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It's really easy to compare Bitcoin to Christianity: it's got sins and a missing savior and an immaculate conception (okay, really it's probably more like the annunciation, but Madonna changed the words for all of us), and Bitcoiners are supposed to preach the good news...
100 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 17h
It feels like the industrial revolution to me - sneaky, bottom-up, less about particular technologies and more about infecting everything by being salient.
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I've never researched this, but I wonder if people were very conscious of participating in something (an industrial revolution, a technological shift, a new era) or if it all felt so diffuse and so bottom-up that there wasn't really an awareness of an industrial revolution until long after. I'm sure books have been written on the topic, but I'm curious how the inventors and tinkerers and business-people of 17th and 18th centuries felt about their place in history: did they feel like they were ushering in a new era?
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The Protestant Reformation. Bitcoin White Paper Day (October 31, 2008), when Satoshi published the white paper, announcing his thesis for a better money, is the same as Reformation Day (October 31, 1517), when Martin Luther pinned his 95 theses to the Wittenberg cathedral
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the reformation day date has always struck me as interesting. let's hope bitcoin doesn't lead to quite so many wars.
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Unfortunately that is not necessarily up to the bitcoiners
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Plaza Accord.
In the 80s the US was facing a problem with the dollar being too strong, hurting international trade positions. Obviously letting the dollar collapse outright would have meant panic, capital flight, loss of strategic control since there was no real alternative except for maybe gold which had already been looted leading up to 1971.
Bitcoin has similarly been pressure valve in disguise to foster a transition to something more sustainable than foreign exchange, with buy-in made consensual through grassroots mythology and market incentives. In this way both controlled a monetary pivot necessitated by the US dollar being used against its own country in the form of the Triffin Dilemma and globalist leverage.
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I see the analogy, but I disagree with the implication: if our political overlords were effective enough to plan, engineer, and execute something like this, they wouldn't have the problems this solution solves.
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Politics is just theater, politicians are just actors, strings pulled from the IC. The greatest psyop ever was convincing people they're incompetent. "Appear weak when you are strong".
They have effectively unlimited resources, all the planning power, blackmail, sigint, you can conceive of and more. If they can write movie scripts about the CIA they can write operational plans of military grade.
The only hiccup is that its a battlefield, faction vs. faction, that's chaos not incompetence.
That's exactly why Bitcoin was a perfect solution, the enemy doesn't get much of a vote in stopping it, and in fact they have an incentive not to.
"Bitcoin is for enemies" is quite literal, America's enemies.
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133 sats \ 1 reply \ @Fenix 8h
No analogy is good and accurate enough, especially those nonsensical ones with a religious bent. The event of Bitcoin's creation is what it is; by itself it is important and grand.
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No blueprint can quite capture it! The ornate, gilded ones drawn up in the old world's drafting rooms!?! Bitcoin’s foundation needs no spire or cornerstone blessing; it emerged like a new steel frame on the skyline—sober, monumental, and structurally sound.
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133 sats \ 4 replies \ @fourrules 13h
The cross was the work
The highest hill was the proof
The criminals left and right of the carpenters son showed that anyone could mine, run a node, or hold, and we were all beckoned to follow Him
His solitude was His sovereignty
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The cross is like the steel frame, the essential structure of an endeavor, perhaps. The summit is the rooftop terrace gardens like an observatory, confirming trajectory. The figures beside the Architect prove that any laborer could rivet the beams, manage the project, or read the blueprints—and all were hired to build. Solitude is the executive suite, authority over the skyline.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @fourrules 2h
Ironically your attempt at cynicism still contains the 4 pillars of the monomyth, but you've mixed up different hierarchies into a brown blob of play dough, or a cryptid.
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The building is the dragon, the challenge
The rooftop terrace, the goal, the "Observatory", is the gold, the proof.
Reference to laborors describes the building process as inclusive, collective, not quite permissionless but no game is perfect, in other words the villagers.
The executive suite represents responsibility, authority, sovereignty, the loneliest condition, the solo knight.
But the most popular instances of the monomyth describe the transition from laboror (everyman) to executive (hero).
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That's reaching because the literal and precise parallels between Satoshi, the ultimate game designer, and Christ, the greatest player, make you uncomfortable. You're too emotionally invested in 'muh atheism', which is the intellectual level of a stunted teenager.
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