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'The United States succeeds only because a critical mass of us choose to believe in this religion and really want it to succeed.' Systems ought not require fai
by lanternfish 5y ago
'The United States succeeds only because a critical mass of us choose to believe in this religion and really want it to succeed.'
Systems ought not require faith in order to be successful. An actor can believe in the good of a system without worshipping it; the kind of 'religion of America' you describe is the framework culpable for many of the worst atrocities the US has committed: Iraq, Vietnam, even Jim Crow or slavery can by tied to a reverence for some fundamental eidolon of 'Americanism'. Separating church and state is meaningless if you turn the state into a church: our systems should be meaningful without the crutch of the founding fathers, the constitution (as a historical object), or the piety of our public infrastructure.
There may be an element of the United States social project which resembles religion, an element that is likely very similar to crypto worship. However, this is not a defense of crypto's legitimacy, but a scathing critique of America's ontological basis.
- anonporridge 5y agoBitcoin "the system" doesn't require faith to work. It works by pure cryptographic rigor that is provably infeasible to cheat, along with an adaptive ruleset that responds to changes in external conditions to keep running as designed. It just works, and I don't need any faith to know that. I just need a solid understanding of math and computer science. Bitcoin "the price" is fundamentally different from the system, and really just serves to operate as a signal for how much collective human attention and trust it is gathering. It's incredibly volatile because it's still so young and finding it's place. I also don't think the religious element of bitcoin is likely to be a long term thing, but a kind of bootstrapping mechanism to both draw attention, and nurture a core foundation of devotees who are committed to working diligently to integrate "the system" more and more into the real world.
- shrimpx 5y agoThe price and the system are really inseparable from each other. If bitcoin was worth $0, there would be no computers running it and so it wouldn't exist as a system. So the system does require faith to work.
- anonporridge 5y agoFair enough. It requires a bare minimum of 2 people to really work. But that's literally true of any network protocol you can possibly imagine.