen is that crypto-currencies, DAOs, NFTs, what-have-you are counter-intuitive to most people, even the ones hodling it, because most of these decentralized products are just not the same thing and shouldn't be all lumped up in one giant straw-man. For one, I am really bullish about payment networks like Facebook's Diem, Celo.org, Coinbase/Circle's USDC, and Stellar. These absolutely should disrupt international payments. There's a lack of coherent understanding but just as apenwarr pointed out, eventually something good will come of it, and then everyone that is/was on the blockchain train would claim, "I told you so". At this point, there are so many smart people working on it, that I don't see it failing in my lifetime. The key, I guess, is to pay attention to whoever is out there toiling away to make the ecosystem better and listen to their whats, whys, and hows.

dmingod666 5y ago
Isn't 'solving' international payments messing with the US govt? If you bypass the swift system then they can no longer track international transactions and more importantly enforce sanctions.
- 4ggr0 5y ago
  As someone who's not from the US, good.
  - oblio 5y ago
    You're probably working under the assumption that whatever replaces the US system is better. You have no way of knowing that and most US geopolitical alternatives are awful. Except for maybe the EU if you include it.
    - 4ggr0 5y ago
      > that whatever replaces the US system I'm just generally opposed to a system being pushed by a single country. Don't care if that's the US, China, Russia or Nepal. It's not because I don't like the US, I just wish that we all would get to say how that system is supposed to work, instead of the US thinking it knows what's best for "us". Similar to how it's for whatever reason okay that the US has it's military bases littered all over the world. I've got nothing against y'all as people, but your government and military for sure grind my gears.

jollybean 5y ago

Not Religion, Pyramid Scheme. The key point about BTC is money and the 'believers' area all holding at least some BTC and they promote it with zealotry for that reason. It's the money and the dream of fabulous riches. Religion generally doesn't really go there in any serious way. It's a really, really good example of bias, and how it works. Someone holds a few magic numbers and it really distorts their worldview. Religion would be far more popular of people thought they could get rich by attending service.

enord 5y ago

Some sibling comments argue that the USA is a religion in the same sense, which is a nice thought experiment and a fair comparison. However, I think it's incumbent on us compare bitcoin as a religion to the prevailing mode of social organization (or religion, as it were) where money is concerned: The Rule of Law and it's missionary arm International Trade Relations Except for this, whatever one realizes from bitcoin holdings (read: exchange ledger holdings for legal tender) is just numbers on paper. I just don't see how bitcoin can fulfill any of it's purported roles (asset, currency, value-store) outside the rule of law, and yet flouting the established legal ways of settling transactions, asserting ownership and saving for the future were all part of the elevator pitch. This begs the question: What effect will bitcoin have on the rule of law? I fear that, on net, it may serve to undermine our legal, liberal traditions by antagonizing proponents to the regular economy and pursuant democratic processes for improving its shortcomings. More directly, the unregulated nature of the bitcoin economy leaves affected societies knee-capped in managing externalities and second order effects right where the incentives are the most perverse (on the ledger), forcing heavy-handed and perhaps illiberal responses from regulators. Success on it's own terms will spell bitcoins demise so long as belief in the rule of law remains stronger than in crypto-utopia (I will take that bet).

Borrible 5y ago

The homology of God and Mammon is long known. They are both, at least for a lot of people, transcendend and abstract forces dictating human life. Over which they have no influence. And not just in our era [0] as Heinrich Heine did put it. [0] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/heine/lutece/ch31.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/heine/lutece/ch31... Both give hope of redemption from the burdens of life. Have to revisit Georg Simmels, Philosophy of Money. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Money

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